3. The Judgments of Insight

For the past couple of nights, we’ve been talking about how important it is when you think about the four noble truths and the three characteristics—which are the main wisdom teachings in Buddhism—that you put the four noble truths first.

The four noble truths carry duties. They imply activities that you have to do. They don’t just sit there. Suffering is something you should try to comprehend. Its cause is something to let go of. The cessation of suffering is something to realize. And the path to the end of suffering is something to develop. So as you learn these truths, you realize that there’s something you have to do based on knowing these truths.

Whereas the three characteristics don’t necessarily carry any duties. If you use them in the context of the four noble truths, then they do carry duties. But on their own, they don’t carry any necessary duties at all. They’re just descriptions of the way things are. The simple fact that something is inconstant, for instance, doesn’t carry any particular duty. You can enjoy its inconstancy, or you can fear it, or you can resign yourself to it. You can react any way you want. There’s no inherent duty around the three characteristics if you just take them on their own.

We talked the first night about how the practice of the four noble truths is connected directly to the practice of merit. Last night, we talked about how important it is to put the four noble truths first when you’re thinking about the practice of mindfulness and concentration. Tonight’s talk is going to be on the importance of putting the four noble truths first when you try to develop insight.

If you put the three characteristics first when you think about insight, the usual interpretation is that the mind is essentially passive and, if left to itself, will be okay. But things come in, make contact with the mind, and the mind reacts, trying to control things that are going to change. And it suffers because it’s trying to control the change. The solution that’s proposed is that if you just realize that there is no essence to things—to outside phenomena or to the mind itself—and that they’re constantly going to be changing, then if you just accept the fact that they change, you’re going to be okay.

But you’ve got to ask yourself, does the mind really work like this? It would be like saying, “If food is inconstant, food is stressful, food is not-self, food is impermanent, my stomach is impermanent, then I just won’t eat.” It doesn’t work that way. Hunger drives you. It’s hunger, it’s desire, that drives our experience.

Everything we work for is based on the fact that the mind wants to feed. We feed not only on physical food, but also on emotional food, mental food. We feed on our relationships. We feed on our wealth. We feed on our status. The mind is constantly looking for something to feed on. And this feeding is what the Buddha means by the word “clinging.” And clinging is suffering. This is what we’re trying to put an end to.

Now, it may sound a little scary to hear that he’s telling you that you’re not going to feed anymore. But instead of just saying, “Stop eating and you’ll be okay,” he’s saying, “Look, I’ll show you how to find a dimension where the mind feels no hunger, where it’s totally satisfied. When there’s no hunger, then there’s going to be no clinging, and when there’s no clinging, that’s the end of suffering.” But to attain that dimension requires that you develop the path and that you learn how to comprehend suffering—in other words, that you act in line with the four noble truths and their duties to take the mind to where there’s no hunger.

So let’s look at what we feed on when we cling. We cling to what are called the five aggregates. “Aggregates” sounds like gravel, but it’s not. The five aggregates are activities we engage in.

We feed on these five activities, these five aggregates. And as we feed on them, that’s where there’s suffering.

Now, why did the Buddha choose these five activities to focus on? Because these are the activities that are most directly related to the way we eat. Eating is our basic activity, whether physical or mental.

Think for a moment: When you’re hungry, first there’s form, the form of the body. In other words, the body right here is something that needs nourishment. And then there’s the form of the physical food outside. That’s form.

Feelings: You’ve got the feeling of hunger, which is painful. And the feeling of fullness, which is pleasant. And then the feeling of being too full, which is not pleasant again. You want to find something to give rise to the pleasant feeling of fullness that’s just right.

Then there are perceptions, which try to identify two basic things. One, you try to identify, “What kind of hunger do I have right now?” And two, “What outside can I feed on that will satisfy that hunger?” If you have a hunger for pizza, that’s one kind of hunger. If you have a hunger for a good relationship, that’s another kind of hunger. You’re looking for different kinds of food.

