Sensual Desire & Ill Will

Two days ago, we were talking about how to deal with distractions that can get in the way of establishing mindfulness and getting the mind in concentration. We noted the Buddha’s five strategies for dealing with distractions in general:

We also noted though that in addition to these general strategies, the Buddha taught specific techniques for dealing with the specific distractions that most often get in the way of concentration. These distractions are called hindrances, and there are five types: sensual desire, ill will, sloth and drowsiness, restlessness and anxiety, and doubt.

Today, I’d like to talk about some of the specific strategies for dealing with the first two of these five hindrances: sensual desire and ill will. You’ll notice that most of these techniques are applications of the first two of the Buddha’s main strategies, focusing on the drawbacks of the hindrances and then replacing them with better topics to focus on. We focus on their drawbacks so that we’ll actively want to overcome them. Only when there’s this desire will the various strategies work. If you like your hindrances, you’ll probably sabotage whatever strategies the Buddha recommends for overcoming them. But if you want to get past them because you see how they place limitations on your mind, then the strategies will have a chance.

It’s important to note that when we try to overcome these hindrances, we’re not trying to uproot them once and for all. So don’t worry. We’re not trying to get you to renounce sensuality and ill will once and for all by the end of the day. We’re here simply trying to get into concentration and stay there, so our immediate aims are more modest. We’re just trying to clear the hindrances out of the way temporarily, so that we can have some space in the mind to establish mindfulness and concentration.

The contemplations here are meant to make you want to get past these hindrances. For many people, that’s quite an accomplishment right there, because there are voices in the mind that want to enjoy sensual desire or ill will or anger. So our main focus here is to get you to see that it would be good to get past these hindrances at least for the time being.

A lot of the contemplations here will focus on the drawbacks of the hindrances, so that you can begin to abandon your allegiance to them and be more true in your allegiance to the voices in the mind that want to settle down and find some inner peace.

In focusing on the drawbacks of these hindrances, the Buddha also brings in another strategy: trying to locate their allure—what it is about them that part of your mind finds attractive. If you can’t see the allure clearly, then no matter how much you can focus on the drawbacks, you’ll still fall for the allure when your resolve weakens. The allure likes to lurk in the secret parts of your mind. It exercises its power with a whispering campaign. Only when you can locate the allure and see how stupid it is will you be able to resist it.

• For instance, with sensual desire: When talking about sensuality, the Buddha means not so much sensual pleasures as it means our fascination with thinking about them, planning them, remembering them. That’s what you’re really addicted to. And that’s what destroys right concentration. How long does it take to eat a pizza? Not long. But you think about pizza for hours. The same with sex: It doesn’t take that long, but we’re so used to seeing these fantasies as attractive that we take them for granted and can spend hours with them.

So the Buddha provides some strong medicine to call the allure into question. His basic strategy is to focus first on the unattractive side of the object of our sensual fantasies, and then on the unattractive side of our desire to fantasize itself.

With food he has you contemplate the more unattractive side of what you’re eating. He starts with where it comes from. It comes from the soil, the flesh of dead animals. Or with cheese, it’s the glandular secretions of goats, cows, and sheep.

Then he has you think about what happens to it when it goes into your mouth and when it comes out the other end. Our body is strange. It cannot absorb nourishment directly from the delicious food on the plate. It has to transform it with its digestive juices into something that we would never put into our mouths. Yet only then can it absorb it in the dark tunnels of your digestive system.

When you’ve thought about that, then you can think about all the things we tend to do to satisfy our fantasies about how food should taste and the lengths we go to in order to satisfy our fantasies. And then it all goes down the toilet.

The same with our fascination with the human body, the extent to which we feel pride over our body or lust for another body. The Buddha has us contemplate what’s inside the body: all its various organs. He has you imagine taking them out of the body, as you would take rice or beans out of a sack, and contemplate them one by one until you can see that there’s nothing really worth feeling pride or lust about.

For example, if we all took our livers out and put them on the stage in front of us here, no one would be interested in seeing who had the prettiest liver. So why is it that we can visualize this and yet so easily forget it and start feeling pride and lust all over again? It’s because we want to feel the lust and we want to feel the pride. This is where you have to look at your desire for sensual fantasies and see that it, too, is unattractive.

The Buddha gives many analogies here. Sensual fantasies are like a dog chewing on a bone without any meat. It gets no nourishment and—as Ajaan Lee liked to point out—the only taste it gets is the taste of its own saliva.

Sensual fantasies are like a dream. When you wake up, the beautiful things you saw in the dream are gone.

At the same time, when you act on your sensual fantasies, you’re putting yourself in danger. You’re like a hawk with a piece of meat. Other hawks and ravens will follow you and try to tear it away from you, even to the point of killing you. To satisfy those fantasies requires the cooperation of other people, which they can withdraw at any time. The Buddha gives the analogy of a man who’s borrowed a chariot and ornaments from other people and goes around displaying them as if they were his own. If the owners see him, they can take those things back at any time, and the man has no grounds to complain.

