This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Spectrum of desire

So, it's nice to be here and see all of you. Is the sound okay? You hear me okay? Great.

I'll start this morning with a proposal, and it's something that can be verified with mindfulness: the human mind has a lot of desires. What I'm calling desire here is quite broad. Let's say that it refers to any kind of wanting, whether gross or subtle. We have a desire for food when we're hungry. We have desire if we're hoping to get home in time to get to an important Zoom meeting. I had the desire to drive to Redwood City this morning at some level, otherwise I probably wouldn't have gotten here.

Sometimes desire comes in the form of not wanting something. Maybe we want the neighbor's dog to stop barking. Also, this morning while I was driving here, there was a squirrel crossing the lane in front of me. There were no other cars coming, but halfway across the road it changed its mind and came back, so I slowed way down. It wasn't clear which way it was going to go, and I definitely felt my mind narrowing, which it does through desire. I didn't want to hurt the squirrel; I had a strong desire not to hit the squirrel with my car. Luckily, it headed back into the grass.

There are a lot of desires, and then there can be more subtle desires. While we're sitting, often it's hard to sit in the same position for a long time. We will subtly shift our weight even when we're meditating, and also on the computer, just because there's a desire to move or shift; the body isn't meant to be in the same position for a long time. Or we can sit in meditation and subtly be holding on to a state of calm. We want that to continue now that we've got it.

Let me ask a question then: How many of you would agree if I say that the Second Noble Truth of the cause of suffering says that the cause of suffering is desire? Yeah, that's often what we hear. I see some hands, not all the hands. There's a lot of wanting in the mind, and what's going on with that?

Another proposal that can also be checked is that, at some level, we tend to think that fulfilling our desires is going to bring happiness, or at least it's going to make things better than they are now. We fulfill desire after desire to try to get things that we like or get things that feel pleasant so that we can sustain a sense of happiness, ease, safety, or well-being—whatever word we use for it. It's actually not such a ridiculous idea to want those things in our life, but it may not be complete to have the idea that we need to keep wanting things and getting them in order to be safe or happy or have well-being.

If we practice mindfulness, we will start to see more of the picture. If we keep looking with mindfulness, there are a lot of things we might see, but I'll highlight a couple of them. One of them is that it is not entirely the case that we can become happy by fulfilling desires. How many would agree with that? Yeah, nearly all the hands went up for that one.

It's tiring to constantly be going from thing to thing to thing, and we have to keep at it because each one lasts for a while but not forever. There's always one more thing coming, one more refinement, one more next thing that we want. All of this is not entirely in our control, is it? At some level, we understand that we don't have complete ability to get the things that we want. Some things are easy, sort of; it's pretty likely you can take your next breath—but not always. That one's pretty likely, but for other things that we try to get, that we have to buy or acquire or get from somebody else, there's a whole other set of conditions out there that are not in our control about whether we can get them.

If we start looking more clearly, we may not be able to get what we want or get rid of what we don't want. What does the mind do with that? Our quest to find happiness by fulfilling desires gets more and more suspect as we practice mindfulness.

The second thing that we might realize is that not all desires are actually harmful for us. I deliberately painted a little bit of a complex picture at the beginning with all the things that I pointed toward. Some desires might be useful on the spiritual path, and some of the very real happiness that we get from fulfilling desires might be good for us. How about the peace that you get from coming to IMC or watching on YouTube? That seems useful, doesn't it? It settles the heart and mind better than doing something else with this hour and a half.

We're going to have to look more carefully at these issues of desire and wanting. I'll state it clearly: Are all desires bad? No, but we have to have a lot of wisdom about that.

The Buddha was actually quite nuanced in his teachings on desire. He taught in different ways at different times, and he taught different people differently knowing where they were on the spiritual path. Basically, he noticed—I think he was brilliant in this—that there is a tendency in the mind to move toward things, and also a tendency to move away. Let's broadly call that desire. He thought, "People have this tendency of wanting to move toward and away, which is to some degree a quality of the unawakened mind. But we have it, so why not use it? Why not use it on the path to move toward things that are actually helpful?"

