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en:lib:authors:thanissaro:trainyourhunger [2019/10/30 10:32] – docinfo_head del. Johann | en:lib:authors:thanissaro:trainyourhunger [2019/10/30 14:12] – navi and box Johann | ||
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+ | ====== Train Your Hunger (The Sea Squirt) ====== | ||
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+ | There’s a little animal called the sea squirt. It’s not very big, and its most complex organs are its brain and its digestive system. After it’s born, it moves around in the ocean and finds a spot that it likes, where it senses that the food will be good. Then it stays there for the rest of its life. And one of the first things it does after it’s found its spot is to digest its brain, so it’s just left with a digestive system, basically to show who’s in charge. | ||
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+ | This is true not just for sea squirts. They’ve shown that when the brain makes its map of reality, a lot of the information — in fact the first order of information — comes in from the digestive tract. All the signals about what you’re hungry for, what you lack, drive you as you look to the world outside. A large portion of your map of reality is devoted to what’s needed inside, in your gut, in your stomach. And you go out looking. | ||
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+ | This fits in with the Buddha’s teachings on the fact that what defines us as beings is our need to subsist on food. We’re constantly looking for the next meal. It’s good to keep this point in mind. It’s often forgotten. | ||
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+ | I’ve been reading some books on the noble eightfold path, and the general message they give is that we suffer because we have the wrong map of reality: that inside we believe there’s a permanent self, and outside we believe that there’s a permanent happiness. And because of that wrong map, we make a lot of wrong decisions. We react to the world in the wrong way. So the solution they propose is to see, on the one hand, that there is no self, or no permanent self inside, and that outside nothing is permanent. As a result, you see that there’s nothing worth going after, so you just give up, happy to be free from making any effort for any purpose. | ||
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+ | And that’s supposed to be wisdom. You basically take an equanimous attitude toward things as they arise and pass away, knowing that ultimately everything’s going to pass away, and that’s it. Well, to give up feeding on the world out there simply because there’s no permanent self, or because nothing out there is permanent, is like saying you’re going to stop feeding on food because you realize that your stomach is impermanent and food is impermanent. | ||
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+ | That’s not going to work. Our hunger drives us. As the Buddha said, it’s our primary disease. If we can’t get the food we want, well, we’ll settle for something else. You see this with the coyotes. You look into their scat and sometimes you find plastic rope. They couldn’t get the food they wanted but they found something to stuff into their stomachs. And as long as our hunger is driving us, we’re going to keep looking for food, even if it has to be plastic rope. | ||
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+ | So the solution doesn’t lie simply in changing your map of the world outside or the world inside, to see that there’s no permanent entity either inside or out — because that, of course, doesn’t take into account the fact that your inside map is not telling you about permanent entities. It’s telling you about hunger. And we don’t hunger for food because we think we have a permanent self or that there’s permanent food. We hunger for food, both physical and mental, because of our hunger pains. | ||
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+ | Our reaction to those pains is what we’ve got to train: We’ve got to train our hunger to be more discerning as to what’s worth going after. We train it through virtue, concentration, | ||
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+ | In other words, you have to learn how to abstain for a while. And you abstain largely out of confidence that this is going to be good for you. But you also need some substitutes for the things you’re abstaining from. The substitutes may actually be better for you, but it’ll take a while to get used to them. | ||
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+ | It’s the same with the precepts. We abstain from behavior that we might have felt like doing. Before, if we found pests in the house, we’d think it convenient to just kill them. Or to avoid awkward situations, we’d think it okay to tell little white lies. That kind of thing. But now we realize that we’ve got to abstain from these things 100%. There may be difficulties, | ||
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+ | The same with all the other little things that would go against the precepts: If you’re able to abstain from them, you train your hunger in new directions. Rather than feeding off the advantage of breaking the precepts, you feed off the sense of self-esteem, | ||
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+ | Even more so with concentration: | ||
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+ | Then you can turn around and look at the food that you got, say, from sensual desire or ill will, or any of the hindrances — restlessness and anxiety, uncertainty, | ||
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+ | As for discernment, | ||
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+ | Once you see the cause, the third step is to ask yourself, “Why do you go for that? What’s the allure? What’s the flavor? What’s the sense of being fed that you get off of that?” And then the fourth step is to compare the allure with the drawbacks. “If you feed off this, what are the long-term consequences? | ||
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+ | And in addition to dispassion, you develop disenchantment, | ||
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+ | And when you can apply this analysis in an all-around way, eventually even to your concentration, | ||
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+ | So you don’t overcome your hunger for things simply by denying it. You find something better to feed on. But you have to train the hunger to appreciate that, because without the training in virtue, concentration, | ||
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+ | So the way to let go is not to just deny your hunger, it’s to train your hunger to make it more discerning, to ask yourself deep down inside, “What do you really want out of life? What would really be satisfying? | ||
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+ | So instead of digesting your brain, you get your intelligence to take over until it puts an end to your need for a digestive system. You find a happiness that’s totally free from hunger, free from the need to feed, and that’s when you let everything go — not out of defeat, out of victory. | ||
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+ | That attitude of giving up on consuming the world because you say, “Well, it’s not permanent, and I’m not permanent, so I might as well give up looking for happiness”: | ||
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+ | As the Buddha said, though, one of the names for the noble eightfold path is unexcelled victory in battle. You battle the ignorance that’s been guiding your hunger, and you come out with something much better. You’ve learned that you can use the processes of fabrication to create a path that leads to something unfabricated. And that’s genuine victory. We struggle in the world because of our hunger, but when we find something that doesn’t require feeding and totally satisfies the hunger, then there’s no more need to struggle. As the Buddha said, better than victory over thousands of other people is victory over yourself — and this is how the victory is won. | ||
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