The Allure of Sensuality

Years back, I was reading an article about a man who had started investing in the stock market in the 1950s. He had asked for some advice from someone who knew the market: “What would be a good stock to invest in and not have to worry about selling or buying, just sticking with the stock and reaping the dividends?” The friend said, “Choose a company that produces a product that everybody knows is bad for them, but they buy it anyhow.” So the writer invested in tobacco stocks, and sure enough, tobacco stocks kept going up and up and up. No matter what was said about how cigarettes caused cancer, or the deceptions of the tobacco industry, the stocks just kept climbing.

This shows the perverseness of the human mind. All too often, the things we know are bad for us are the things we’re most attached to because we think we’re getting something out of them that compensates for the bad effects they can cause. This is why the Buddha’s analysis of the things we’re trying to get past in the practice includes not only seeing their drawbacks but also seeing their allure: what is it that pulls us to them.

While we’re working here on concentration, one of the prerequisites for concentration is that you put aside sensuality and get your mind secluded from sensual thoughts. This doesn’t mean that you’re secluded from sensual pleasures. The pleasures themselves are not the problem. The problem is the fact that the mind keeps thinking about these things and planning how it would like this, how it would like that, whatever the pleasure may be.

It’s like thinking of fixing your food. You’ve got a fish or a vegetable, and you ask yourself: “How could I fix it?” You can think about this sort of thing for hours. It’s the same with our pleasures concerning other people or other things. We can imagine all kinds of different recipes or scenarios, and the mind take real pleasure around that.

As the Buddha says, we’re attached to this kind of pleasure because we don’t see any other alternative to pain—which is one of the reasons why we try to get the mind into concentration: to give it that other alternative that has a lot fewer drawbacks. The problem with sensuality, though, is that we think we’re powerful and clever because we can get the sensual pleasures we want. That’s a lot of the allure right there: our image of ourselves.

They’ve discovered in advertising that if they put a person in the advertisement with whom the people they’re aiming at can identify and yet at the same time admire—someone who’s better looking, wealthier, or whatever, more than we are—and we’ll try to identify with them. We’ll think that “If I buy that product, I’ll be like that person in the advertisement.”

So, all too often, the pleasures themselves are not what we’re after, we’re after an image of ourselves as the purveyor and consumer of those pleasures. But then as we really look: What is it for the mind to be enslaved to a pleasure like that? The people who are trying to get your money, they don’t respect you. All too often, the people you look for to buy you the pleasures, they don’t respect you. And as I was saying earlier this afternoon, when you’re dependent on a particular kind of sensual pleasure, it puts you in a position of real weakness. Part of you may say, “I can do without it,” but then there’s the other part that really hankers after it and will do anything at all to get it. You’ll suddenly find yourself doing things you otherwise wouldn’t have imagined doing.

This is why it is good to look at the allure and at the drawbacks to see how false and hollow the allure is, what a liar you are to yourself. That’s when you finally decide, Yes: You’ve been lying to yourself and you’ve been stupid enough to believe these lies. That’s when you can begin to get beyond this and a sense of saṁvega comes in: “I’ve been such a fool for so long.” You really have to work on that. Do what you can to develop that, because that’s what’s going to get you out.

In one of Ajaan Lee’s early writings, he talks about the need to develop a sense of saṁvega to get in the mind into concentration. This is one of the areas where it is really important to get the mind secluded from sensuality, secluded from unskillful mental qualities. You’ve got to see the drawbacks of those things and you’ve got to see that you’ve been complicit in a lie, complicit in a cover-up, and you realize how foolishly you’ve acted.

But there is a sense that you were identifying with an image of yourself as being pretty cool to get those pleasures, or to simply want those pleasures to begin with. People can be very attached to their views about themselves based on the pleasures they like, their tastes in sensuality. They can see themselves as very distinct from people whose tastes in sensuality is just the least bit different. But it all comes down to the same thing: You are a prisoner, you’re a slave, running after the least little thing. When a part of the mind says, “Enough,” that’s your way out.