I want to talk about this desire that we have, this movement toward. I like to say that there's a broad range of desire or a diversity of desire, kind of like a spectrum of desire. But it's not really linear; it's more like a space.

Five Classes of Desire

I'm going to frame it today as five aspects of desire or five classes of desire. This is not a canonical list from the Buddha, but all of them are talked about in the teachings, and I've just gathered them together. You can see if it's a useful way of classifying things. As we get in touch with these, you might just sense for yourself: "Oh, okay, is that present in me? How does that operate in my life? How does that resonate for me?"

1. Taṇhā (Craving)

The first kind of desire, clearly in the unwholesome part of the space, is the one that's called taṇhā^[1]. That's the Pali word taṇhā, and it literally means thirst, but it's usually translated as craving. This is a grasping kind of desire that is obviously painful and obviously harmful. It's a gripping, essentially. It relates to lust or greed or an extreme wanting that we have, and we've probably all experienced this.

When this kind of craving is about the world of the senses, which it often is, we call it kāma-taṇhā^[2], which means it's desire for sensual things, sense desire, or sense pleasure. Like the Kama Sutra, you may have heard of, which is very much about sensuality. Kāma-taṇhā is strong grasping of sensual objects. It's not really about the object itself; it's in the mind. We might have strong grasping for ice cream at a certain time and not at another time. It's not about the ice cream; it's about how much we want it at a given time. Or we might be caught up in how we look, our clothing, our hairdo, or various sexual fantasies and desires. A particular form of this kind of desire is addiction to alcohol or drugs.

Taṇhā generally causes trouble for us. It can also relate to things that aren't sensual. We can have lust for power, or for having a certain identity, or being seen in a certain way; that can also be the realm of taṇhā. It's obvious that these kind of desires don't support the path to liberation. They are themselves binding for the mind.

2. Bodily Needs

A second class of basic desires is related to bodily needs. We all have these: the need to eat, the need to drink, the need to use the bathroom. These desires are not usually seen as inherently harmful, but they are somewhat stressful, aren't they? How we relate to the desires and needs of the body influences how happy or unhappy we are. Even awakened people still feel physical hunger, and they still have the need to pee.

There's one sutta that says that even arahants^[3]—who are fully awakened beings—feel sensations that are dependent on the body and conditioned by life. You're not going to overcome those basic things. Even the Buddha had back pain. They're not all pleasant, these things related to the body, but there is some distinction between beings regarding whether or not these bodily desires bring any dukkha^[4] (suffering).

3. Human Life and Worldly Desires

There's a third class of desire, a very big one, related to the desires that it takes to fulfill a human life. Trying to live a typical human life among other humans, we have desires that go with that: the desire to find a livelihood, the desire to have a partner, the desire to be part of a community, to secure a place to live, and to have access to food that we like. This is the world many of us live in from day to day. These desires take a lot of energy, a lot of our attention and effort, and they're myriad. I can't even name them all: relationships, politics, family life, all these worldly desires. Gil Fronsdal sometimes says that instead of human beings, we should be called "human desirlings." I heard that from him years and years ago, and it stuck with me.

These kinds of desires are very interesting for the spiritual path because they're the ones that we tend to defend as normal and even necessary. "If I didn't have those desires, what would I do? I'd just sit on the couch all day. I'd be a couch potato. I wouldn't do anything, I couldn't accomplish things, I couldn't help people, I couldn't serve my family." We tend to mark these desires off as off-limits. How can we even question those? The Buddha asked us to put a few question marks on those, as to whether or not we have to pursue them with any kind of grasping.

It's a big realm for Dharma practice because this realm of desires occupies much of our day. These are the ones that we go from one to one to one throughout our day. So many of them are mild forms of what I called kāma before—the world of sense desires and sensual pleasures. Not all of them are taṇhā (that grasping kind of desire), but they are kāma. We don't have to have deep pathological grasping in order to be somewhat enslaved to our desires. The Buddha asked us to question that enslavement and see if we could find other ways to live our life such that it doesn't have that inherent stress associated with all those things.

