Shoulds & Wants

When you sit down and meditate and tell yourself you’re going to be thinking only about one thing — the breath — you find that lots of other thoughts come crowding in, lots of other voices in the mind. Some of them are helpful; a lot of them are not, because a lot of them come from a time when the mind was not trained at all.

There’s a long-standing theme in Western psychology that divides these voices into three types. Plato divided them into your reason, your will, and your appetites. Your will is basically what you’re trying to achieve in life. Your reason tells you what you should and shouldn’t do. Your appetites are your raw desires that sometimes act in conflict with what you really want out of life, because you want some immediate gratfication, right now.

Freud took this three-part division and gave it different names. There’s the superego, which tells you what you should be doing. There’s the ego, which is what you want out of life—you want happiness. But then there’s the id, which is just raw desire—the desires that don’t listen to reason, or are in conflict with reason, in conflict with your ideas of shoulds.

As he said, if you just give in to the shoulds, what society tells you what you should be doing, you’re going to be miserable. After all, the shoulds of society don’t always aim at your genuine happinesis. They just want you to obey. If you give in to your appetites, you’re going to be miserable, because they rarely think about your long-term well-being. So the ego within you constantly has to keep negotiating between the two. It’s a negotiation that never ends, and never arrives at a totally happy resolution.

Now, for the purpose of your true happiness, the Buddha gives you different shoulds. The shoulds are the shoulds in the four noble truths. You should try to comprehend suffering. You should try to abandon its cause. You should try to realize the cessation of suffering, and you should do that by developing the path. These shoulds are not imposed on you. The reason you listen to them is because they’re for the sake of your true happiness. So there shouldn’t be any conflict between what you really want out of life and what the Buddha is telling you that you should do.

The conflict is with your immediate appetites—the times when you want to go for an immediate pleasure that’s opposed to the training and the path. But the fact that the Buddha’s shoulds are based on the desire for true happiness gives you an area where you can actually have conversations inside. Seeing that everybody wants happiness, it’s just a question of straightening out your ignorant desires for happiness and giving them more knowledge. At the same time, you provide yourself with a sense of well-being through the concentration so that your desires for immediate happiness, immediate gratification, are not totally denied.

Ideally, everything should work well together inside—much better than the picture that, say, Freud would give, where there’s a constant battle and your best hope is to negotiate a fragile truce.

But you’ll find that you come into the meditation, you’re bringing a lot of other attitudes in with you, different from the ones the Buddha recommends. It’s not the case that your shoulds are all monolithic or that your desires are all monolithic. We come from a background in which we’ve picked up many different cultures, and they have very conflicting ideas of what you should be doing with your life.

And, of course, your desires for immediate pleasure right now can be all over the place. Some of them can be pretty perverse, in the sense that they actually find pleasure in making you miserable. They find pleasure in thwarting your desires for long-term happiness.

Sometimes you run into a case where it’s not a battle between your sense of what you should do and what your appetites tell you they want. Instead, both sides gang up on you. You’re trying to meditate, and they tell you that you shouldn’t be doing this, or that you don’t really want to do this.

Some desires will disguise themselves behind the shoulds—like the idea that you shouldn’t be trying to enjoy the pleasure of concentration, that you don’t deserve that pleasure. A part of the mind may simply not want to practice, and so it hides behind that old idea that you shouldn’t indulge in pleasure because pleasures are bad for you, or because pleasures automatically involve unskillful mental states. You have to question those attitudes. Why would you want to listen to those shoulds?

Partly because there’s a confusion—the old confusion that the Buddha went through on his quest for awakening. He had a vision of how awakening might be found. In the vision, there were three pieces of wood. One piece was soaking in water. One piece was wet, even though it was taken out of the water. And a third piece was taken out of the water and was dry. Only the last piece of wood could be used to make a fire.

The symbolism there was that someone who’s enjoying the pleasures of the senses, immersed in the pleasures of the senses, would not be in any position to gain awakening. Those who withdraw themselves from those pleasures but still hanker after them are not going to gain awakening. It’s only those who are totally devoid of any sensual involvement or sensual desires at all: Those are the ones who are going to gain awakening.

That was about sensuality. But he interpreted the meaning as any pleasure at all. So he tried to deny himself any kind of pleasure: starved himself, forced himself not to breathe. He kept this up for six years and almost died. Only then did he realize that this was not the way.

The problem there was, of course, that he took an image about sensuality and applied it to all pleasures. Yet not all pleasures are sensual. Not all pleasures make you blind the way sensual pleasures can. The pleasure of concentration, even though it’s very physical, is not a sensual pleasure. It’s a pleasure of form. When he realized that, that was when he got on the right path.

Many of us have the attitude that if we’re enjoying the meditation and there’s a sense of pleasure coming up inside, there’s something wrong with us. We’re not doing what we should be doing.

I remember when I was getting some pleasure out of the concentration for the first time. It reminded me of the pleasure that came from listening to classical music. I thought, “This must be wrong. I can’t be looking for that kind of pleasure.” But then I realized, No, it wasn’t the pleasure of the music. It was the pleasure of a mind settled in, at home with a body. And there’s nothing blameworthy about that. There’s nothing to be afraid of. The Buddha had to convince himself of this before he was able to get on the right path.

Another instance where you desires and your shoulds are ganging up on you are the negative voices that say you can’t do this. They’re sabotaging your efforts, telling you, “You’ve made a miserable job of things in the past. You’re not going to be able to handle this.” Well, again, ask yourself: Why would you want to believe that? You might say, “I don’t want to believe that,” but there must be something in there.

Think of the Buddha’s five steps for dealing with any unskillful mental state. You want to see, when it arises: What sparks this voice? It’s not going to stay forever. It’s going to pass away. When it passes away, why does it pass away? What happened? When it comes back again, why do you pick it up again? What’s the allure?

Part of the mind says, “It lets you off the hook. This is going to be a long, difficult path.” But then think about the path of not practicing. It’s a lot longer and involves a lot more pain and suffering.

Some people get out of the idea of a long, difficult path by saying, “Well, just open up to the present moment as it is. That’s all you need.” But the Buddha was not one of those people. There’s a path to follow, it’s going to take some effort, but it’s going to take you someplace. Sometimes it goes quickly for some people, but sometimes it goes slowly. Sometimes it’s pleasant; sometimes it’s going to be hard. But the life of not practicing is a lot harder. It may be familiar, and a lot of times that’s the allure of that kind of life. You’re familiar with it. It doesn’t demand too much out of you. This path is more demanding. But you have to develop a fighting spirit—to look for the drawbacks of following your unskillful voices, and to find the escape from them.

As in that passage from Ajaan Maha Bua’s biography of Ajaan Mun, where Ajaan Mun said he was sick and tired of being the laughingstock of the defilements. These voices that say that you can’t do this, that you’re incapable, you’re going to be a failure, so might as well not try: Those are the defilements trying to fool you. If you’re friendly with them and give in to them, they’ll laugh at you. Learn to disidentify yourself from them, see them as something separate, and ask why they should have power in the mind. What kind of happiness can they promise you? What kind of fulfillment?—any way you can think of for weakening their power. Laugh at them if you can.

It’s in this case, when the shoulds and the wants gang up on you, that you need some other shoulds and some other wants that can fight them back. The best shoulds are the four noble truths. This suffering you’re causing yourself, how can you comprehend it? How can you abandon the cause? And the desire to gain awakening, as Ananda pointed out to the nun, is one of our motivations for practicing.

So muster some shoulds and some wants of your own on the side of the Dhamma. That way, when unskillful shoulds and unskillful wants gang up on you, you’ve got the strength and strategies to fight back.