Think about when you were a very small child, when you first learned about the world. You were crawling around and you found something: What did you do first? You grabbed it and put it into your mouth, to see if it was food. That’s the first thing we’re interested in: learning to identify what’s edible and what’s not edible. The same principle applies to our relationships: We find that there are some people we can feed on, and other people we can’t.

But our desire to find something to feed on: That’s the first thing that drives us, that’s the first thing we use our perceptions for: “Is this food? What kind of food is this? What kind of hunger is this good for?” That’s how perceptions function in our eating.

As for fabrication: Say that you get some food. The question is, “What do you do with it in order to eat it?” If you get a raw potato, you can’t just eat it as it is. You’ve got to cook it first. And if you don’t have any food yet, what do you do to find food? That, too, is fabrication. This is the intentional element, going out and changing your environment so that you can feed off of it.

And finally, consciousness is your awareness of all these things as they are happening.

All five of these activities are necessary when we eat. And because eating is so central to being a being, these are the basic activities that the mind engages in. Everything else grows out of this.

And so when the Buddha says, “Hey, you’re suffering because of these activities,” part of the mind says, “Wait a minute, no, this is how I get my food. I don’t want to let go of this yet.” So first he has you find a better kind of food. That’s why we practice the path. We can learn how to feed off of generosity, how to feed off virtue, and in particular how to feed off of concentration.

Now, concentration is also composed of these same five aggregates. You’ve got the form of the body, the breath. You’ve got the feeling of pleasure that you’re trying to create as you stay with the breath. You’ve got the perception, which is the image you hold in mind to help you stay with the breathing: What kind of image do you think of when you think of the breath? What perception of the breath helps to make it a comfortable place to be focused? And then fabrication is how you talk to yourself about the breath: “Is the breath comfortable? Is it not comfortable? If it’s not comfortable, how do I change? Once it’s comfortable, how do I maintain it? How do I maximize it?” All of this is fabrication. And consciousness is basically your awareness of these things.

So as a first step, the Buddha says, “Here is some better food to feed on,” so that—when you’ve mastered it—you can turn around and look at your old ways of feeding and decide, “Maybe I don’t want to feed in those old ways anymore. Maybe wealth isn’t really a good kind of food. Maybe sex isn’t really a good kind of food. The various things I’ve been looking for all my life: Maybe they’re not really good nourishment for me.” But the important thing is that you now have an alternative source of food, so that it’s easier to peel away your attachment to the kinds of food that are not so skillful.

This is what insight is all about: learning how to say No to certain kinds of clinging, certain kinds of feeding. In particular, you want to look at what the causes of suffering are, to look at why you cling. The Buddha says that it’s all because of craving. And craving, he says, comes in two forms. One, there’s the kind of craving where, if you look at it clearly and steadily, you see that it’s stupid and you can let it go.

The other kind of craving, though, when you look at it, stares back. Defiantly. In other words, you look at it and say, “No, this is stupid,” but it says, “I’m going to eat this way anyhow. I don’t care.” And with that kind of craving, he says, you’ve got to make an effort. You can’t just say, “Oh, this is coming and passing away,” and leave it at that. Because it’s going to come back and come back and come back, making you suffer. You’ve got to do something so that you don’t keep going for it. In this case, he says, you’ve got to exert a fabrication, which is what the path is all about. It’s something that you fabricate, you put together, so that the mind can understand why you don’t want to feed on these things.

What kind of feeding is the kind of feeding that you’ve got to work on? What is the kind that you don’t have to work on? Think about physical food. Say you eat something and immediately get sick. That’s obvious. You eat this, it’s going to be bad for you. The next time you see it, you don’t want to eat it again.

One time when I was a child, we had ham for dinner and I threw it all up. I looked at the bits of ham in the vomit on the floor, and for years after that I could not eat ham. All I could think about was vomit. So that’s the kind of feeding that’s very easy to deal with. Something makes you sick, doesn’t taste good, or else you see that there’s a direct connection between that kind of food and pain, and so you don’t want to eat it again.