4. Elevated Human Wishes

Continuing with the five classes of desire, the fourth one I would call our more elevated human wishes. There are various words for this: wholesome, skillful, refined, elevated, spiritual. Choose the word that works for you. These include wishing to be ethical, wishing to be kind, wanting a peaceful and happy life where we are able to care more about how we're living than about money or status. Wanting to learn to meditate, wanting to learn the spiritual teachings, desire for the well-being of others.

These are nice desires. These are generally very good desires. These are the kind of wishes that can serve our spiritual development if we engage with them right. The Buddha used these elevated desires as part of the path. He encouraged us to have these kinds of skillful wishes in order to uplift us or draw us along the path.

When we allow these wishes to be felt in our heart, they encourage us towards skillful and wholesome action. The happiness that comes from fulfilling these kinds of desires is nourishing. These are the wishes that can support confidence, ease, brightness, and a certain kind of refined joy. Not a bubbly kind of joy associated with the sense world, but a tranquil kind of joy.

That is the kind of pleasure that the Buddha approved of. This is actually repeated in several suttas. It is called the bliss of renunciation, the bliss of seclusion, the bliss of peace, the bliss of enlightenment. The Buddha says of this kind of pleasure that it should be pursued, that it should be developed, that it should be cultivated, and that it should not be feared. How about that? The Buddha says there are kinds of pleasure that should be pursued.

There's the famous story of the Buddha realizing that all of the efforts he had done up to that point—when he was the bodhisattva before he was the Buddha—hadn't brought awakening yet. He was frustrated by all his ascetic practices and his practices of the formless jhānas^[5]. Then he thought back to a time in his childhood where he entered meditative absorption sitting under a tree peacefully, and how easeful and joyful that felt. He recognized that that was the way forward; that was the path. This kind of meditative pleasure that he had first felt somewhat spontaneously, he then cultivated under the Bodhi tree and was able to awaken.

These kinds of pleasures and happinesses are part of the path. It's important to note that even though that quote I read included "the bliss of enlightenment," these are not the goal actually. This kind of meditative pleasure that comes as a fruit or a byproduct of calming the mind, calming the body, and having bright awareness, is not actually freedom yet. There can still be some delusion in there, such as a sense of self or pride. But if we keep up with the mindfulness practice, those side points will be seen and addressed at some point. This meditative happiness will allow us to awaken.

5. The Aspiration to Awaken

That's the fifth class of desire, which I think is worth separating out: specifically the aspiration to awaken, to be free, to be liberated. That can take various forms. What kind of wanting is that? It's wanting to know, to discover, to investigate, to see, to touch into, to realize, to release.

These kinds of wishes, desires, and aspirations feel very beautiful, very clean, very wholesome. They are a little bit distinct from that fourth class where we want to be ethical and kind. Sometimes, at certain points on the path, this fifth kind of desire to awaken can get very strong, and then it's called saṃvega^[6], which is often translated as spiritual urgency. Maybe you've felt that one.

For some people, there's a resonance with the Western idea of a calling—a calling to practice, a deep sense of wishing to be free. Sometimes it can be a little bit unpleasant, even. The other desires feel beautiful and clean and wholesome, and then there can also be a "get me out" feeling, and that's part of the process too. Sometimes this wishing to be free can come really straight from the heart.

Discerning Skillful Desires

So we have these five: we have taṇhā (grasping kind of desire), we have basic desires related to fulfilling bodily needs, we have the desires that accompany living a human life among other humans, we have our more spiritual wishes for kindness, for ethics, for meditative development, and then we specifically have the aspiration to be liberated.

They're not quite a linear spectrum; I hope you see they define a space. But nonetheless, there is a clear division between unwholesome and wholesome, between unskillful and skillful. Some of them are blatantly painful, and those are the ones where we can feel that contraction. Other ones we tend to make a trade-off. We say, "I want this, and the benefits of it are going to be better than the detriments, so I'm going for it." Like when we're working a certain job that has some stress associated with it, but we need the income. And then some of them are really quite beautiful, and we can fulfill those as much as we want; they are clearly helpful and will support us on our path.

