Delight & Beyond Delight
March 30, 2024

We hear about how the arahants have gone beyond delight, and it sounds grey, dull, unattractive. But we have to understand what “delight” means. It’s the mind’s tendency to dress up its pleasures, to make them more than they actually are, so that we go back to them again and again and again.

It’s very closely related to the allure of our defilements. Think about food: You can think about it in a way that it’s really attractive. You look forward to the meal every day. But then you think about it more deeply. It looks good only when it’s on a plate or in your bowl. Once it goes in your mouth, you wouldn’t want to look at it again. It tastes good only in the mouth, and once it goes down the throat, you wouldn’t want to have it come back up.

You think about the process of digestion and the fact that your body can’t absorb things from the food when it’s good-looking and tasty. You have to wait until it’s pretty disgusting, and then it absorbs. The more you think about it, the more you realize it’s a very unattractive process.

And that’s not even taking into consideration the suffering entailed for those who provide the food. If you’re not a vegetarian, there are the animals that have given their lives. If you are a vegetarian, there are the farmers, the farm workers, the people in the distribution network. There’s a lot of suffering that goes along with it.

So you like to dress that up. You can see this clearly in the different foods that different societies have. There’s a dish they like in Greenland, where they take the intestines of a seal, and they stuff them with seal parts. Then they let the whole thing ferment and they eat it raw. They’ve learned how to delight in that.

So think about that. There are a lot of foods that we have here in the West that other people would find pretty disgusting, too—like cheese—and yet we’ve learned how to delight in them. Of course, the devas don’t delight in human food anywhere. To them, it’s pretty smelly. That’s one of the reasons why, when we first started out here, no matter how cold it was outside, after the meal Ajaan Suwat would say, “Okay, open up all the doors. Get rid of the smell of the food,” so that the devas wouldn’t be offended.

So everywhere you look, human pleasures have to be dressed up. The question is, what are you dressing up, and what does it lead you to do? There are a lot of pleasures that you dress up and then you want to get them again, but you have to do things that are against the precepts, things that are against principles of just being a noble human being, to get those pleasures. Here again, you dress them up.

**Lust is the big delighter, because when we actually think about the body—and this is one of the reasons why we do body contemplation—it’s to realize that if you don’t look at the body with lots of blinders on, if you look at it actually for what you’ve got, it’s not all that attractive. Yet we want it to be attractive, so we focus on certain details and ignore other details that are right next to the details that we like, just millimeters away. We don’t like being reminded of the fact that there are these other unattractive features to the body. **

So this is delight. This is allure. The mind is basically lying to itself.

As for the arahants, having gained nibbana, there’s nothing they have to delight in. They don’t need to add anything to what they’ve already got, because it’s perfectly sufficient. It’s totally satisfactory, so that even commenting on it doesn’t increase the joy, doesn’t increase the well-being of nibbana. That’s why they’re beyond delight. They don’t have to dress things up. They don’t have to lie to themselves.

To get there, though, we have to delight in the path. This requires changing our internal dialogue. We learn to talk about the breath being interesting. In many ways, the breath in and of itself is not all that interesting. But the fact that the way you focus on it will change it, the perceptions you have about it will change how you feel it, and there are different ways of breathing that can get help alleviate different diseases, different pains in the body—that is fascinating. It gives you a sense that the Buddha was right when he said, “All things have the mind as their forerunner.” You begin to see the influence that the mind has on basic experiences, even just of the body as you feel it from within. There’s a lot to explore there in terms of your perceptions, in terms of your inner conversation.

Learn to delight in that. It gives you some pull away from your unskillful mental habits. It gives you more and more reasons to want to say No to them. In the beginning, you’re dealing with mindfulness basically saying No, and doing your best to resist the pull. As the Buddha said, mindfulness is like a dam. It holds the flood back, but it doesn’t solve the problem of the flood, because after all, dams can get flooded. They get washed away when the current is really strong. But at the very least, they give you some reprieve. They still the water a bit, slow the water down, so that you can see more clearly what exactly is going on, to see where things originate, where things pass away, what the allure is, and how often the allure is what you yourself added to it that makes it so compelling.