But there are other kinds of food where you really have to make an effort to say No. One is the kind of feeding where, even though it makes you sick, you don’t care. Years back, when I was still a lay person living in Chieng Mai, I taught at the university. A group of us, Western and Thai teachers at the university, really liked Northern Thai food. So once a week we’d get together. We knew where all the best markets were in town, which market had the best naam prik ong, which market had the best kai yang, which market had the best kaeng hang lay, which market had the best laab. We fanned out into Chieng Mai and got all the best kinds of food and then came back and ate it. And the next day, everybody would have diarrhea. And the following week, we would do it all over again.

That was a case where “I don’t care. The food makes me sick but I don’t care. It tastes really good.” If it’s a case like that, we’ve got to remind ourselves that getting sick may have a long-term consequence. You’ve got to keep reminding yourself: This may taste good, and maybe you can see that there are some drawbacks to it, but the drawbacks may eventually become worse than you think they are. They’re really not worth the flavor, because after all, the flavor of the food lasts in your mouth only very briefly, and after that you can’t get any benefit from it. If you think about that, and it hits home, you’ll finally say, “This is really stupid. What are we doing?” But again, it takes some determination and some reflection on your part in order to say, “Wait, I don’t want to do this anymore.”

The second kind of food where it’s hard to say No is where you don’t see the connection between the food and the drawbacks because it’s something you’re doing all the time. You’ve just accepted that there’s suffering and it seems normal and necessary. You don’t really see that it’s not. Years back I was reading about a peasant family in Bhutan whose house was built up on stilts. Right below the house was an open-pit toilet. And sure enough, the flies would buzz around what was down in the open-pit toilet and then they’d come up and land on the food. The family was constantly suffering from diarrhea, and yet they didn’t see the connection because it was happening all the time.

So this is one of the areas where, if you’re doing something all the time, you don’t see that it’s harmful. You just think that it’s normal and necessary. This is why you need someone to teach you to see, “Look, you don’t have to do this all the time, this particular way that you’re holding on to something. There is another option. You don’t have to feed in this way.”

Again, this is one of the reasons why the Buddha teaches you concentration. He says, “Feed on the concentration for a while and then compare it with the pleasure you get from other things. You’ll find that when you’re feeding on concentration, it doesn’t have the bad effects that came from feeding off breaking a precept, or feeding off lust, feeding off anger, feeding off any unskillful state of mind.”

The third kind of food that’s hard to say No to is sugar, or things like sugar. In other words, you eat it, you don’t get sick, it seems okay. Forty years down the line, though, when they’re wheeling you into the hospital to perform heart surgery, they’ll say it was because of all the sugar you’ve been eating. But you didn’t see it at the time. Sometimes things have long-term consequences but no perceivable short-term ones. But here again, if you’ve heard that there may be long-term consequences, and if you can learn how to say No to the sugar for a while, after a couple of weeks, sugar actually smells bad. I had to learn this the hard way. They took me in for a CAT scan of my heart and, oops: 70% closure of an artery. It was because I had been eating sugar. I wanted to go back to my stupid self when I was twenty years old and say, “Stop the sugar, okay?” But by that point it was too late.

So this is again why it’s good to have a teacher to point out that these ways of feeding are harmful to you. But you’ve also got to develop the sense that you really do care. This is what heedfulness is all about: You care about the fact that the things you like can cause harm and you understand, “I don’t want to cause that harm, so I’ve got to go back and look at the things I like.” This, as I’ve said, requires that you have alternative sources of food, which is what the concentration is for, what virtue is for.

And this is why insight doesn’t just happen. You can’t take people off the street and say, “Just be okay with everything that changes, and that will be insight.” That’s not insight. Insight comes from seeing, “Okay, I eat in this way but I don’t have to. If I don’t eat in this way, then I don’t suffer the way I did before.” But it’s because some habits are hard to change that you have to exert a fabrication on some of the ways the mind feeds.

I’ll give you some examples. When you’re trying to get over a compulsive way of thinking—for example, you may be addicted to anger, you may be addicted to lust, you may be addicted to greed, you may be addicted to status—treat it as an addiction. The Buddha teaches five steps to understanding addictions so that you can get beyond them.