I want to delve now a little bit into that realm that I called the skillful desire, because it's not talked about as much. I hope you're seeing at this point that there are a lot of different kinds, and we're going to need to be careful about which side we're on.

What about these skillful desires, these wishes that can support the path? In that scheme of five, they were the fourth and the fifth. But actually, I'm going to take a step back into that third realm and say that it's important to realize that in order to support our more elevated, spiritual, refined kind of desires, we have to do some work in the realm of the third kind of desire: the everyday wants and needs of creating a human life. We have to do some preparatory work in the realm of our life in order to bolster our ability to fully develop these more refined kinds of desire.

In other words, we have to set ourselves up. We have to set up our life. Everybody in this room and on YouTube, you have set yourself up such that you could be here this morning. That's not bad; that's already an accomplishment. A lot of people haven't done that. We can work in the very ordinary realm of the sensual world, the stuff of our life, in order to create conditions that will allow us to move forward on the path with the more refined kinds of happiness.

There's a couple things I want to say about that. First of all, we need to simplify. We need to simplify our life in certain ways in order to support practice. I want to read some lines actually from the Mettā Sutta^[7], from the Buddha's discourse on loving-kindness or goodwill. They're right at the beginning, and they point toward a way of being that has an air of simplicity to it that I find quite touching. A way of being that's straightforward and uncomplicated. This is from the Amaravati translation:

"This is what should be done by one who is skilled in goodness, and who knows the path of peace. Let them be able and upright, straightforward and gentle in speech, humble and not conceited, contented and easily satisfied, unburdened with duties and frugal in their ways, peaceful and calm and wise and skillful, not proud and demanding in nature."

Doesn't it feel nice just to hear that? People who are like that are really nice to be around. This has to do with generating the conditions for loving-kindness in our life, but it points toward a simplification of how we are. Simplifying our actions, simplifying our speech to be straightforward and gentle. Probably even simplifying our thought processes so that we're not always caught up in a million theories and speculations and anxieties about what other people are thinking about us. It's not necessary and not so supportive of our practice.

We want to live in a way that has some spaciousness to it, to the degree that we can. I support creating some outer spaciousness if we can: reducing the amount of running around that we do, simplifying our activities, bringing more spiritual friends into our life. But even if those aren't your life conditions—you have busyness, you have many people, you have work that's complex—there can be an inner spaciousness in relating to that. This phrase, "unburdened with duties"—there's a lot to be said for not having too many duties, but if you do, there's a way of being unburdened by them. There's a way of relating to them such that they aren't heavy and difficult and stressful for us if we create inner spaciousness around those.

If we want a life of practice that includes a life of metta and goodwill and kindness, these words that I offered give us some touchstones: straightforwardness, gentleness, humble, contented, unburdened, frugal.

Finding Refuge in the Senses

That leads into finding ways to relate to the sensory world skillfully so that we can create a sense of refuge. Of all the vast realm of skillful desires and wishes, the desires that help us find refuge are essential. Some of those actually come from the sensory world, from the material world. The five physical senses—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching—can be used or related to in ways that nourish our heart and mind.

The sense realm in Buddhist teachings is often associated with the need for restraint, and I would agree with that generally because often we're not restrained in that realm, and that only leads to stress. But not all sense stimuli are to be avoided. How can we? We have these sense organs, so we don't have to avoid everything. We can use the sense world in ways that evoke faith, that evoke refuge, that evoke nourishment for us when we're properly attuned.

We can even use the sixth sense, which is our cognition, our mind, in ways that are nourishing. Sometimes people have the idea about spiritual practice that anything related to thinking is bad, that it should all just be coming from the heart, coming from emotions. But it's not the case; we can use our thinking mind. We can use the fullness of our mind and heart to nourish us.