Now, the mind resists this kind of contemplation, but that’s precisely where you’ve got to look: where it resists. What is it trying to protect as it resists this? That’s where you’ll find the allure. And you know that the allure will have to be something fleeting and basically stupid or childish. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have to protect it and conceal it so much.

Sometimes the allure is in the image you have of yourself as you think of sensual pleasure: the role you play in that fantasy or the very fact that you can fantasize, the pride that you can have in the thought, “I can think of all kinds of sensual pleasures,” the pride in yourself in being discerning in your choice of pleasures or the power of your imagination to imagine new sensual pleasures.

But is it worth all the suffering it entails? If this were all the world has to offer, you could argue that it would have to be worth it. But the Buddha’s offering us something much better. So why don’t you give his teachings a try?

When you can think in this way, you might be willing to attack things right at the allure. If you’re engaging in a fantasy, try to do what the psychologists call “poisoning the fantasy.” If the allure is in the pride, try to think of someone in the fantasy secretly despising you. Or if you’re fantasizing about food: You’re going to a one-Michelin-star restaurant. It turns out that the chef wanted three stars, so for revenge in not getting the rating he wanted, he’s become unhinged. He’s putting garbage in the food and then disguising it with spices and herbs.

They tell a story of the period after World War II in Japan. The Americans occupation forces would go to Japanese restaurants, and the Japanese chefs would put human excrement in the food and then disguise it with spices and offer it to the Americans.

These are some of the ways of thinking yourself out of your sensual desires. If you can laugh at your sensual fantasies, that will get you out of them at least long enough for the mind to return to concentration.

• As for ill will, the Buddha employs many strategies for getting rid of it. Ill will is not simple anger. It’s the anger that comes with a desire to see somebody suffer. We can often dress up our ill will by telling ourselves that it’s justified, that the person has really done something bad and deserves to suffer for it. Then justice can be done.

So here the Buddha has you question both your anger and your ideas of justice.

With the anger, he first points out that you tend to do stupid things when you’re angry. The mind gets tunnel vision, and what looks right when you’re angry often harms you. When the anger goes, the range of your vision widens and you see the harm that you’ve done. Yet no amount of regret can go back and undo that harm. So in the midst of anger, you have to develop some mindfulness. Remember the stupid things you’ve done under the force of anger in the past. Then restrain yourself from doing or saying anything until you can get your anger under control. This way, you see that it’s in your own best interest to try to overcome your anger so that you can think clearly about the situation and come up with an effective response. Then you’re ready to look more objectively at the situation in ways that can calm the anger down.

One way is to look at the good things that that other person has done in the past. The Buddha has an image that you can try to use in this case. You’re going through the desert. You’re hot, tired, trembling with thirst. You come across a cow’s footprint with a little bit of water in it. You realize if you tried to scoop up the water with your hand, you’d make it muddy. So you have to get down on all fours and slurp up the water. You wouldn’t want anyone to come along and take a picture of you at that point and put it on Facebook or Instagram, but you realize this is what you have to do. Don’t let your pride get in the way of your nourishment.

In the same way, if you’re angry at somebody, you might think that it’s demeaning to think of their good traits. But you remember you have to need their goodness because when you can’t see the goodness of other people, it’s very hard for you to encourage goodness within yourself.

So you need the water of other people’s goodness to nourish the water of your own goodness. Otherwise, you find yourself mistreating them very easily.

If you can’t see anything good about the other person, then you have to feel compassion for him. He’s creating a lot of bad kamma, but his bad kamma is not going to pull you down into hell. It’ll pull you down only if you mistreat him. The image the Buddha gives here is going through the desert and finding a sick person on the side of the road. No matter who the person is or what the person has done, you feel compassion.

As for your sense of justice, ideas of justice work only if you know the beginning and the end of the story. Then you can tally up who did what, who was the first to misbehave or to overreact to the actions of the other party. Your ability to tally up an accurate score is what makes you feel that your ideas about justice are objective. But in the world of rebirth, where we’re constantly changing roles as we go from one life to another, where did the story begin? Any score that you might keep is only partial.

In a case like this, the Buddha says the only way out of the samsaric mudslinging is to forgive the other person and extend him goodwill. You don’t have to love the other person. Just decide that you’re not going to harm him. That’s the only way that these things will end.

Then you have to look for the allure of the anger. One, it gives you a sense of power. Sometimes you feel that it frees you from inhibitions. But you have to remember that when you’re angry, as I said, you get tunnel vision, so you don’t really see the picture clearly. You lose your sense of shame and compunction. The allure of ill will is in the belief that your sense of justice is objective. But when you can see that the allure is lying to you, and that you can actually think more clearly and effectively when you’re not angry, you’ll be more willing to stop identifying with the anger and actually want to get past it.

As I said earlier, these approaches are not meant for you to give up sensuality or ill will once and for all. If you think you’re being asked to do that, part of the mind will rebel. You’re simply being asked to put these emotions down for the time being, and give your desire for mental calm and concentration a chance to succeed. When you become more and more a master of your concentration, the pleasure and sense of inner well-being will affect a change in your mind. And you’ll look more favorably at any contemplation that can enable you to experience greater freedom and peace.