Conclusions

We chose to do a retreat on the topic of desire because there’s so much misunderstanding around this topic in Buddhist circles. Some people will tell you that the only way to gain awakening is not to want it. In fact, if you don’t want it strong enough, it’ll come. You might call that the power of negative thinking.

Actually, desire plays an important role on the path. As you remember, we do want to attain a state that has no desire at the end, but we can’t attain it by simply telling ourselves not to have any desires. Instead, we learn how to use skillful desires until we reach an attainment that doesn’t change, a happiness that’s total. At that point, there’s no need for desire because all our desires come from a sense of lack—and this has no sense of lack at all.

Remember what Ven. Sāriputta had to say when he was asked what to tell people when they asked, “What does the Buddha teach?” Sāriputta’s answer was, “Our teacher teaches the subduing of desire and passion.” Why is that? Because we suffer when things for which we have desire and passion change in ways that go against our desires. On top of that, we have many conflicting desires that pull us in contrary directions.

But then the next question was, “Why would the Buddha teach this?” Sāriputta’s answer was that we can stop suffering when we reach the end of desire and passion for the aggregates. That’s something worth desiring.

So, the Buddha’s not just describing things for the sake of painting a world view to impress people. He’s teaching out of compassion. He has a path of practice that leads to the end of suffering. This requires developing skills, and these skills in turn require that you desire to master them. This means you have to think strategically. In other words, you use desire to get to the end of desire.

Now, remember the Buddha’s strategy. The first step is to bring knowledge to the process of how desires are formed and judged, seeing how the mind is doing this all the time. The second step is to judge your desires against the best possible desire, which is the total end of suffering and stress. Sticking to this one overriding desire will ultimately be a source of unity within the heart because you’re no longer pulled in opposing directions by your desires. The third step requires that you observe the mind in action. In other words, you’re not just dealing in abstractions. You have to watch the mind as it actually forms and judges its desires. Now, the mind is best observed when it’s learning to do something good for the mind in a state of stillness, mastering the skills of mindfulness and concentration. So you use desires to master these skills, combatting any other contrary desires, and then ultimately you have to abandon skillful desires, too.

In confronting unskillful desires, you need a strong healthy sense of self, because there will be some conflict in the mind. When there’s conflict between desires, your sense of self comes to the fore, as you have to choose which desires to identify with. This is especially the case as you’re beginning with the skills of the path. The desires that go against the path are still strong, and you’ve identified with them many times in the past. So you have to make a deliberate point of switching your allegiances, identifying with the desires that will help you along the way and deliberately not identifying with contrary desires. This is how perceptions of self and not-self are used on this stage of the path. You apply the perception of self to the things that keep you on the path, and not-self to the things that would pull you away.

As your skills develop and grow strong, the conflict grows less, and your sense of self doesn’t meet up with so much opposition, so it comes less into consciousness. This allows you to focus directly on actions in and of themselves. You find that the idea of self is also an action: You use it when it’s skillful and you let it go when it’s not.

During this retreat, we’ve considered several of the Buddha’s teachings on how to master this approach. They come down to two sorts. One is a set of values and the other is a set of techniques. The values come from the four determinations: discernment, truth, relinquishment, and calm. This set of values also gets expressed in the six objects of delight: delight in the Dhamma, delight in developing, delight in abandoning, delight in seclusion, the unafflicted, and no conflict.

These two sets of values are closely related.

Now, there’s an unusual dynamic in these determinations. They are aspects of the goal to which we aspire and they’re also the means by which we get there. In both cases, we practice for the sake of truth and calm. In terms of the means, the Buddha says, “Don’t neglect discernment,” which means always keep the long-term consequences of your actions in the mind. Second, “Guard the truth,” which means to be very clear to yourself about where your ideas and your beliefs come from. Third and fourth, “Be committed to relinquishment” and “Train only for calm.” Note that even on the level of means, calm is stated as a purpose.

When the determinations are expressed as goals or ends, we find that the four are divided in another way. Truth and calm are attributes of nibbāna, whereas the highest forms of discernment and relinquishment occur immediately before the experience of the deathless and then fall away. So truth and calm are our overriding values. That’s what we’re practicing for: so that truth and calm become true attributes of our own hearts and minds. Those are the values.

