Admen Inside

The Thai ajaans like to talk about your defilements in a way that makes it seem like they’re separate people inside you. Greed says this, anger says that, lust says this, jealousy says that. These things try to exert power over you.

It’s as if there are separate becomings inside there. Your mind is full of desires, and they all have to argue their case. Each desire goes together with a becoming. In other words, there’s something you want, it exists in a particular world of experience, and you’d have to take on a certain identity within that world in order to get that thing.

It’s almost as if those desires have their admen arguing their case. Sometimes they advertise the object that you might desire. Sometimes they advertise the world in which you would find yourself striving for that desired object. And sometimes they advertise the identity you would take on there.

You see this in advertisements all over the place. When they sell a car, it’s not just the car. It’s the social world in which you would exist if you had that car, and the kind of person you would be in that world if you had that car. The whole becoming is what they would call “the Ford experience” or “the BMW experience.”

Well, that’s how our desires—our likes and dislikes, our anger, our lust— present their case.

Sometimes they present a pretty weak case. Again, it’s like advertisements. There are some advertisements that are trying to get you to want something that would involve taking on an identity in a particular world that you wouldn’t care to take on. So you can see that it’s worthless.

But then something else would come along and present the case a little bit differently about the same object. The objects of our desires don’t change that much, but in a different world with you acting in a different identity, they can suddenly seem to have more of an allure.

It’s like all the fantasies in the world of James Bond. Drinking and having sex is a sophisticated thing in that world. It’s not really all that different from drinking and having sex in a very poor shanty town. Basically, the same desires, but dressed up differently.

So you have to watch out for the dressing up. Some voices speak in the mind advocating a desire, and it’s as if they’re not talking to you at all, because they don’t appeal to your sense of who you’d like to be or the world you’d like to exist in.

But others can present the same thing, and you find yourself hooked. So you have to be careful. Just because you’ve learned how to say No to certain becomings and the way they present a particular object as desirable doesn’t mean you’ve succeeded in dealing with all becomings. They can sneak up and present something else.

It’s like that case of the nun Subhā. She’s going through the woods, and a goldsmith’s son—a libertine—comes up and accosts her. Years back, someone made a translation of that—someone who said she was doing a feminist take on these verses because only women would understand them—and in her version, the goldsmith’s son was really crude. “Hey, you’re hot. I’m hot. Let’s go have sex.” The way he talks, no self-respecting woman in her right mind would go for him. Which leaves open the possibility that if he were more subtle and suave, she might be tempted.

Well, that’s actually what the original Pali is all about. The libertine has a silver tongue. He paints very attractive and alluring pictures of what it would be like if Subhā disrobed and went to live with him. He presents a picture of the kind of woman she would become in his dream world. She’d have servants looking after her. She’d be using fine fabrics. She’d be like a golden doll.

But Subhā is not interested. This is the point. She’s a non-returner. So, no matter how he presents his case, she’s not going to fall for it. She argues with him. “What in this body, full of all these disgusting things”—like we have in the chant about the 32 parts of the body—“What in this body do you find that’s attractive?”

“Your eyes,” he says. “Your eyes are like those of a faun”—again, trying to paint a picture of her, even though his desire is to have sex with her.

That’s the whole point of all this. He’s talking about her eyes, talking about her, hoping that she would be attracted by this picture that he’s painting of her. But she says, “These eyes are just little globes bathed in tears, bathed in mucus. How can you be attracted to them?” He says, “I don’t care.”

That’s the purpose of all the advertisements that our defilements present to us. They want us to get to the point where we don’t care—in other words, where we’re lacking ottappa, lacking compunction, not caring about the results of our actions, living in a world where the Dhamma doesn’t exist, where the Buddha doesn’t exist, where Ajaan Lee and Ajaan Mun, all the great ajaans, don’t exist.

But again, she’s not tempted. She says, “You like my eye?” and she plucks it out, hands it to him. Of course, he’s immediately taken aback, apologizes profusely, and she makes her way safely out of the forest. It was her bravery that got her out.

The story ends well. She goes back to see the Buddha and she gets her eye back.

But the point is, when he’s talking about sex, he doesn’t talk about sex. He’s talking about the world in which she would live and the kind of being she would be in that world: the becoming around the sensual desire.

That’s what you have to watch out for. Your defilements are trying to create states of becoming to suck you in. They suck you in by baiting the allure in such a way that you decide, “I don’t care about the consequences. I just want this.”

You have to care. What’s going on in your mind has its consequences. Other people may not know, but that’s not the problem. The fact is that there are consequences for giving in to your defilements. The becoming tries to present them in such a way that the consequences don’t matter or don’t even exist, so that compunction goes out the window.

So you have to develop a strong sense that your thoughts, words, and deeds all have consequences, and you really do care about yourself down the line. It’s not just a matter of being in the present, thinking that that will solve your problems.

What you do in the present has consequences in the present, but also down the line into the future. And you want to care. So you have to learn how to steel yourself, because these advertisements that your desires make to sell their wares try to find where you have a soft spot.

Again, it’s like advertisers outside. They present their wares in one way that doesn’t attract you. Well, they’ll paint another picture of another world, another you, and then they’ll finally hook you.

So you have to learn how to not have any hooks. This is one of the reasons why we develop mindfulness, not just to keep general things in mind, but specifically to keep in mind the fact that when you go into a world like that, there are going to be consequences, even though the world claims that there won’t be any. It shuts them out, because each world of experience cherry-picks, at least in its presentation.

Just like the advertisements we see on TV, we see in magazines, we see on the Internet. They create a very distorted world in which actions really don’t have consequences aside from the act of buying their wares, for which they promise happy consequences.

So learn how to not have any soft spots where the advertisers can get you. Wherever you do have some soft spots, be alert for any attempt to appeal to them, because they can pull you down.