The Problem of Desires

In the old days, when a monk gave a talk in Thailand, he would have a fan in front of his face so that he couldn’t see the faces of the people he was talking to. That was so that he wouldn’t be influenced by their expressions. This is important. I have a friend, a lay Dhamma teacher, who used to be a professor at a university in Boston. He told me once about another professor who had a habit of pacing back and forth in front of the room as he gave his lectures. His field was behavioral psychology.

His students, being students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, decided to do a behavioral psychology experiment on him. When he was in the left corner of the room, they would pay attention, look intently at him, take notes. When he was in the right corner of the room, they would look out the window. Nobody would take notes. Within two weeks, they had him staying in the left corner. And he didn’t realize what had happened. So I don’t want to look at your faces while I’m giving this talk. Otherwise, when there are certain things that need to be said that you don’t like, I’ll stop saying them. And then you won’t get to hear them.

So. Close your eyes.

To understand the role of desire in the ordinary mind and along the path, we have to understand the Buddha’s analysis of what’s happening in the present moment, because that’s where desires are conceived, judged, and either followed or rejected.

The present moment is not a given. It’s fabricated out of the raw material provided by past actions. You’re the one fabricating it, which is why your sense of self is so dependent on how you fabricate things.

There are three types of fabrication, which I mentioned briefly earlier today: bodily, verbal, and mental.

• Bodily fabrication is the way you breathe.

• Verbal fabrication is the way you talk to yourself. In technical terms, it’s called directed thought and evaluation. You direct your thoughts to a particular topic, and then you make comments about it, you ask questions, you answer the questions. That’s the evaluation.

• Finally, there are mental fabrications, which are perceptions and feelings.

Perceptions are the labels that you apply to things. There can be three stages of this kind of perception. We can illustrate them by thinking about a red light at an intersection. One, you notice that its color is red. That’s one level of perception: “red.” The second level is, what does red mean? In this case, it means, “Stop.” Then third, you have the perception as to whether it’s important to pay attention to or not. In other words, is it important to follow what the red light is saying or can you ignore it?

So perceptions are mental acts that give meanings to things.

As for feelings, these are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, or neither pleasure nor pain.

These three types of fabrication are the processes by which we put together the raw material that comes from our past kamma and actually make it into an experience in the present moment. They usually function on a subconscious level. One of the purposes of meditation is to bring them more up into the conscious level so that we can see them clearly, because it’s through these three fabrications that we also create our desires.

Try to remember this teaching on the three fabrications because it’s going to play a big role throughout our discussions for the remainder of the retreat.

Now, the act of fabrication is always for the sake of something, for the purpose of something—usually for happiness or pleasure. It’s an expression of a desire to gain results. This is why the Buddha said that all phenomena are rooted in desire. This means that the present moment is not static, and it’s not divorced from the past or the future. It’s constantly in motion toward the future, using the results of the past. It’s propelled by your desires.

We have a subconscious sense that if we don’t desire things, everything will fall apart. This is one of the reasons why we hold on so tightly to our desires. It’s also one of the reasons why the mind takes pleasure in agency, because it gives you a sense of power.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a German psychologist who was studying infant behavior noticed that the thing that makes babies happiest is doing something again and again, and getting the same results. It gives them a sense of power over their environment. This is why they make noises again and again and again. It gives them a sense of power. It can drive you crazy, but for them, it’s an expression of agency. As we grow up, we stop making noises again and again—except when we sing or make music—but we do continue to take pleasure in our sense of agency in having some power over our environment.

So the mind doesn’t just register facts. It exercises its agency. The basic unit of our knowledge is a movement toward the future coupled with a judgment as to which movements or desires we should follow for the best results. This means that we’re out looking for sensory input in order to satisfy this movement toward the future. We operate with filters, absorbing sensory input only if we think that it will have some potential to satisfy our desires. Either we think that the input is satisfactory in and of itself or we can imagine using it for the purpose of some further happiness.

This gives rise to three main problems.

• Many of our desires are in conflict with one another.

• Too many of our desires cause us to act in ways that lead eventually to harm.

• And finally, we can make faulty value judgments. The mind is constantly running what’s called a cost-benefit analysis to judge which desires are worth following and which ones are not. In the Buddha’s terminology, this is called comparing the allure with the drawbacks of each desire. The allure is the gain you associate with following the desire. The drawbacks have to do with the difficulties you’ll meet up with and the problems that will be caused by following the desire.

This may sound a little too intellectual and theoretical, but in actual practice it involves a lot of emotions and a lot of ignorance. Very often we don’t even know why we like something or we can’t say No to desires that we know are harmful. That’s because the allure is strong but often hidden. Part of the mind actively hides it because the allure wouldn’t stand up to serious scrutiny. As a result, we don’t really know what we’re doing.