As for the techniques, we master the four bases for success and the noble eightfold path within the framework of these determinations. Maintaining this framework is what makes these strategies skillful. In other words, you can apply the bases for success to any project, good or bad, and as you may have heard, you can even use mindfulness to rob a bank. But when you’re ardent in actually devoting these techniques to the ideals of calm and truth, then the techniques become skillful.

To stay on the noble path, you use the Buddha’s five-step program to keep you on course. In other words, if anything comes up to pull you off the path, you look for its origination. Then you look to see how it passes away. You try to find its allure, and then you compare that allure with the drawbacks. When you’re true to yourself—when you actually see what the allure is, and that it’s basically lying to you—that’s when you develop dispassion for it. That’s how you escape, freeing yourself from whatever unskillful qualities arise in the mind.

You use these five steps as you try to make your concentration more calm and true. The Buddha describes how this is done, basically saying that you get the mind into a state as still as you can. Then after you’ve enjoyed it for a while, if you see any disturbance, you let it go, and the mind goes into a deeper state of calm. You appreciate your sense of emptiness from that previous disturbance, and then you look to see if there’s any remaining subtler disturbance. You see the drawbacks of that disturbance, develop dispassion for its cause, and then escape from it. This, by the way, is how the Buddha uses the concept of emptiness in concentration practice: You try to get the mind empty of disturbance step by step in this way. In other words, you apply the five-step program to imperfections in the path to make it empty of imperfections.

Then, as you approach the end of the path, the Buddha has you apply the five-step program to all five faculties: the faculties of conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. These are another way of expressing the noble eightfold path. For example, you look at your concentration. You’ve become sensitive to how it originates and how it passes away. You’ve come to appreciate its allure in the sense that it gives a great sense of peace and well-being. But now you begin to focus on its drawbacks. It’s at this point when you can get a strong sense of dispassion for it because of its drawbacks.

Of course, the drawbacks have to do with the fact that it’s fabricated and so you have to keep working at it to maintain it. The mind develops dispassion for that. It wants to find a happiness that doesn’t need to be maintained, so it truly inclines to the unfabricated happiness of the deathless. That’s how it escapes even from the path.

This cost-benefit analysis, you might call it, is done in light of the third noble truth, accepting the possibility that there is something better than concentration and that an unfabricated happiness is possible.

In other words, if you think that concentration is the best thing possible, you’re not going to let it go. But if you take the Buddha seriously when he says there’s something better, then you’re more open to the idea that it’s better at that point to let go.

This process applies to all the factors of the path. Right view is another example. Right view says that anything that’s fabricated is inconstant, anything inconstant is stressful, so it should be let go. You use this view as a working hypothesis to let go of all your attachments to other things. But then you finally realize that right view itself is fabricated. It, too, is inconstant and stressful, so it, too, has to be let go. You develop dispassion for it and are freed from it.

Now, to go through this process requires that you see dispassion as a good thing. As we noted earlier, it’s not a state of dull resignation. It’s more a sense of developing maturity, as when you’ve outgrown tic-tac-toe because it no longer captures your interest. You realize that dispassion leads to greater freedom, greater happiness. At this point, you relinquish all fabrications—because you see that they’re deceptive disturbances—in favor of what’s undeceptive and truly peaceful.

You come to a basic level of verbal and mental fabrications in the mind. These are the fabrications that keep the present moment going and also maintain your sense of self. You start asking yourself, “Who’s talking to whom in here? Who is signaling messages to whom? Why?” These fabrications seem pointless. When they seem pointless, you let them go. With no fabrications, the present moment has nothing to shape it, so it falls away.

At the same time, all three of your senses of self—the self as the agent, the consumer, and the commentator—fall away as well. You see for yourself that there’s a dimension of consciousness that doesn’t require fabrication. It’s beyond the aggregates. It’s beyond the six senses. It’s ultimate happiness and total freedom.

The remainder of your life is lived, then, in the light of knowing that that’s the case.

Now, this may seem far away, but you can still benefit by applying the Buddha’s approach to your life even if you don’t go that far. There’s a lot to be gained by focusing on your actions, because these things are really yours.

