Sensual Passion

In the Buddha’s description of concentration practice, he says that you’re aloof from sensuality, aloof from unskillful qualities in the mind. The word sensuality—kāma in Pali—is often misunderstood. Sometimes it’s translated as aloof from sensual pleasures. But the Buddha doesn’t have you search out a really difficult, painful place to practice. You try to find a place that’s quiet and sit in a comfortable position.

What he’s talking about when he says you’re aloof from sensuality is that you’re not thinking thoughts about sensual pleasures, planning them, going over sensual pleasures from the past. You get aloof from that so that the mind can be really quiet.

Now, for a lot of us, that’s where we find our pleasures, our happiness: thoughts of nice sights, sounds, tastes, tactile sensations. For many people that’s what happiness is in life. But the Buddha says there’s something better. If you’re attached to those things, he says you’re a slave, a slave to craving, and you really can’t trust your mind. It goes slipping out after these things, and it can take you along with it, drag you along with it. Especially at death: You’re afraid of losing sensual pleasures, you see the opportunity for some more, and you just go for them.

But sensual pleasures can lie to you. Ajaan Mun talks about how, when he was able to remember his past lifetimes, he came across one period where for 500 lifetimes he was a dog because he was satisfied with dog sensuality.

There’s a passage in the Canon where the Buddha, after the end of the rains retreat, is going to go off on a wandering tour. Mahanama, his cousin, comes to see him and asks: Suppose there’s somebody who’s wise, who’s made some progress on the path. He’s dying, and the Buddha’s not there to give him advice. What kind of advice should he give him? The Buddha starts out by saying, “Make sure he’s not worried about his family, worried about things in this lifetime, because now he can’t do anything about them. He shouldn’t weigh his mind down with them.”

Then he has Mahanama ask the dying man, “Are you afraid of losing human sensuality?” If the man says, “Yes,” then Mahanama’s supposed to tell him, “Well, there’s better up in the levels of heaven.” He goes up the different levels, one by one by one; each time the sensual pleasures get better and better. Finally, he gets to the level of the Brahmas. The Brahmas’ pleasures are more refined than that. They’re not sensual. They’re the pleasures of form, the pleasures of concentration.

So when we practice concentration, we’re lifting our minds up above our ordinary sensual pleasures, even heavenly sensual pleasures, finding pleasure in the sense of the body as we feel it from within—like we’re doing right now. Breathe in a way that feels good. Think of your whole nervous system breathing. It’s not just the lungs expanding and contracting; the whole nervous system is bringing the breath in, letting the breath go out. See how that feels.

If you can get a more expansive sense of good energy in your body, that’s a lot nicer than sight, sound, smells, taste, and tactile sensations, because those things are very shallow. They’re like a coating of paint on your sensory organs, and even paint lasts longer. They’re there and they’re gone—like reflections of light on water. But this goes deeper and it lasts longer. So try to get in touch with the potential for feeling as sense of well-being inside the body like this, because you’re lifting your mind above the heavenly levels when you do.

Then, when you can find a sense of well-being this way, you can look back at the sensual pleasures that you used to go after and be honest about their drawbacks.

We have that chant for the 32 parts of the body. A lot of people complain, “Why look at the negative side of the body? People suffer from a negative body image already.” Well, one, if you weren’t really attached to the idea that you want your body to look good, this contemplation wouldn’t bother you. And two, you don’t want a happiness that doesn’t allow you to be honest—that tries to pretend things are not there.

Think about the body: Just a few millimeters under the skin there are all these things you couldn’t bear to look at, couldn’t bear to smell. But because you’ve got the skin covering them up, they’re okay; we can pretend they’re not there. But they are there. If you didn’t have all these different layers and organs inside the body, the body wouldn’t be able to survive.

So here we are, stuck with something that, in order for it to live, has to have a lot of unattractive aspects. To get sensual pleasure out of it, we have to ignore those aspects. So the mind is lying to itself. That kind of happiness can’t last.

Think of the shock that some people go through when they see someone that they loved when their bodies are torn apart, say, in a war or an accident, and they go crazy because the things that they’re been trying to deny are suddenly made very, very clear.

You’re a lot safer if you can think about the drawbacks of the body and admit that “Yes, they’re there. They’ve always been there. They’re there now”—and that you’ve got to find happiness in something else.

This is why the Buddha offers us the practice of concentration, because that lifts the mind, even above deva sensuality. The nature of the mind is that it’s looking for happiness, but sensuality can never satisfy it. As the Buddha said, “Even if it rained gold coins, it wouldn’t be enough for one person’s sensual desires.” You gain this pleasure and then you think of better pleasures, and then you think of better pleasures, more expensive, more expensive. It’s like the people who say, “If I get a million dollars, I’ll be satisfied.” But then when they get a million dollars, they say, “Well, wait till I get two.” And then when they get two, then four, four, then eight, and it keeps growing exponentially. The human mind is never satisfied if that’s where it’s looking for its pleasures. There’s no way it’s going to be satisfied, because the pleasures come and they go.

