When Attacked by Distractions

As we’re meditating here, it’s like walking down a path. We want to get to the end of the path, but the problem is there are things on the side of the path that are very interesting. So we stop and look, sometimes sitting down, sometimes wandering off into the underbrush. It takes a while for us to get back. If we spend the hour surveying the land on either side of the path, we never get anywhere. We’ve got to make up our minds: We’re going to stay right here with the breath. Whatever comes up along the side, you’ve got to realize that “This is not where I want to go. This is not what we’re here for.”

You want to be an adult about this. When an adult has a place to go, the adult usually goes there. Children tend to wander around, get easily distracted, forget what they’re doing, what they were supposed to be doing. So you want to be an adult meditator.

Now, sometimes animals will come off from the side of the path to attack you, and you’ve got to learn how to fend them off—in other words, your distractions. But all too often a distraction comes and we don’t see that it’s a vicious animal. We see it as something really nice. We want to get involved. Then it bites us, and we think that it’s just playing. So it bites us again. We never seem to have enough of this.

When distractions come up in the course of the meditation, you want to be able to fend them off as quickly as possible. Learn how to see that they really aren’t worth getting involved with. In other words, you want to learn how to develop some dispassion for them. Now, sometimes it’s easy enough, as soon as you’ve wandered off, to realize, “Okay, this is not where I want to go,” and you can come back. But other times, you start wandering off and it gets really interesting, which is where you’ll have to learn how to cut through things.

If an insight comes up in the course of the meditation, ask yourself, “Does this apply to what I’m doing right now?” If it’s an insight about a situation at work or your childhood or something in your family, just put it aside. If it’s really worthwhile, if it’s really helpful, it’ll stick there in the mind. You’ll find that you have it in your pocket when you get to the end of the path, so you don’t have to worry about carrying it or trying to memorize it. If it’s worthwhile, it’ll follow you there.

The problem is that even if it’s not directly related, we tend to really want to get involved. This is something we find really interesting, these distractions. Sometimes what we think is an insight is the most distracting of all. Then, of course, there are the things that are obviously not insights, but they’re lots of fun to think about. This is why the Buddha has you think of these things in terms of what’s going into this preoccupation you’ve got here, what’s so attractive about it. There are basically five questions you ask, the two most important being, “What’s attractive about it? And also what are its drawbacks?” The purpose of that is to see that the drawbacks really aren’t worth it.

This is the Buddha’s main strategy for dealing with distractions, any kind of attachment. He never talks about things as being empty, aside from being empty of self in a way that it’s meant to make you feel dispassionate for whatever it is. It’s not really yours, so why are you holding on to it? That old idea that things are intrinsically empty or intrinsically interconnected or whatever because they’re based on causes is not enough to cut through your attachments. The reason you hold on to certain things is not because you think they have an own-nature or a self-nature, it’s because you think you can get enough pleasure out of them to reward the amount of effort that goes into them. That’s what you’ve got to learn how to see through.

We’re so bad at calculating that usually. It’s like those billboards on the way to Las Vegas when they announce that they give a 97% payback rate. They’re basically telling you, “You give us a dollar, we’ll give you 97 cents back—if you’re lucky.” And yet people still go to Las Vegas. On Friday nights, the highways are just choked with cars. That’s the way most of us are about our pleasures, sensual pleasures, number one. They don’t even promise a 97% payback rate and yet we still go for them.

You’ve got to look at what the Buddha calls the mental fabrications that go into sensuality. What are the feeling tones and perceptions you’re holding in mind that make this kind of thinking attractive? The same applies to anger, the same applies to whatever thoughts you find addictive: What perceptions do you hold in mind? The Buddha offers a few alternative perceptions, say, for sensual desire, to help you see through its allure. He says it’s like a drop of honey on a knife blade. You try to lick it off and you can get cut. It’s like bones they throw to a dog. There’s no nourishment there, you’re just gnawing, gnawing, gnawing away. As Ajaan Lee says, all you get is a taste of your own saliva.

Ajaan Lee has a nice added image on this. He says if you think about sensual pleasures from yesterday, it’s like licking yesterday’s soup pot. There’s not a drop of soup left. If you think about sensual pleasures you’re going to have tomorrow, it’s like licking a pot that doesn’t have anything in it yet. The Buddha says sensual desire is like a hawk that has a piece of meat. All the other hawks and crows—as we’ve seen around here, with the crows ganging up and attacking the hawks—will try to get it away from you, and they can wound you in the process. Sensual desire is like a dream. It’s like borrowed goods: You go around showing it off, but if the owners ever see you showing it off, they’re going to take it back. There’s a whole series of perceptions that you can apply here.