I want to name a number of ways that we can use the ordinary stuff of our life, our six senses, to encourage refuge and a sense of faith, and an ability to go forward with our practice, to align our life with Dharma practice. I'll say them somewhat quickly with the idea that you might just kind of feel which ones resonate for you. Maybe you'll also get some new ideas and say, "Oh, I'm not really using that realm in a way that could be helpful for me."

Seeing

For some, seeing certain objects, such as a Buddha Rupa^[8] or even monastic robes, going to see monastics can be deeply nourishing. There's a way in which our visual senses can resonate with something in us. The posture that the Buddha is in when sitting in these Buddha Rupas—there's an elevation of his chest, and this is actually deliberate. It's meant to evoke a sense of confidence. That posture has an uprightness to it (you remember that word from what I just read in the Mettā Sutta). We're not necessarily going to literally imitate what a stone figure is doing, but there is a way that if we sit up straight or feel the mirror between us and this Rupa, we can actually feel some of that confidence in ourselves. The posture of the body is not irrelevant in how we feel.

Then there is the beauty of a retreat center. It's not an accident that the aesthetic in this room is simple. It's meant to evoke simplicity so that we have simplicity in the mind also. It can be uplifting; there's a subtle sense of calm. If you have a certain sensibility when you walk into a room like this, can you feel the stillness in this room? Because a lot of people have meditated in here. There have been a lot of hours of meditation in here. So there's a way in which that—a sense coming in through our sense doors—can be nourishing for us if we open to it.

Hearing

Hearing the Dharma has long served as a gateway to profound insight, and at a more ordinary level, it's inspirational. Being here this morning to hear the Dharma, and there's also a vast number of talks and guided meditations available online. Listening can be a ready source of support for our practice. Is that a sense desire to want to hear the Dharma? Yeah, but it also goes in that elevated realm.

Cognition (Reading and Thinking)

Reading the Dharma is also good. Using the mind, using cognition. I recommend reading the original texts if you're drawn to them, of course in English translation. There are good English translations available now, and there are also some very good modern interpretations by teachers. The Buddha encourages reflection on the teachings. You are allowed to think about what you've read, think about whether it makes sense to you, think about how it might apply in your life, have questions about whether it's really the case. You probably wouldn't want to do a lot of long thinking while you're sitting in meditation, just because we want to separate those, but outside of sitting on the cushion, please do think about the Dharma.

For some practitioners, the first real taste of confidence in the Dharma comes when we read something that is exactly like what we've experienced. We've been sitting for maybe just a short time, but we've experienced something, or our mind shifts in a certain way, and then we pick up a sutta or a teacher quotes something in a talk, and we realize, "Ah, the Buddha said exactly what I've experienced." And that was 2,600 years ago. Maybe this guy did know something about how the mind works. I'm joking a little bit, but there really can be a profound resonance when we see that at least some of what's in the suttas reflects what we see in our own mind and body right here in the modern world. We also understand that the mind can be trained; the process works. When I meditate, it works. I'm not the exception. So that can be very nourishing.

I think it also helps at a more emotional level to hear stories about people who overcame their suffering. In the suttas, there's a wonderful story about a woman named Kisa Gotami^[9] who was very distraught because her baby died. She carried the child around; she just couldn't grok the death. She came to the Buddha with her dead child, and he said, "Okay, there's help for you if you can get a mustard seed from a house where no one has died." She set off on this quest. It was a brilliantly skillful teaching on the Buddha's part because house after house was willing to give her a mustard seed, but there wasn't any house where nobody had died. So she got it over time. We can be inspired by these more subtle ways that the Buddha taught people. He didn't always just talk about the five kinds of desire; he really could touch into people's deepest emotions and find ways to connect that into the Dharma. We can resonate with her grief, and also with her wisdom in understanding through that practice.

Being in Nature

Being in nature is a decidedly sensory experience, but it can give us a glimpse of the Dharma in certain ways that sometimes penetrate more deeply than things that are explicitly spiritual. Just seeing the trees, the bees, the clouds, the streams. Did you guys see the blooming dogwood on the way in? Amazing. These things tell us about impermanence, impersonality, conditionality in a very straightforward way. We see the cycle of life happening, and we understand how we're part of it. This too is the Dharma. The truth of nature can heal and clarify things for us.

