Dispassion Isn’t Oatmeal

We sit here trying to get the mind quiet, to settle down with one thing, to gain some tranquility. We all have our different reasons for doing this, but the Buddha says that one of the goals of tranquility is dispassion. In fact, he says the highest dhamma, whether fabricated or unfabricated, is dispassion.

Ajaan Lee talks about how the moment of dispassion — when fabricated and unfabricated dhammas fall away from each other — is the highest possible experience. Yet it just doesn’t sound attractive to a lot of us. We think that life without passion would be oatmeal without any flavoring.

But that’s the whole point.

Our experience of the six senses is, on its own, pretty much oatmeal. The joy we get out of it is what we add. Either we add sweet things, and keep varying the sweets, or we decide we’ll try salty oatmeal, adding ginger and garlic. But either way, the oatmeal needs something, and that’s what we provide. Without it, life would be pretty tasteless.

What the Buddha is saying is that there’s something that doesn’t need the salt or the sugar, the raisins and the maple syrup, or the garlic and the ginger. It’s something so satisfying that you don’t have to add any seasoning to it at all. That’s what we’re after—or, at least, that’s what he recommends that we be after. But it requires giving up our taste for oatmeal. And because that requires giving up everything we’ve known so far, it doesn’t have that much attraction. It requires a lot of conviction.

Still, the Buddha also gives us rewards along the way, one of them being the pleasure that comes from concentration. This, too, requires some ginger and garlic. In other words, you have to appreciate it. But you begin to realize that being able to tap into a reliable well-being inside like this is much better than just hoping for more and more sensory contacts.

That’s the problem with the oatmeal of the six senses. It comes and it goes; it comes and it goes. There’s nothing you can really hold on to. We try to hold on to things with our memories, recordings, pictures, and videos, but the real things are gone, gone, gone, and they go so fast, so fast. They say that space-time moves at the speed of light, and it doesn’t come back. But we keep coming back. We haven’t had enough, because we don’t know anything else.

It’s like that story of King Koravya, who realizes he’s old now, he’s 80 years old. He has diseases that he can’t share with other people—in other words, whatever pain he has, he has to feel it alone. When he dies, he can’t take anything with him. Yet when it’s proposed to him that he conquer another country, “Sure, go ahead.” Even though it would kill a lot of people and waste a lot of resources, still it would add some spice. And he’d come back for more of the spice. He’s a slave to craving.

So you’ve got to learn how to see your passions in that way: that you’re a slave to your passions. They tie you down. Or you could follow the Thai ajaans, as they say that dispassion is like growing up: You look at the games you played as a child, and they hold no interest.

There are two ways you can outgrow a game. One is like outgrowing tic-tac-toe. There comes a point when you realize there are only so many ways you can play tic-tac-toe. As long as you don’t make the stupid that would guarantee that you lose, at the very least you’ll always come out with a draw. But that loses its appeal pretty fast. You’ve seen all the possibilities, and the game loses its interest.

Another way of outgrowing a game is like chess. There’s no way you’re going to know all the possibilities of chess, but there comes a point when you realize that, even though it gives you some training in strategy, it teaches you a willingness to make some sacrifices in order to win, it teaches you the power of deception when you can fool your opponent, still the particular strategies you learn as you continue with the game become more and more narrowly applicable only to the game — a game that follows these particular rules with these particular pieces. You see that there’s nothing more to learn that’s really going to be useful for the rest of your life, and so you lose interest.

A lot of the things in life are like that. Either we realize all the possibilities and see there’s nothing much there to challenge us, or we see that there are still challenges, but the challenges get more and more artificial, and we lose interest. That’s dispassion, the dispassion that comes with growing up and being able to put aside your fascination with things that are really not all that interesting anymore. You find that there is something that’s much, much better.

There are people out there who claim that they’ve let go of their passion, that they’ve found the third noble truth, and that it’s boring. Well, they haven’t found the third noble truth. There’s nothing boring about the cessation of suffering. It’s not just a bland, equanimous attitude. The Earth didn’t shake because the Buddha found something bland and equanimous. It shook because he had found the deathless. There always is that possibility—when you can learn not to have passion for childish things—that there’s something much better you can discover as you grow up.

Another way the ajaans describe dispassion is that it’s like sobering up after intoxication. Things that seemed amusing when you were drunk show themselves to be really stupid and silly when you get sober. Things that seemed possible or worthwhile show themselves to be really crazy and worthless. And then there are also the dangers of being drunk. After all, it’s the embodiment of heedlessness. When you’re heedless, you can do anything stupid.

This fits in with the traditional teaching on the three things that the Buddha realized he was intoxicated with when he was young: He was intoxicated with his youth, looking down on old people; intoxicated with his health, looking down on sick people; intoxicated with his life, looking down on those who were dead—as if they were all losers. But then he realized that even though he was now young and healthy and alive, there would come a time when he would be old, he would get sick, and he would eventually die. So it wouldn’t be appropriate for him to look down on other people like that.

At thr same time, when you think you’re young and you’re always going to be young; healthy, always going to be healthy; alive, you’re always going to be alive, again, you’re heedless. You can put things off, things that you really need to do for the training of the mind, for the true well-being of the mind. You just keep putting them off. “No great hurry. No great danger.”

You sober up and become heedful only when you’re willing to realize, “Okay, there really are dangers. There really is a need to focus right now on what needs to be done to not suffer from those dangers.” After all, when youth goes, it doesn’t come back. Health goes, well, sometimes it comes back. But when you die, you come back in another way. You have to start all over again, and you don’t know which of your actions in this lifetime or previous lifetimes you’re going to meet up with in the next lifetime. Things that seem secure now suddenly vanish. You find yourself facing different circumstances that you didn’t expect. They could be good, but there’s also a possibility that there’s something bad back there in your karma field.

So you can’t afford to be heedless. You need to develop some dispassion for the things that would make you drunk, make you intoxicated, that keep you dumb, that keep you coming back for more and more oatmeal all the time. That’s the big irony. We think that dispassion is oatmeal, but we’re the ones who are eating the oatmeal, and we’re just adding our own flavors to it.

Think about that image of the dog chewing on some bones. It just chews and chews, and there’s really no nourishment there. Ajaan Lee’s explanation of that image adds a really nice detail. He says, “All it gets is the flavor of its own saliva.” What we think is ginger and garlic or honey or maple syrup, raisins is actually our own saliva. How much longer do you want to keep on falling for the taste of your own saliva?

There’s something that’s much better, that doesn’t require any passion at all. It’s so extremely satisfying, extremely free from suffering and stress, that it doesn’t require any seasoning or additives. It doesn’t require your commenting or getting excited about it. It’s sufficient in and of itself. That’s why it’s the highest dhamma. That’s what’s meant by dispassion: the dispassion that the Buddha taught, that he found, and that he recommends we try to find, too. It’s well worth the effort. Make the Earth shake in your heart as well.