Secluded from Sensuality

There’s something of an impasse in the practice. On the one hand, to get the mind in a concentration, you have to put aside thoughts of sensuality, your fascination with sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations. As the Buddha said, you have to seclude the mind, withdraw the mind, separate the mind from those sorts of fantasies. But then on the other hand, he says that in order to get past sensuality, you have to have the pleasure of concentration—at the very least, the first jhāna. So what are you going to do?

Fealize that you’re not going to knock sensual thinking out with the first blow. But you give it a few good jabs here and there to get it out of the way, so that you can have some space in the mind to pay attention to the breath, to pay attention to the body as you feel it from within. Learn how to appreciate this pleasure. If sensual thoughts come up again, you give them a little karate chop and settle down to work with the breath again, until you find that it really is satisfying being right here, just breathing in, breathing out, thinking of the breath bathing the whole body, saturating the whole body, going deep into the parts of the body that tend to be blocked off.

You’ll notice, as you start out, that there are certain parts of the body where it’s easy to sense that there’s something moving, and other parts that seem to be stock still. You have to remind yourself that whatever the sensations you have of the body, breath is always there first. So there must be breath in there someplace, even in the areas that seem to be still or solid. It was there first. It is there first. Hold that perception in mind and see what it does. Sometimes the breathing will slow down dramatically when you do that. Areas that haven’t had much refreshment in the energy suddenly have a chance.

The important thing is you get interested here, this breath element in the body. The more you get interested in it, the more you find that there are potentials for well-being here.

I was reading an author saying recently that it’s important not to have too much pleasure in the concentration, because after all, the Buddha doesn’t want you to be intoxicated with pleasure. That person doesn’t understand that there has to be a really intense sense of well-being that comes from sitting here with the breath if you’re going to fight off sensuality. For most of us, as the Buddha said, our only alternative to pain is sensual pleasure, sensual fantasies. That’s how he defined sensuality, by the way: not so much the sensual pleasures themselves, but our fascination with thinking about them. Why are we fascinated with them? Because we see our fantasies as our escape from pain. They have lots of positive associations and they can argue their case pretty strongly.

I remember when I first went to see Ajaan Fuang, somehow the topic of sensual fantasies, sexual fantasies, came up. I said, “Well, that’s one of the body’s needs, right?” And he said, “What does the body need? The body’s perfectly fine without it. It’s the mind that wants it.” And why does the mind want it? It wants pleasure and it doesn’t see any better pleasures. It’s gotten really clever, really quick, at looking for pleasure in these ways.

Looking for pleasure in terms of the breath, in terms of the body, starts out slow. It requires sensitivity, it requires full attention, which means it involves some work. We tend to miss the fact that our sensual fantasies involve a lot of work as well, because an idea that’s attractive today may not be so attractive tomorrow. So you have to come up with something new—and you have to keep on generating these fantasies in such a way to hide the fact that, say, your attraction to the human body is really blind.

Like that chant we had just now about the 32 parts of the body: You can ask yourself, “Which of those parts, when taken on its own, is really attractive?” Well, none of them. Even the skin: If you peeled it off and put it in a pile on the floor, it’d be pretty disgusting. All the organs in the body, when you take them on their own, have no real appeal. Yet somehow when you put them together, the story changes. That’s because the mind wants to find something attractive there, and it’ll do anything it can to find something attractive. So you have to look into that desire.

This is a part of the issue: that it doesn’t see any other alternative, yet here you are providing it with an alternative. There’ll be a part of the mind that says, “That’s fine, we can have both: some concentration, then go back to our fantasies.” But there comes a point where you have to realize that they really are working at cross-purposes.

Basically, what you’re doing is working back and forth: finding some pleasure in the concentration, and then having to look at your fascination with sensuality to try to understand it. That’s best done when you’ve had some quiet time, and there’s a sense of satisfaction with just sitting here breathing. You can start thinking about the drawbacks of the body and admitting that they really are drawbacks.

