Secluded from Sensuality

The description for a right concentration begins with the phrase that you’re secluded from sensuality, secluded from unskillful qualities.

Sensuality is defined as your fascination with thinking about sensual pleasures, planning for sensual pleasures. If you have any thoughts like that, just put them aside.

Unskillful qualities are defined as anything beginning with wrong view up through wrong mindfulness. So, if you’re mindful of things that are not relevant to staying focused on the body in and out itself, if you’re not mindful to put aside greed and distress with reference to the world, try to put these memories aside. Be mindful only of things that are relevant for what you’re trying to do right now, which is to get the mind concentrated, get it still.

There are times when it’s easy to put those things aside, other times when it’s hard. This is why, when the Buddha was teaching his son about breath meditation, he didn’t start out with breath meditation. He started out with other contemplations.

One of which was trying to make your mind like earth. Good and bad things get poured on the earth but the earth doesn’t get excited, doesn’t get upset. Make your mind like water: Water can be used to wash away disgusting things, but the water itself doesn’t get disgusted.

In other words, you want to learn how be with things as they happen, without recoiling, without running away from them. The purpose here is not just to accept them. You make the mind as non-reactive as possible to serve an agenda: so that you can see what’s actually going on.

Remember: When the Buddha teaches breath meditation, it’s pretty proactive. You’re going to be breathing in certain ways, trying to induce certain mind states, certain feelings, certain states of awareness, by the way you breathe. But to prepare the mind for that activity, you have to make it as impassive as possible so that when anything undesirable comes up in your meditation, you don’t get excited about it, you don’t get upset by it. You have to see it clearly if you want to deal with it.

Another contemplation the Buddha recommends is the brahmaviharas, starting with goodwill for all.

Another is contemplation of the body. This is the main center of our thoughts for sensuality. It’s because we’re attracted to our body that we get attracted to other people, so the Buddha has you dissect your attraction to your body first. This is why we have that chant on the 32 parts of the body, not to say that the body is bad, but basically to say, “Why get all stirred up about it? Why look at it as an object of sensual desire?” It has its uses: Without the body, you wouldn’t be able to sit here meditating. But it has also its abuses. You get focused on sensual pleasures related to the body, and they can pull the mind away from concentration.

As you approach meditation topics like this, it’s always important to keep the third noble truth in mind. There is a possibility that you can totally end suffering. Without that possibility, you can say, “I’ll just go for whatever pleasures I like.” Some people like sensuality other people like a quiet state of mind. Sounds like it’s just a matter of personal preference. But when the total end of suffering is an option, you want to reorder your values, spending your time rearranging your thoughts, rearranging your plans around something like this. You’ll be attacking not so much the body, but the state of mind that wants to go for the kind of pleasure that enjoys thinking about different sensual pleasures around the body and then starts planning them.

To focus attention on the mind state, we first have to take apart the object: Is it really worth it? This is where they talk about taking off the skin, putting it in a pile and seeing what you have left. It’s just that much. There’s a very thin layer of skin around the body that makes it something you can actually look at. Without that layer, you’d run away. Yet the skin itself, if you put it in a pile, wouldn’t be attractive, either.

Then you take the rest of the body apart piece by piece. You can’t have a body without a liver, you can’t have one without intestines, but do you really like the liver, do you really like the intestines? No.

Try any way of contemplating the body taken apart—thinking about its dissolution as it gets older, what it’s going to be like when it dies—to make you see that the object isn’t worth all that interest. Yet you find the mind still wants to go for it.

Ajaan Maha Boowa talks about how he got really good in taking the body apart in his mind. All he had to do was just look at somebody and immediately he’d see the flesh, he’d see the blood falling away, the bones disintegrating. Yet, he found that there was still a potential for lust in his mind.

So instead of continuing to focus on the body, he started focusing on the mind. Why is it the mind can see all these things, admit all these facts, all these truths about the body, and yet still consciously ignore them?