If you find yourself going back again and again and again, you can think of that perception of the horse. As the Buddha said, there are five kinds of horses. There’s one kind of horse where all you have to do is say, “whip,” and it’ll do what you want it to do. With others, you have to actually show them the whip. The third group you have to touch on their skin with the whip. The fourth group you have to dig a little bit into the flesh with the whip before they’ll go. The worst ones are the ones that have to have the whip go all the way into the bone before they respond. Ask yourself: Which kind of horse do you want to be? It’s your choice.

Bring these perceptions to mind and see which other perceptions that are already there will object to them. All too often when we have thoughts like this, we think we’re actually getting something out of them, but the Buddha’s making the point that you’re not getting much at all. And there’s a lot of danger that goes along with them.

All the more so with anger. Anger can get very self-righteous. Whoever you’re angry at really did something really bad, and you can document it. But as the Buddha said, if you focus on another person’s bad qualities, it’s as if you’re going across a desert, you’re hot, you’re tired, you’re thirsty, and you come across a little puddle of water in a cow’s footprint. If you spend your time focusing on the mud around it, you’re never going to get the water.

In other words, our main perception there should be that you’re willing to slurp the water up from the cow’s footprint because you need the water, even though you have to get down on all fours to slurp it up. You probably wouldn’t want anybody to take a picture of you in that position, but it’s necessary. In the same way, you do what’s necessary to nurture your own goodness.

The important part of that perception is that you’re hot, tired, and thirsty. All too often, when we’re thinking in terms of anger, we think of ourselves as a judge sitting up on a high tribunal, and the person we’re angry at is way down there on the floor below us. We don’t feel that we’re being affected in any way by how we pass judgment on that person. But the Buddha says it has a huge impact on you. The more that you focus on the negatives, negatives, negatives around you, the more you’re going to be thirsty. Your goodness is going to die.

All of this is related to the fact that, as the Buddha said, our minds are shaped by perception. So you want to dig around and see what those perceptions are. And one of the best ways to do that is to offer some alternative perceptions. The ones that have been in charge will dislike them, will feel challenged, and they actually may come to the surface. So you can see, “Oh, this is what’s holding me back. This is what’s holding me there.”

Now, if you find that applying this kind of thinking helps, and you really are understanding things, okay, drop the breath for a bit and focus on this. Although you can also find that using the breath to deal with whatever has got you distracted can be helpful. In other words, there’s probably some dis-ease someplace in the body. It may be very subtle. It makes you want to go out and look for something else. See how you can breathe to help work through that dis-ease, so that you have something better to compare things with. You see you have this level of stillness, you have this level of calm, this level of well-being, but then you’re going to throw it away. For what? A lump of flesh, a drop of honey on the edge of a knife, a mirage, a dream? Those things don’t just come floating in. It takes energy to think about these things. Is the energy well spent?

That’s the basic perception that the Buddha is trying to have you induce, that these things just aren’t worth it. Sometimes you have to work through this fairly systematically before the mind is willing to agree. But once it’s worked for you, it really does. It really does dig things up, for the time being at least. You’ll find it goes quicker and quicker the next time, until you run into a problem that’s slightly different. It’s going to require a different perception, but the basic process is always the same. You want to see how these things are not worth the effort.

Sometimes you may be discouraged. Your meditation is not settling down as quickly as you’d like it to, and you want to go off and have a little pleasure hit. But you come back and you’re worse off than you were before. In other words, even though your meditation is not going well, stick with it. Some people say, “Oh, my meditation isn’t going well tonight. I’d better stop.” No, that’s the time to keep at it, to figure out what’s going wrong.

What is it like to be sitting with a mind that’s thinking about all kinds of things all at once? Learn how to step back and observe that a bit. See what’s going on in terms of the breath, in terms of what you’re saying to yourself, in terms of your feelings or perceptions—all these things that the Buddha calls fabrication. Maybe only a little bit of insight will come, only a bit of stillness will come, but that’s better than giving up entirely.

So remember, the mind is always weighing things. There’s a part of it that’s always saying, “Am I getting what I want? Is this worth the effort?” A large part of meditation is learning how to be more objective and be more clear-seeing about, “Is it worth it?” This applies to greed, aversion, delusion, all the defilements that would pull you away—sleepiness, restlessness, and anxiety. We have ways of justifying these things to ourselves, and you’ve got to learn how to question that.

There are some old habitual ways of doing things that we’re really attached to because they’re habitual and we find that we can do them easily. The meditation is hard. There’s a tendency to want to slip back to something you can do easily, but you’ve been doing these things all along. What have you gotten out of them?

Ajaan Suwat used to like to ask, “The sensual pleasures you had last week, where are they now?” They’re gone. Were they totally free? No. There’s an awful lot you had to put into them. So you take that and compare it with the pleasure of a skill that you’ve mastered, where you can focus in on the breath and have a sense of well-being. Your way of calculating effort and the results of your effort will be measured against a much better standard.