So you have to ask yourself, “Why am I lying to myself?” And the answer usually is, “Well, I got some pleasure out of this someplace in the past, and I don’t see anything better than this, so I might as well learn how to make it more than it is.” But now, when you’ve got the path here, you can learn how to develop some of its skills and get some mastery over the skills. You learn how to delight in that. Delight in the idea of freedom. Delight in the idea of not being a slave to your defilements, because otherwise, you think they’re attractive and that you’re pretty smart to go along with them. They tell you that if you fall in with them, you’ll get what you want. Lust gets you what you want. Anger gets you what you want. That’s what they tell you. The tricks of advertisers outside are nothing compared to the tricks of the mind.

Of course, a lot of the techniques of advertisers come from observing the mind and how it lies to itself. So remind yourself of what you’ve picked up as you’ve been going through your various lifetimes, in terms of delighting in this, delighting in that, the things you’ve gained in the past and you miss them now. You want them back, without stopping to think, “If I get them back, I’m going to lose them again and miss them again.” You’ve got to learn to realize that there are better things to delight it.

This is why, when the Buddha taught the four noble truths, there are four. There’s not just one noble truth. It wasn’t just that life is suffering. Life has suffering, but life also has the cause of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the path you can follow to get there. You want to keep that possibility in mind. That helps teach you to delight in what you’re doing as you practice, even on days when the path doesn’t seem very delightful. It gives you the strength to stick with it, the confidence that you’re heading in the right direction. At the very least, you’re not going in the wrong direction.

There’s that story in the Canon of a monk in the forest. His meditation is not going well. One night, he hears the villagers off in the distance, having a festival. He feels pretty miserable. He says to himself, “At least they know how to have fun. They know how to have a good time. Here I am, sitting in this hut all alone, miserable.” A deva appears to him and says, “Do you realize how many beings there are who envy you? All those beings that are going to hell, they wish they had the opportunity to come back again and make a better use of their lives, to train their minds.”

You’re headed in the right direction, so learn how to delight in that. As for your mind that’s so good at advertising greed, aversion, and delusion, get it to advertise the path to itself: how good it is that you can wake up early in the morning and have nothing else to do but sit and meditate. Think of all the people in the world who don’t have that opportunity. Think of the fact that, at the very least, even when your mind seems pretty recalcitrant, and you look around, and you can’t find any pleasure in the breath at all, at least you’re not harming anybody. There are so many people out there who are doing massive harm.

**So learn to appreciate the path. Delight in the path. Learn to see that the path has an allure. Eventually you’ll have to see through the allure of the path, to try to get beyond it. But learn how to give it some allure to begin with. And if it seems artificial to be talking to yourself that way, well, remember that it’s pretty artificial to like greed and to like aversion to begin with. Their allure was something you made up. You maintained it by lying to yourself. **

Here you can tell yourself some truth, even though it seems that you’re not quite familiar with it yet. But you can be confident that people have tread this path before. As they say, only people who are true can know the truth of this path. The Dhamma is that special. So as you’re making yourself worthy of that path, learn to appreciate the fact that you’re headed in the right direction. Then, as the path becomes more alluring, you can look back at the other habits you’ve had in the past and you’ll be more willing to see through their allure. The reason why we delight in them is because we don’t see anything better. But now you’ve got something better that you can focus on, that you can aim at.

So look at the way you advertise the different pleasures in your life and ask yourself: Would the Buddha have been fooled by those advertisements? I doubt it. Then why do you let yourself get fooled? Why can’t you see through them? Part of the mind already has seen through them, but it has to deal with all those voices that want to hold on because they don’t see anything better. You have to keep reminding yourself: There is better. Let that thought se****e you through.