Ajaan Suwat, toward the end of his life, had a bad car accident in which he sustained a lot of brain damage. From that point on, he wasn’t able to give long Dhamma talks, so he would focus on the things that were really, really important. One of the points he would make again and again was that even though the Buddha says so many things are not-self, our actions are ours. In the Pāli, it’s “Kammassako’mhi: I am the owner of my actions.” Then he would add, “Focus on what’s genuinely yours. Take care of your responsibility first, because the world can’t do these things for you.”

This morning I was talking with Dhruv, and he said, “The people are beginning to talk. They’re heading back to reality.” And I said, “No, no, no, no. They’ll just go back to a different world. They’re going back to a world that basically says, ‘Take care of what we want you to do. As for what are really your true needs, we don’t even want to talk about those.’” The world tells you that what other people are doing someplace else is the most important thing to know. But the Buddha is basically saying that what you’re doing right now is the most important thing in your life.

Here we come to another teaching that Ajaan Suwat would repeat frequently toward the end of his life, which is to take refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Saṅgha. The question is, “What does that mean?” It doesn’t mean the Buddha’s going to come down and protect you from our political leaders. What it means is that you take the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Saṅgha as your examples. They found true happiness, and if you develop their qualities in your mind and in your actions, you’ll find true happiness, too. These qualities include wisdom, compassion, purity, virtue, concentration, discernment. These are your protections. Politicians can still hurt you physically and economically, but they can’t hurt anything that’s of real value within you.

These principles were true in the time of the Buddha and they’re still true today, no matter what the rest of the world tells you, even if it tells you that it is the true reality. True reality, genuinely true reality, is basically the principle of your actions and their results. So do your best to make your actions skillful.

This means that there’s a lot to be gained by,

This is training in observing the mind in action through commitment and reflection. In other words, you don’t just watch the mind, willy-nilly doing whatever its moods may dictate. You’re trying to master a skill, and especially the skills of mindfulness and concentration. You commit yourself to these practices and then develop what’s called metacognition by observing and observing to see how you can do them better and better. That’s in the area of skill and technique.

As for establishing priorities among your desires, that’s a matter of values. Expect your values to become more mature as you develop the skills of self-observation such as mindfulness and concentration. The more pleasure you can find in concentration, the easier it is to say No to unskillful desires, both because you have something better to compare them with and because you’ll be able to recognize them as unskillful on your own, without the Buddha’s having to tell you.

Now, don’t think of yourself as taking on the whole world alone. As the Buddha said, a lot of the practice depends on developing what he calls admirable friendship, which means finding the people who are characterized by four qualities.

As you stay with these people, it helps to reinforce these values within yourself. But as the Buddha said, you don’t just hang around people like that. If you find that there are people with conviction, you try to emulate their conviction. If you have trouble doing that, you can ask them, “How do you do this?” The same with virtue, generosity, and discernment. In other words, admirable friendship doesn’t mean just having admirable friends. It means learning how to develop their qualities within yourself, so that you become your own admirable friend.

It’s now up to us how much we want to borrow the Buddha’s wisdom for the sake of lessening or even better, eliminating the sufferings of our lives. Try not to sell yourself short. Don’t let your old ideas of your limitations get in the way. You’ll benefit by following the path even partway, but you’ll benefit even more if you follow it as far as you can. As we said the other night, learn to find delight in developing and abandoning. You have the potential strengths within you to overcome the mind states that would hold you in slavery: qualities like greed, aversion, and delusion. Learn to enjoy the struggle. Be up to the challenge of finding those potentials and making them a reality.

The Buddha’s goal may seem daunting, but remember that it was taught by a human being, and it was taught specifically to human beings. The path doesn’t lie beyond human capabilities. You’re a human being. The whole path is intended for you.

(Meditation)

The last time I saw Ajaan Suwat was just a few months before he died. He complained that his brain was sending him strange perceptions. I took that as a good sign, that he still retained his powers of mindfulness in that he recognized the perceptions as strange. But then he said something really important. He said, “But that thing I got through my practice, that hasn’t changed.” That thing, of course, would be something that is not affected by illness or the death of the body. Nothing in the world can affect it. So that possibility is there: that there is something valuable inside you that no one else in the world can know about, and nothing in the world can take away.