The first step is to just see: “When does this desire for something unskillful arise?” Is anger always there in the mind? Is greed always there in the mind? These things come and go. Sometimes they come and go more quickly than you might think. For example, with lust: Suppose you say, “I’m going to say No to lust.” But after a while it comes back, and then it comes back again, over and over, and it says to you, “Look, if you don’t give in now, this lust is going to get stronger and stronger, stronger and stronger. It’s going to build up until you can’t stand it anymore.”

But if you actually look at it, it comes and it goes, it comes and it goes, it comes and it goes, but it doesn’t necessarily build up. The problem is with the way the mind talks to itself. It creates the perception of lust building up to scare you. It says, “Hey, watch out, watch out, watch out, this is going to come get you if you don’t act on this, you’re going to go crazy”—all kinds of excuses the mind gives—and you have to say, “Well, no. There are people who can live without lust, and they’re perfectly okay. So maybe the perception that it’s building up is a lie.”

Or with anger: We get attached to anger. Or sorrow: We hold on to grief. There was a famous case in Thailand many years back. There was a high-ranking monk in Bangkok whose name is Chao Khun Upāli, and he was famous for having a sharp tongue, like Than Keng. In the old days, high-ranking people would say that when they lived at home, nobody could take them to task, so they’d go to hear Chao Khun Upāli take them to task. Then they felt at ease.

One time a woman went to see him. She had just lost her only son. He was twenty years old, he had died unexpectedly, and she was overcome with grief. She said, “I can’t think of anything else. All I can think about is my grief for my son.” Chao Khun Upāli said to her, “You’re saying that just to show off to other people and to get their sympathy.”

She was so shocked and felt so insulted that he said that, that she didn’t even bow down. She just left, went home and thought about how horrible he was. “How can Chao Khun Upāli say that I’m doing this just to show off to other people? This is really horrible, what he said.” Then, after two hours, she realized that she hadn’t thought of her son once during the two hours. All she had thought about was how nasty Chao Khun Upāli was. So she went back. She bowed down to him and thanked him.

This shows that even though we think we’re holding one thought in mind all the time, it’s not always there.

So the Buddha says that the first thing you want to look for is, “When does this come? Is this thought that’s eating away at my mind always there? If it’s not always there, then when it comes, what comes with it? What sparks it?” Sometimes you’ll see that the things sparking an unskillful thought are really very minor. You wake up in the morning with a little bit of a headache, and all of a sudden you go to anger. Or when you feel tired, you suddenly go to lust. Tiny feelings in the body can spark these things. It’s not necessary that you have to see something bad in order to feel anger. Sometimes you’re just in an angry mood and you search for something to be angry about. The same with lust. The same with greed. This is why they have Amazon: You can’t think of anything you want, so you go and look at Amazon to see, “Maybe there’s something I’ll want to want.” So basically, you are the one who’s looking for trouble. And as a meditator, you want to see that.

When you see the moment when these things come, then the second step is to see the moment when they go. When they go, why do they go? Sometimes you lose interest, sometimes something else comes up that simply elbows the first thought out of the mind. What seemed so important five seconds ago is suddenly not important anymore. Why? Something else comes in and pushes it out—like Chao Khun Upāli’s words to the woman. You’ll see that, just as minor things can give rise to a state of mind, minor things can make it go. That gives you a sense of how arbitrary these defilements are.

Then the third step, the Buddha says, is to look for their allure. What is attractive about this kind of thinking? Why is lust attractive? Why is anger attractive? Why is greed attractive? Why is worrying attractive? Even though you say you hate these mind states, why do you keep going back to them? What do you get out of them? Sometimes it’s easy to see why you enjoy them, and sometimes it’s not. When it’s not easy to see, that may be because you’re embarrassed about it—as when you tell yourself, “Anger is horrible, I say horrible things, I do stupid things when I get angry,” and then you go back to anger again because it gives you a certain amount of pleasure, a certain sense of superiority or of release from the restrictions of good behavior.

It’s not that the anger comes out of nowhere and attacks you. You are the one who sides with the anger. You are the one who picks it up. And you have to look: “When I pick it up, why? What do I find attractive about the anger?” You need a good, solid state of concentration in the mind to see this, because all too often, the mind will hide from itself the reasons why it goes for unskillful things. This requires a lot of honesty.