This is a tendency of the mind in general. When you want to go for something you know is unskillful, you block out any thoughts that would criticize what you’re going for and why. We can get very narrow in our focus. This is what becoming is all about. You have a desire, then you have the world around that desire, and in order to pursue that desire sometimes you have to make it a very narrow world, where your role in that world is very narrow as well. So why do you go for that? What’s the appeal? Why do you want to lust?

It’s not the case that you’re sitting here perfectly still, perfectly innocent, and something comes along and stirs up the lust. Most of the time, we’re out looking for lust, as well as anger and all the unskillful desires we have. Why is that? What’s the appeal? Where is it located?

The Buddha talks about how the appeal can be located in any of the aggregates. In other words, your perceptions around lust, your perceptions around your relationship to the other person, your role in getting involved. Sometimes it’s your thinking, the story you’re telling yourself, all the feelings that come up. Where is the appeal located?

You think about all the damage that can be done if you give into these mind states—all the affliction that comes, and the fact that you’re cutting off the possibility of nibbāna—yet the appeal is such a little tiny thing. That particular mind state, that becoming that you develop around lust and sensuality, has to block out the possibility that there could be an end to suffering. Otherwise, you’d see how ridiculous this is and what a waste of time. Maybe one of the best ways of looking at this is to recognize that you are just wasting your time here, and you don’t know how much time you have.

We have this human birth and if we don’t use it well, we fall. So this is a chance to grow up. Why throw it away? One of the main reasons is that you don’t believe it’s possible—or you don’t want it to be possible. You have to look at all these possibilities.

It’s a mental issue. You focus first on the body to see that there’s nothing much there, so that you can focus your attention on what’s going on in the mind.

There’s that experiment I mentioned before: They put a male pigeon in a box with a female pigeon and they measured how much time it would take for him to start his mating dance. Then they took the female pigeon out and put a male pigeon in her place, clocked him again. It took a little bit longer but eventually started to make its mating dance toward the male. Then they took the male pigeon out and put a decoy in. It took him a little bit longer, but eventually he started the mating dance. They took the decoy out and then they put in other objects in, making them less and less like pigeons—one of them was a red rubber ball—and although it took him a little bit longer each time, he could still work up his mating dance. Finally, they took the ball out to see what he would do with an empty box. He focused on a corner and started to do his mating dance toward the corner.

That tells you a lot about the mind—and not just about a pigeon’s mind. The human mind is like that, too. It can manage to get itself worked up over anything. To what purpose? What’s accomplished? What are the consequences?

These are some of the things you tend to block out of your mind. When you start indulging in fantasies like this, the consequences disappear in that world of becoming. But then, is that the way the world works? No, it has consequences. And the consequences that come, the afflictions that come with lust, are pretty strong. Then you contemplate that here you are, cutting off the possibility of the third and fourth noble truths, that suffering can be ended, and there is a path to accomplish that. You could be spending your time on that path rather than wandering off into the woods, getting caught in the underbrush.

To see how sensuality has its drawbacks, remember the Buddha’s graduated discourse. He starts with generosity, with virtue, the rewards that comes from developing these qualities in your mind. You get to the sensual levels of heaven but then you fall. You get carried away with your instantaneous sensual pleasures, and the integrity of the mind, the character of the mind, begins to erode. You get used to having whatever sensual pleasure you want, and there it is. You think about it, and there it is. You can imagine what kind of bad habits you develop in a situation like that. Then you get dropped down and you have to start all over again. Think about how many lifetimes, how many eons you’ve been going through this.

So try to get out of the tunnel-vision that comes with sensuality and look at a larger context in terms of rebirth, in terms of the noble truths, particularly the third noble truth. There is that promise.

One of the great ironies of Buddhism coming to the West is the accusation that Buddhism is pessimistic because it focuses on suffering. But that’s just the first noble truth. The important truth is the third: It is possible to put an end to suffering. That’s about as optimistic as you can get, but it challenges the becomings, the world views that we have, that would block out that possibility.

So here’s the Buddha saying, “Here’s the path, and it goes to a really amazing place, where you can actually step outside of time, step outside of space, where it’s totally free.” Wouldn’t you rather go there?