Another problem is that the options that the mind presents to itself are often false dichotomies. It’s like politics: They say, “You have to choose either this person or that person. You have no other options.” Neither person is really desirable, so they want you to say, “Well, given that that’s the only choice I have, I’ll go with the better of the two.” In America we call this “choosing the lesser of two evils.”

There was a great political advertisement years back. A reporter goes to a child and asks, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” And the child responds, “I want to choose the lesser of two evils.” It’s very sad, but it’s not just politics. Often the mind plays this trick on itself as well. You tell yourself that the only options are x and y, even though there’s a whole alphabet of other options, many of which work much better. The ordinary process of this cost-benefit analysis ends with a temporary value judgment: yes or no, right now, for the time being. You leave open the possibility that you might change your mind later on, when presented with different choices and alternatives.

Now, one of the big problems is that the mind, when focusing on a desire, engages in a process called becoming. This is a sense of yourself in a world of experience centered on a desired object. When you think of something you want, you then ask yourself, “Where can that be found? And which parts of that world are actually helpful in getting it, and which ones will get in the way?” Parts of the world outside that are not relevant to that object are not part of that particular becoming.

As for your sense of self in that becoming, you go into that world. The parts of you that are relevant to that desired object, in other words, the ones that play a role in this particular becoming—either your abilities to gain the object or your lack of abilities to gain it—form your identity in that world. Other aspects of yourself that are not relevant in this way play no role in your sense of self in that particular becoming.

So both your sense of the world and your sense of yourself are defined by what’s relevant to that particular desire.

Now, this happens on two scales: micro, inside the mind; and macro, in the world outside. On the micro level, you think of something you want, you can imagine the world in your mind, and you think of yourself playing a role in that imaginary world. Then, many of these inner becomings actually start playing a role in creating becomings on the macro level as well.

For example, you’re sitting here and you want some pizza. You think, “When the monk stops talking, I can go over to Moustier.” Then you actually go. That’s how becoming goes from interior to exterior, from micro to macro. This also happens at the moment of death. As you realize you cannot stay in this world or in this body anymore, a vision will appear to you. If it’s attractive, you’ll go into it. Sometimes, when you’re desperate at death, you’ll enter even into a becoming that’s not attractive. In either case, that’s how you get reborn into another world, based on the alternatives that are offered to the mind, which in turn are based on your past kamma.

This process of becoming is how we approach all situations. Nobody has to teach us, we just keep doing this. We’re kind of like beavers. A beaver’s approach to every problem is, “Build a dam, build a lodge”—a home for themselves in the pond created by the dam.

They’ve even found that little baby beavers who lost their parents and were then raised by human beings, when they go into the wild, start building dams and making lodges, even though there was no one to show them how. That’s their solution to every problem. The same with human beings: Our solution to every problem is to create a state of becoming. Yet this is why we suffer.

This process is best understood by observing more carefully these micro-level becomings in the mind. When you have the sense of self within this process of becoming, it can take on one of three roles: the agent, the consumer, and the commentator.

The agent is the part of you that says, “I can do this.”

The consumer is the part that says, “I will enjoy the results.”

And the commentator is the part that makes comments on both the agent and the consumer. In other words: Is the agent doing well enough? Is the consumer really going to be satisfied by this? Does the consumer have high enough standards for what counts as happiness?

There’s a constant conversation among these three.

We’re attached to these inner roles because we sense that they’re the only way of bringing happiness. They get fed into the process of cost-benefit analysis, as we desire certain things and we feel that we’re competent to succeed at them. The commentator either encourages the other two, or else it says, “Stop, this is not working, you’ve got to change what you’re going.” From the Buddha’s point of view, this is where things can go wrong. You have a limited idea of what you can do. You have a limited idea of what kinds of happiness are possible. And your commentator can be really crazy.

Many of us don’t like our inner commentator. In English we talk about the inner critic. A lot of people would like to get rid of their inner critic because it doesn’t seem to be very friendly. But we need it. We need some part of the mind to evaluate what we’re doing. One of the topics of the retreat this week is how to train your inner critic so it’s actually a helpful commentator.

Part of that training will be to expand your sense of what’s possible in finding happiness. Many of the fabrications that we do in the present moment give meager results because we have limited perceptions of what’s possible and what’s desirable, and we have a limited sense of our self. We tell ourselves, “Only so much is possible in this world,” or “I personally am capable of only so much.”

Other times we have a problem because our many inner selves get into conflict with one another. This is where we develop what’s called the inner committee that we’ve talked about in previous retreats. Many “you’s” inside your mind have different opinions on how to find happiness.