Ajaan Fuang had some students who, when their minds got quiet, would have a vision of themselves sitting in front of themselves. So he’d have them imagine the body in their visions getting older—one year older, two years older, five, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, dying—and then going through the process of decay for a couple of days after death. Have you ever imagined your body in that way? It’s a good exercise, realizing that the only thing that’s different between you and a corpse is the fact that you’ve got breath. There are even cases where people, when they die, hang around their bodies. It’d be a pretty miserable thing to hang around, don’t you think?—watching it decay, but you can’t get away because of your strong attraction.

This is what you want to see: the drawbacks of that attraction. Why are you so focused on it?

This is why the Buddha has you engage in that analysis of the allure versus the drawbacks, when you’re thinking about the drawbacks of the body—the fact that the different parts are unattractive, the fact that it’s going to die and decay.

Or the fact that it’s subject to so many diseases: That’s one of the perceptions the Buddha has you develop, too. Just think of all the different parts of the body and all the different diseases that go along with each part. Some wise guy once said, “But how about the eyebrows? There are no diseases with the eyebrows, right?” Well, it turns out there are little tiny mites that get into your eyebrows if you’re not careful. Everything has a disease. And you want to be reborn into one of these?

We signed on very early as we were coming into this life. We weren’t thinking too much. All we could think about were the positive things we associated with having a human body. Now all of the sudden you’re here, reading the fine print—and not only reading it, but also being subject to it.

So you think about the drawbacks of sensuality, and then let the mind rest in concentration. Then come back and examine the drawbacks again. You have to really see that your attachment to sensuality is definitely a problem. It’s holding you down, holding you back. We tend to think of it as opening up possibilities, but it’s really closing off a lot of better things.

We have to honor that principle that some pleasures in life are preventing pleasures that are much greater.

There’s that verse in the Dhammapada that when you see that by abandoning a lesser happiness, you find a greater happiness, the wise person will abandon the lesser one and go for the greater one. There was a British translator one time who rendered that into English and added a footnote. He said, “This can’t possibly be the meaning of this verse. There must be a deeper meaning someplace. This point is so obvious. We don’t need a Buddha to tell us these things.” But then look at how many people live their lives in line with that principle. For everybody, it’s this and that. We want to keep all our pieces and win at chess. It takes a mature mind to realize it’s not possible.

And that much maturity, of course, is still not enough. You have to keep looking again and again and again. Ajaan Maha Bua makes this point. You may have contemplated the body a thousand times, two thousand times, and it still doesn’t seem to sink in. He said, “Well, just keep at it.” The mind is really resistant, but then there are a lot of resistant things in the world that ultimately will fall away through persistence. Think of water falling on rock. Water is soft, but if it keeps dropping, dropping, flowing, flowing, flowing over the rock, it’ll run a course in the rock.

So no matter how solid your attachment to sensuality may be, you’ve got to keep coming back, coming back to contemplating its drawbacks. The energy you get to keep coming back comes partly from the contemplation itself, and partly from the nourishment you get from the concentration. The concentration is food for the mind.

Think about that image of the frontier fortress. You’ve got mindfulness as the gatekeeper at the gate, trying to keep unskillful things from coming in. You’ve got the soldiers who stand for right effort, armed with their knowledge of the Dhamma. The soldiers and the gatekeeper, of course, need food. And the food is concentration.

So work on learning how to find a strong sense of interest and attraction in concentration. Learn to really appreciate how good it is for the mind just to be able to settle down and not have to do anything but be with one thought. Learn to develop it in such a way that there’s a strong sense of well-being that comes as you let that one thought, along with the pleasure of the breath, permeate the body as you feel it from within.

So there’s a back and forth, a back and forth. There are so many things in the practice that are like that. Your virtue is going to depend on your discernment. Your discernment is going to depend on your virtue. This is one of the distinctive teachings of the forest tradition. It’s not the case that you just do virtue and, when your virtue is perfected, you then do your concentration. And when the concentration is perfected, you then do your insight practice. You have to do all three together. The virtue helps keep you honest. The concentration gives you food and energy. And the discernment is what enables you to see why you’re holding on to things that are really holding you back.

Just that one perception can help an awful lot. As I said, we think that our sensual fantasies open possibilities. Well, they’re actually closing off a lot of other ones, better ones. When you’re willing to admit that, that’s a lot of the battle right there.