If you want to find some satisfaction, look inside. Develop a taste for the feeling of the good breath energy in the body, and then make that your foundation as you go through the day.

The Buddha gives an analogy. He says our engagement with the senses is like having animals that are running off in different directions. You’ve got a crocodile that wants to go down to the river. You’ve got a monkey that wants to go up in a tree. You’ve got a dog that wants to go into a village, a snake that wants to go into a hole in the ground, a bird that wants to fly up into the air, and a jackal that wants to go into a charnel ground.

If you put leashes on these animals but don’t tie the leashes to anything more solid—you just tie the ends of the leashes to one another—they’ll pull and pull, and whoever is the strongest will pull all the others in its direction. That’ll probably be the crocodile, who will pull everybody down into the water, where they drown. That’s the way it is as we go through the day, looking for things that we’d like to see, trying to listen for things that we’d like to hear. As long as we’re feeding on sensory pleasures like that, the mind is out of control.

What the Buddha says is that you’ve got to find a post, tie the leashes to the post—make sure the post is strong—and then pull as they might, the animals can’t go anywhere. They’ll stay right here next to the post. The post, he says, is mindfulness immersed in the body; and mindfulness immersed in the body leads to concentration. If you have a sense of well-being with the breath as you fully inhabit your body, then you’re not so hungry for things outside. You can breathe easily and have pleasure right there in the breathing.

Try to breathe into all the little muscles that do a lot of work: say, the muscles of your hands, the muscles around your eyes, the muscles right at the breastbone. Let them do the breathing and let them get nourished by the breathing, with a sense of fullness as you breathe in, fullness as you breathe out. Don’t squeeze things out as you breathe out. You’ll find there’s kind of a melting sense of pleasure. Let that melting pleasure spread through the body; and there you are: a sense of well-being that’s a lot deeper and a lot more lasting than a nice sight that comes and goes, or a sound that comes and goes.

When you’re not hungry for sensual pleasures, then you can look more honestly at where you’ve been looking for pleasure in the past and realize that you’ve been a slave to something that’s going to turn on you.

The Buddha gives lots of different analogies for sensuality. He says it’s like a dog chewing on a bone. There’s no meat on the bone; there’s no nourishment on the bone. And as Ajaan Lee points out, all it gets is the taste of its own saliva.

If you try to follow your sensual pleasures, you put yourself in a place of danger: It’s like a bead of honey on a blade of a knife. Or like a hawk that’s got a piece of meat, and as it flies off, other hawks and crows and raptors chase it down, trying to get that meat from it, and they’ll kill it if they can. In the same way, sometimes you get sensual pleasures, other people want them, and they’ll kill you for them. Those are pleasures that aren’t safe.

This is why we practice the Dhamma, why we listen to the wise people who say that when you want to find long-term welfare and happiness, you look for it in your practice of generosity, your practice of virtue, your practice of meditation; and especially the meditation because, as the Buddha pointed out, if you don’t have the pleasure of concentration, then no matter how much you see the drawbacks of sensuality, you’re still going to go back to them, because the mind is hungry. It needs nourishment. It wants pleasure of some sort. So give it the pleasure of this.

Learn how to tap into this wherever you go. We start out here, in a quiet place like the monastery, but you want to be able to take this skill with you as you leave, and you can take it because the breath is there with you all the time. It’s just that as soon as we leave the monastery, the mind goes back to its old habits. Sometimes when you look for nice sights, listen to nice sounds, it gets pulled out again. It’s lost its post; the crocodile is going to drag you down.

So try to get a sense of well-being inside that you can maintain. Of course, as the Buddha pointed out to Mahanama in the sutta, when you get the dying person to focus on the pleasures of the Brahma realms, you can point out to him that even the Brahma realms have their drawbacks. They still have a sense of self-identity, a sense of “me.” When you’ve latched onto the pleasure of the concentration, that, too, is a form of attachment. And even though it’s pulled you away from sensuality, it still isn’t the ultimate goal.

The ultimate goal is when you’ve mastered these things and you learn how to let go of them, not to go back to your old sensual pleasures, but to go up to something even more free. This is why the Buddha talks about abandoning not only passion for sensuality, but also passion for form, passion for formless. But before you try to let go of those, make sure that you’ve gotten really good at the sense of the pleasure of form here in the body, so that you can pull yourself away from your hunger for sensual pleasures, your hunger for sensual fantasies. You’ve got something much better right here.

After all, why do we go for those pleasures? We want a sense of ease and well-being. Well, here you can create a sense of ease and well-being by the way you focus on the breath—with a lot fewer drawbacks, a lot fewer pitfalls. So try to develop this as a skill, because it’ll save you from a lot of grief.