A lot of this inner conversation is done in ignorance. It’s as if we have an inner bureaucracy. You have the chairman on the top floor who thinks he knows what’s going on, but there are workers on the other floors who have other ideas and have learned how to sneak things past the chairman. One of the purposes of meditation is to make all the different layers inside your mind available to your awareness so that you can actually see what’s going on and do it more skillfully.

Now, before I talk about how the Buddha would solve this problem, I’d like to talk about how other philosophies here in the West have tried to solve this problem in the past, so that you can see what’s special about the Buddha’s solution. In particular, I’d like to focus on three main approaches in the West: two extremes, and a set of attempts to find a middle ground between those extremes based on objective standards.

What all three approaches have in common is that they start with assumptions about the nature of the world and your position within that world. In other words, they start with the assumptions of becoming—your identity in a world of experience—and from those assumptions they draw conclusions about how you should deal with your conflicting desires. And we should note at the outset that none of them can take you beyond becoming. They all agree that your desires find meaning within the terms of becoming, and you have to accept that that’s as far as they can take you. Or so they say.

1) The first extreme is derived from hedonism, the belief that the world contains no objective standards for judging your desires, so you should follow whatever desires please you. In English we say, “Different strokes for different folks.” Your standards for which desires you choose to act on are entirely up to you, and it’s accepted that your desires are arbitrary. In other words, in this theory, suffering comes from not getting to do what you want to do. There’s no need for any inner unity among your desires. It’s okay to be pulled in different directions at different times because each desire is taking you where you want to go anyhow.

The most extreme example of this approach is, “Do what you want and don’t worry about the consequences.” This is the theory implicit in a lot of advertising.

A more pragmatic version of this approach says, “You have to take into consideration what the results of your actions are going to be, but it’s really up to you to decide what you want to achieve, because there are no objective standards as to what’s right and wrong.”

Another version of this attitude comes from what’s called the human potential movement, which is that you as a human being have your own distinct set of potentials—political, sexual, intellectual, material—and that you should try to develop all the potentials you can. They’re all good, and the only constraint on your desires for self-fulfillment are time and energy. I know some people who have adopted this attitude, and they end up frazzled because they’re being pulled by their potentials in many directions all at once.

2) The second extreme goes in the opposite direction entirely. This is the passive, defeatist approach that says, “Desires do nothing but bring on suffering, so just don’t desire anything.” In other words, “Just relax and don’t try to accomplish anything.” There are two versions of this extreme.

One says that the nature of the world is that you have no free will and no choices at all. Everything is predetermined by past conditions, so you have no choice but to accept things as they are.

The other version is that you do have choices, but any attempt to exert your free will will always add more suffering because you’re unskilled by nature and always making a mess of things.

In either case, the proposed solution is the same: “Don’t have any preferences. Don’t waste any effort trying to change things. Just find peace by accepting what comes, without wanting things to be different from what they are.” Sometimes you hear this presented as the Buddha’s teaching, but the Buddha actually attacked the idea that you’re powerless to make skillful changes. And as I said, if the Buddha simply accepted things as they were, he would have stayed in the palace.

So those are the two main extremes: Either there’s nothing wrong with following your desires, or you shouldn’t desire anything at all.

3) The third alternative tries to find a middle ground between these two extremes by establishing objective standards for giving priority to some desires over others. This approach says that the main cause of suffering is that you feel divided within yourself, a sense of inner division that comes from having desires that pull in different directions. To solve this problem of inner division, this approach says, you have to start by defining who you are. Then, from who you are, you determine which desires you should have, and reject any desires that are inappropriate for who you really are. In other words, you choose one state of becoming to act as your primary self and your primary view of the world. As for other desires, you judge them as to whether they promote that state of becoming or not. If they do, you can say Yes to them. If they don’t, you should say No.

The different versions of this third alternative come from different ways of defining your self.

For example, from the Romantic point of view, you are an integral part of the universe, and your sense of separate self is an illusion. You have to be sensitive to the urges coming up within you, learning to recognize those that come from the unity of the universe as a whole and distinguishing them from desires coming from a false sense of separateness. Your duty is to express the more universal ones, regardless of whether they follow social conventions.

Another way of defining yourself is that you’re just your body. This is the materialist world view. You exist to basically meet the needs of your body and nothing more, so follow the desires that are conducive to your survival and material well-being. Don’t pay any attention to desires that go beyond death, because there’s nothing in you that will survive death.

Then there’s the theistic view, which is that you are a creature of God, so you must bend your will to his.

In some of the theories of this sort, you’re taught that you can actually achieve peace through ordering your desires, given the priorities appropriate to what you’re told you are. In others, you have to accept the fact that conflict is inevitable and you simply have to do the best you can.