And then the next step, of course, is that after you see the allure, you look for the drawbacks. As with eating Northern Thai food once a week and then having diarrhea, sometimes the drawbacks are easy to see. But sometimes they’re not so easy. Sometimes they’re long-term and slow to show themselves. When they’re slow, you want to bring to mind what you’ve learned from watching other people’s mistakes or from listening to the Dhamma. You don’t have to wait until you’re suffering before you say, “Gee, I shouldn’t have done that.”

The Buddha says that there are basically five kinds of people in the world, which he compares to five kinds of horses. With the first horse, all you have to do is say, “Whip,” and the horse will do what you want it to do. With the second kind of horse, you have to show it the whip, and then the horse will do what you want it to do. With the third kind of horse, you actually have to touch the horse with the whip a little bit, to show, “I’m serious.” Then the horse will do what you want it to do. With the fourth kind of horse, you have use the whip to dig a little bit into the skin before the horse does what you want it to do. And with the fifth kind of horse, you have to hit down into the bone. So which kind of horse do you want to be?

The Buddha has been telling us ever since 2,600 years ago that “Anger is bad for you, greed is bad for you, lust is bad for you, delusion is bad for you.” And for 2,600 years, we haven’t been listening. People sometimes ask, “Why is it that with people in the time of the Buddha, all they had to do was listen to the Dhamma once and they became awakened, whereas now, we listen to the Dhamma how many times and it’s still not happening?” That’s because the Buddha was gathering all the flowers, all the fruits, that were already ripe, whereas we were the unripe fruits. Who knows where we were or what we were when he was alive.

The Dhamma is still around. So here is our opportunity to say, “Do I want to wait until I really suffer more before I get to work at the practice? Have I had enough suffering? Do I want to change?” Look very carefully at the drawbacks of your unskillful thinking. Compare them with the allure. Are they really worth it?

It’s in this area of contemplating the drawbacks that the Buddha brings in the teaching about what we call the “three characteristics.” He never used the word “characteristic” to describe these teachings, though, and this is an important point to know. When we think “three characteristics,” we think that they are describing something essentially and categorically true about, say, this microphone. “This is what the microphone actually is. This is the truth about the microphone. It’s inconstant, it’s stressful, it’s not-self.”

But the Buddha didn’t use the word “characteristic” in this context. He used the word “perception”: the labels you apply. Now, these perceptions should be applied at the right time and place. And in this case, you should apply the three perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self to contemplate the drawbacks—to remind yourself that clinging to unskillful thinking does have its drawbacks. The microphone on its own is no problem, right? But if I cling to the microphone and, after the talk, if someone says, “Let go of the microphone,” and I say, “No, I’m going to hold on to this microphone all night,” then we’ve got a problem.

So you want to look at the drawbacks of clinging to this. And you apply the perception, first, that this microphone is inconstant. Its use for you is not going to last. The word “anicca” is sometimes translated as “impermanent,” but that doesn’t really get to the reason for why it’s stressful. You know that mountains are impermanent, and yet you can still build a house on a mountain and feel fairly secure. You know that Singapore is impermanent, but you still feel okay about living in Singapore. But if you realize that things are inconstant, they are undependable, they can change at any time, then you realize that you can’t be complacent. That’s what the Buddha is trying to point to.

Let me tell you a story about Sebastian. Sebastian’s very first letter to my teacher, Than Ajaan Fuang, was back in the 1980s. He wrote, “I practice the Dhamma by seeing that everything I encounter is impermanent, stressful, and not-self.” And my teacher said to me, “Write back to him and say, ‘The things outside, those are not the problem. The problem is not that they are impermanent, stressful, and not-self. The real problem is that your own mind is inconstant, stressful, and not-self. Look at where the real problem is coming from, the part that’s blaming other things for being inconstant, stressful, and not-self.’”