Then you try to bring your mind to the pleasure of just inhabiting your body. At first it doesn’t have a lot of the delights and self-images around it that make those other pleasures enticing. But those pleasures need that sense of self-image, which is why one of the Buddha’s main ways of dealing with sensuality is to get us to look at the things we’re actually hankering for and take them apart, look at them very carefully. Look at the parts you ordinarily wouldn’t want to look at, the parts that you’ve got to be in such denial about. The stronger your attachment, the more you’ve got to look at those negative sides. Then you realize that the reason you didn’t see those negative sides was because that image you had—the allure—blinded you.

Meanwhile, the pleasure of concentration doesn’t need all that advertisement, doesn’t need all those lures. It’s simple, it’s basic, it’s right here. Still, you need to develop a taste for it. It’s when you appreciate it as being something really safe that you begin to develop a taste for it. Then, as you get to know it better, you realize that it’s not only safe, but it also has a more intense and more solid sense of well-being. After all, what is the well-being we get out of sensual pleasures? It’s a little bit, right there where the mind can rest in the image or in the sensation, but it can’t stay very long. This means it has to go searching again—and searching again. Yet here, by just being with the breath, you can maintain the sense of well-being for longer and longer times.

You’ll find that the effect that this kind of pleasure has on the mind is very different. It’s soothing, it’s calming, it’s solidifying, as opposed to the kind of pleasures that we get from what Ajaan Fuang used to call, “fresh hot defilements.” There’s a little bit of a moment where the mind can rest with a sense of itself or with a pleasure, and then it gets aggravated, and wants that again, has to find it again. There’s a part of the mind that will be willing to do almost anything, and there are parts of the mind that will do anything, to get that pleasure back—which is why you can’t trust it.

But the pleasure of concentration makes the mind much more trustworthy because you know you’ve got something good right here that doesn’t require situations outside to be just so. It doesn’t impose your ideas of what you want on other people.

Think of that image the Buddha had of everything in the world being already laid claim to. If you want to get any happiness, you’re going to have to take things away from somebody else. Of course, other people come along and they see what you’ve got and they’ll take that away from you, too. But nobody can take your concentration away from you. They can’t come moving in and take your breath and elbow you out. The one thing that can do that is your greed, aversion, and delusion. You may ask yourself, “Why do I keep siding with those?”

Think of that image in the Dhamma summaries, about the world being a slave to craving. That goes together with an image in the sutta it’s drawn from. It’s about a king who’s got everything he really needs, he’s eighty years old, he’s about ready to die. And he says, if somebody came by and said that there was another kingdom that he could conquer and get all the wealth that he might want, he’d go out and conquer it, even if it were on the other side of the sea. Think of how ridiculous that is. That’s what sensuality is like. It’ll go for anything.

Years back, we were having our evening sweet drink at Wat Asokaram after the afternoon chanting session. A couple came walking by—a tiny, tiny Thai woman and a huge big Westerner—and one of the old monks shook his head and said, “Craving knows no bounds.” That’s what you’re taking as your companion when you start going for sensualities: something that knows no bounds at all, something whose tastes are totally arbitrary as to what you might decide the pleasure is going to be today or the pleasure tomorrow. Eventually we develop a real hankering for it, and then it does become the case that you will do anything at all, even when you know it’s bad for you to try to get that pleasure—and that’s scary, because it means that the mind is totally heedless at that point.

So the Buddha’s question always is, “Do you really love yourself? Do you really care for yourself?” If so, why don’t you look after yourself? Why don’t you protect yourself from these false friends? After all, if sensuality were such a good thing, why is it that divorce court is the most violent court in the system? A couple of have been having sex and then one of them betrays the other one. Why does the other one feel so horribly betrayed? It’s because their image of themselves, the image of their relationship, is suddenly destroyed, and that’s what they were actually holding on to more than anything else, to compensate for the degradations of their sensuality.

So, look into your self-image in the pleasures you go for. Try to see where you’re lying to yourself, the way you have of dressing things up in order to make them appealing, and then look at this pleasure that the Buddha offers that doesn’t require dressing up, doesn’t involve any bad kamma at all. No bad consequences, now or into the future. That’s when you see that you’ve been acting very foolishly in not going for the Buddha’s pleasure. That’s when you begin to grow up and really take your happiness seriously—so that no investor can make any money off you at all.