As I said, all three of the main approaches we’ve mentioned so far are defined within the confines becoming—confined either in defining who you are or defining the world in which you have to try to find happiness. They can’t take you beyond becoming, and so they can’t take you beyond suffering. The Buddha calls them “thickets of views” and “contortions of views.” These are views that keep you ensnared and trapped.

So now, with this range of options in mind, let’s look at the Buddha’s approach.

With regard to the first extreme, the Buddha says that there are clear, objective standards for what counts as skillful and what doesn’t. You have to judge your desires by the results they yield, and you’re wise only if you choose desires that lead to a long-term harmless happiness.

With regard to the second extreme, as I already noted, the Buddha says that you have to accept, as a working hypothesis, the principle that you do have the power to make a difference in your life, and you are capable of mastering the skills to make a good difference, going all the way to the end of suffering. Instead of telling you that you’re powerless, the Buddha affirms that you do have the power to change things for the better, and that the desire to change your behavior in a more skillful direction is to be encouraged.

With regard to the third option—determining which desires are most appropriate based on what you are—the Buddha takes the opposite approach. Instead of defining who you are and then deciding what you should desire based on that definition, he starts by having you ask, “What is the best possible thing to desire?” From there you then define yourself in line with that ultimate desire, as someone who wants to do whatever is required to follow the path that can bring that ultimate desire about. At different stages of the path, your definition of your self will change, depending on the skills you have to develop at each stage of the path, but the ultimate desire remains constant.

The Buddha discovered that there is a path that leads to the total end of suffering: That’s the best thing to desire. So that’s the possibility you always have to keep in mind. Then he has you adopt a certain view of the world in which the actions of that path are possible and fruitful—so fruitful that they take you beyond the confines of the world. The view of the world that he teaches as right view is arranged around this possibility. This path also requires having a healthy sense of self who’s capable of following the path and who will benefit from following the path.

But then when you finally get to the end of the path, all those senses of self can be put aside. And you’ve gone beyond the world. As the Buddha said, there’s no need for any further becoming because you’ve found the ultimate happiness.

Now, it’s good to remember that the end of suffering is not a blank, dead space. It’s an awareness that’s totally sufficient in and of itself. It doesn’t need to depend on any object. And it’s a happiness so totally satisfying that there’s no need for any further desires. There’s no need to keep on fabricating the present moment—no need for any becoming, no need for any sense of self, no need to inhabit a world. As Ajaan Suwat once said, “When you experience the ultimate happiness, you have no more interest in knowing whether there’s a self experiencing it or not.” The experience of that happiness is totally complete.

Now, for those of us who haven’t gotten there yet, it’s what in English we call “a hard sell” because it’s unlike anything we’ve ever encountered anywhere before. Because we’re so used to building our dams and our lodges, we can’t see any happiness that doesn’t involve dams and lodges. This is why the Buddha has to convince us that this is a good thing. Part of the training he provides is to give us a new sense of possibilities. This involves training in becoming skillful in the three types of fabrication we mentioned earlier, so that we’ll know them well. That’s because the things you know best are the things that you’ve mastered as a skill.

You can see this in the way the Buddha teaches. He teaches you how to talk to yourself: where to direct your thoughts and how to evaluate things skillfully. And in his many similes, he teaches you what perceptions to hold in mind. He even teaches you how to breathe to give rise to skillful feelings of pleasure and equanimity in body and mind. In other words, he teaches you how to do all three kinds of fabrication in a skillful way.

This all comes together in the practice of concentration. You’re focused on your breath, which is a bodily fabrication. You’re talking to yourself about the breath, “Is it comfortable? Is it not? Is it too long? Too short? What can be done to make it more comfortable? Once it’s comfortable, what can I do to spread that comfortable sensation to the body? How can I make that more permanent?” All of that is verbal fabrication. Then there are the perceptions you hold in mind: How do you picture to yourself the way the breath flows in the body? And how do you maintain those feelings of pleasure? That’s mental fabrication.

This is one of the reasons why we read the suttas where the Buddha tells you how to talk to yourself and what perceptions to hold in mind. It’s so that we can have an expanded sense of what our possibilities are, of what kind of present moments we can create and how we can point it in the direction of the end of suffering.

That’s a general picture of the Buddha’s approach. We’ll go into more detail tomorrow evening. The main points to remember from tonight are the three fabrications, the teaching about becoming, and the three types of self that you have in that state of becoming: the agent, the consumer, and the commentator. Above all, remember that the Buddha has you adopt as an absolute the desire to put an end to suffering, and that everything else should be relative to that.

Keep these points in in mind and you’ll be well prepared for the rest of the retreat.