So you look at the act of clinging: This clinging is inconstant. Even if you cling to something that’s constant—and there are cases where people meditate, they reach their first experience of awakening, and they cling to it; they’re clinging to something that’s constant—the problem with clinging is that the clinging itself is inconstant. That’s why it’s stressful. Clinging comes and goes erratically. It’s inconstant. You can’t really depend on it.

And the next question is, “If you can’t depend on it, is it easeful or is it stressful to hold on to?” It’s stressful. It’s like sitting in a chair where the legs are not even. If you’re not careful, you’ll tip over. You have to stay tense to maintain your balance. This is why inconstancy is stressful.

And then if something is inconstant and stressful, is it the right place to find true happiness? Well, no. If there’s no true happiness there, then why do you want to lay claim to it? Why do you want to hold on? Why would you want to identify with it?

This is what the meaning of “not-self” is: It’s a perception that tells you, “This is not worth holding on to. It’s not worth claiming as yours.” Notice, the Buddha is not saying, “There is no self.” The one time he was asked, “Is there a self? Is there no self?” he didn’t answer. He later said to Ven. Ānanda, “Whichever way you answer those questions, you’re going to get into wrong view.” So he’s talking about an adjective: “not-self.” He’s not talking about a metaphysical issue. And the adjective is making a value judgment: Is this thing worth claiming as you? Is this worth claiming as your self? This act of clinging that you hold on to: Do you really want to hold on to it?

No. It’s not worth it.

And the Buddha says, if you can perceive that it’s not worth it, then you can let go. You’re making a value judgment. Remember, clinging itself is a value judgment. You hold on to things because you perceive that they’re worth the effort. But the Buddha wants you to see that you’re fabricating all your sensory experience—everything you see and hear and smell and taste and touch and think about—and there’s an effort that goes into everything you fabricate. All of these aggregates that you’re focusing on, as he says, come from potentials in the past. But you have to do some fabricating in the present moment to turn them into food for the mind.

For example, say that you’re sitting and meditating. You have a pain in your knee. There are lots of different things you could do with the pain in the knee. The pain is there, maybe because of past kamma. But you can sit there and make yourself miserable because of the pain. Or you can learn how not to focus on the pain, and you’ll be okay for a while. Or you can learn how to focus on the pain with the attitude, “I want to understand this pain. I’m not going to be a victim of the pain. I want to understand it.” That changes your relationship. And it changes your experience of the pain.

And as the Buddha says when he’s describing dependent co-arising, your present intentions come before your experience of the kammic results coming in from the past. Your present intentions are prior, they come first, ready to fabricate what’s coming in from the past. And so your intention as you approach something is what’s going to make all the difference. You’re fixing your food. What kind of food are you fixing? The way you fix it determines whether you’re going to get good food or bad food to eat.

Years back, we held a group meditation session at the monastery, outside, under the trees. It was a lovely day. There was nice breeze from the west, nice shade from the trees. And there was a woman who was brought there by a friend of hers. I personally had a very nice meditation session. But at the end of the session, the woman who was brought by the friend opened her eyes and said, “I have never suffered so much in my life.” All she did was to sit still for one hour, but she was suffering. Her body was the same body as before she came and after she left. But what she did with her sensations of her body and mind while she was sitting there: That was what made her suffer.

And so the Buddha wants you to see, “Here you are doing all of this to create food for the mind, but you’re creating lousy food. It’s making you sick. Do you want to keep on doing this? Is it really something that you want to hold on to? Or is it something you want to let go of?”

Because in clinging, we’re holding on to the aggregates. One, we’re holding on to the potentials coming in from the past. Two, we’re holding on to the act of fabrication in the present moment. And three, we’re holding on to the anticipation that “This is going to be good. I’m going to get something good out of this.” Insight is basically a matter of seeing, “No, you are not getting anything good.” It’s a value judgment.

It’s like owning chickens. You think, “I’m going to feed the chickens because when the chickens get big, they’re going to give eggs.” The chickens come from the potentials you’re preparing from the past. Then you think, “I’m going to work with these things, I am going to develop these potentials, and I hope I’ll get something good to eat out of them.” That’s the anticipation.