Devotional Actions

Then there are certain devotional actions. This isn't for everyone, but if you've never tried it, you might. Certain devotional actions can uplift our heart and mind, making it easier for us to connect in with these refined forms of happiness. For some people, bowing before you start meditation, or chanting, or ritual—these things can connect us in with the spiritual dimension of life. Some skeptics, like me originally, have been stunned at how deeply these kinds of simple devotional actions can go. They can really touch the heart.

Conclusion

Are there ways that you could express your spiritual desires through your material life? It's a question for all of you just to consider. Is there some way that you could shift maybe take some of the energy that's going into ordinary desires like food, comfort, various pleasures? We devote a lot of our attention to that: "How am I going to get this or that? Get the next one that's going to be good." How could we convert that into elevated desires for simple surroundings that support practice, for trust and confidence in practice, for learning the teachings, for spiritual community? There's a way in which we can elevate our wishes toward the upper end of those five classes of desire. Sometimes we're able to literally convert the ones that are a little bit more worldly focused into something more nourishing that is part of the path.

We started by talking about how desire, first of all, is very prominent for us, but also that it has some subtlety to it. Clearly, a lot of the desires that we chase don't really help us. They're exhausting, we don't have control over them, they're pretty temporary when we get them, and we have to do the next one. And yet, some things are good to want. I don't know if you can get awakened without wanting that at some level; it's not going to just happen.

So these spiritual wishes for goodness and meditative development are good ways to direct that movement toward in our mind to be movement along the path. Eventually, I think we will move into the complete release of maybe all kinds of desire except for those bodily ones, and definitely we move into the release of taṇhā—the grasping kind of desire that is the cause of suffering in the Second Noble Truth.

But then that leads to a natural question: How do we know if we want something, is that a good want or an unhelpful want? It's a little bit of trial and error; there's a need for discernment there. We have to keep checking. We can check if wholesome states in the mind are increasing and unwholesome states decreasing, or the reverse. If we want kindness, we will tend to not increase our taṇhā when we do that. It can still creep in. We can want to be kind and then we say, "I'm really a kind person." We take it on as an identity, and that's when it becomes unskillful. But if we just keep checking: "Is what I'm wanting helping me to be calm, more wholesome, more skillful?" That's probably a good kind of desire.

We can also check the felt sense. If there's tension associated with a certain desire—something grasping or more in the sensory realm tends to bring some tension, some stress with it—whereas other kinds of wants have a more open feeling to them. There's still a little bit of tension maybe, but it's more subtle. We can also check whether what we're wanting will help others or only us. That's a good clue. If it would help others, then it's more in the realm of skillful.

Developing this kind of discernment is part of the path. We are not perfect at first at knowing whether we're having skillful or unskillful desire, so we'll have to develop that over time. But one implication of thinking in this way is that the whole world becomes our realm of practice. Every moment, every encounter, every wish that we have in our mind right here in the tangible world is a doorway to taking a step on the path if we can see it in that way.

There's a completeness, a fullness to our relationship to life, and especially when we've undertaken a spiritual path, we start to see the ways in which some of what we do supports that, and some of what we do doesn't support that. We can start to prioritize moving toward the things that are actually helping us, that are propelling us along the path. Part of the subtlety of knowing about which desires are helpful and not is that it shifts over time. Something that was helpful for a while might become unhelpful later. We have to let go of certain desires that were okay at the beginning but then become burdensome.

I hope this has clarified a little bit this realm of desire so that we don't have an automatic sense of "Oh, it's all bad, I've got to get rid of all my desires," and then the reaction against that, "But I don't want to get rid of all my desires." We can sweep all of that aside and consider instead this dimension of wholesome versus unwholesome, skillful versus unskillful. Which desires are supporting the path? We move more and more toward having more of those in our life, and then let mindfulness take care of the rest of it. Let the ones fall away that aren't helpful, moving us toward that final movement into freedom, into awakening, freedom from all those movements of mind.

Thank you.