Now our problem is, as human beings, that we have very poor judgment as to what to feed on and what not to feed on. So it turns out that our first problem—once we’ve got the chickens and they get big enough to give eggs—is that we eat everything that comes out of the chickens. Whether it’s chicken eggs or chicken shit, we eat it all. And the Buddha is basically saying, “Hey, no, choose just the eggs.” That’s his first lesson. That’s where he says to feed off generosity, feed off gratitude, feed off virtue, feed off concentration, feed off practicing the path. Don’t feed off the chicken shit.

But the problem is that these chickens are not ordinary chickens. They’re the chickens from hell. As the Buddha says, even when we feed off good things, they come back and they feed off of us. The aggregates chew on us all the time, he says. Feelings chew on us, our perceptions chew on us, fabrications chew on us. When we lie down at night, the chickens come and peck at our eyes. So we have to realize, “I’ve got to stop feeding chickens altogether. Which means that I’ll have to stop eating eggs. I’ll have to find something else, something better to eat.”

This is where the Buddha says, “There is better food. There is the food of release.” And then there’s nibbāna, a dimension in which there’s no need for food at all. That’s what insight is for. When you realize that there is the possibility of a higher happiness, it makes it easier to see that “This is the happiness I’ve been developing out of feeding these chickens and eating their eggs, and eating everything else. But there is something better. Maybe I can stop doing this.” This is what the three perceptions are for. These chickens are inconstant, they are stressful, and you really don’t want to own them and keep on feeding them. You want to let them go. This is what insight is all about.

So when you find yourself dealing with unskillful thoughts in the mind, remember the five steps for dealing with them. You don’t have to keep on feeding, say, off of anger.

Notice, dispassion does not mean that you’re averse to it or that you have no feeling at all. It means simply that you’ve outgrown it. You’ve grown wiser. You’ve grown more mature. You’ve realized that there is something better. That’s when you feel dispassion for chicken shit. It’s not because you hate chicken shit. It’s just that you realize, “I don’t need to feed on chicken shit anymore. There are better things to eat.” You’ve outgrown it. The next time you see chicken shit, you don’t hate chicken shit. But the thought of eating it just doesn’t occur to you anymore. And when you’re really mature, you don’t even want to eat eggs. You’ve got something better. That’s awakening.

This is going to require many stages of the practice as you get to deeper and deeper problems in the mind, but the same five principles apply all across the board: Look for why these things arise, how they pass away, what is the allure, what are the drawbacks. When you compare the allure with the drawbacks, you see that this is worth letting go of. That’s when you develop dispassion for whatever the issue is. And the dispassion brings release.

At some stages in the practice, there will be certain things that you’ll still hold on to, that you’ll need to hold on to, at least for the time being. We talked about this the other night. It’s like carrying a banana back from the market. You don’t throw away the peel until you’re ready to eat the banana. Otherwise, the banana turns to mush in your hand. In the same way, there are certain things you have to hold on to as you develop the path so that your mind doesn’t turn into mush. So hold on to your virtue, hold on to your generosity, hold on to your concentration and your discernment. But learn how to let go of other things, the things that pull you off the path. Finally, you’ll turn around and look at the factors of the path and realize, “I can let go of these things as well.”

The Buddha says that even at that stage, you apply the same five steps. See that, “Okay, there is the allure to the concentration or the discernment, but I don’t need it anymore.” The path requires effort, but you’ve reached the point where you don’t need effort anymore. That’s where you can let everything go. That’s where the mind is totally free, and it reaches a place where it has no hunger for anything at all—because it’s totally satisfied with what it’s found. That’s what insight is for.

It requires work to get there, because you have to learn. You basically learn how to understand why you lie to yourself, saying, “I like this, I like that.” But are these things really worth liking? Maybe there’s something better. You’re making a value judgment and you’re getting more and more mature in your judgments.

Remember the other night when I told you about the signs on the road going into Las Vegas, where they say, “93% payback rate”? In other words, you give them one dollar, they give you ninety-three cents. Now you get to the point where you see that sign everywhere—and there’s no interest, because you know you’ve got something better. That’s what insight is all about.

So those are my thoughts for tonight.