Passion, Desire, and the Path

Often in spiritual traditions desire is seen simply as something to rid ourselves of, but there is a very important place for it on the path. We need passion. And we need both to understand desire and to know freedom from desire.

The theme for the talk tonight is passion and desire on the path. So those two words, passion and desire, have got a bit of a bad press in a lot of spiritual traditions, but maybe especially in Buddhist teachings. We can tend to kind of demonize them a little bit. So I'd like to just explore a few of the different aspects of this. Of course it's a huge subject, so just to touch on a few.

It seems to me, as I was talking yesterday a little bit, the movement of the Dharma, the movement of the practice, is going against the stream. It's going against the stream, certainly culturally, and not just in this culture but probably most cultures that have ever existed in human history. It's going against that stream, and it's also going against quite a strong inner stream that we have of greed and acquisition, and aversion and delusion.

So to go against the stream in a real way, in a significant way, to go against that stream inner and outer, it takes a huge amount of energy, an enormous amount of energy. Where's that energy going to come from? And is it possible actually, if we just talk about passion, in practice, is it possible that actually we need passion, we need passion and desire?

When we hear about or read the story of the Buddha -- many of you are familiar with it; he leaves the luxury of his home, etc., and he's out there, and he goes through all these austerities. He describes eating, you know, one lentil a day, or two grains of rice, and then the next month he only eats one grain of rice. [laughs] I don't know how true it is. And then fasting, etc. It's really quite extreme. And he said he could press his finger into his abdomen and feel his spine without much effort.

So when we read that, the overwhelming sense, of course, is one of extreme renunciation. And later, he renounced that level of renunciation, actually. But what also strikes me is the amount of passion involved in that. Not just the renunciation -- there's something so determined and passionate and driven almost about that. That often doesn't stand out to us.

I heard -- I can't remember where it was -- recently, or maybe I read it, there was a very well-known, very well-respected and loved Tibetan teacher called Kalu Rinpoche. And I think he died sometime in the last fifteen years. A very profound teacher, a great being. And he said that his teacher was actually living in a monastery, but not as a monk. He was living there as the tailor. He was the monastery tailor, if I remember rightly. And one day, Kalu Rinpoche's teacher -- he was not a teacher; he was a tailor -- suddenly it occurred to him (I don't know what happened), it occurred to him that he was going to die. It just struck him really obviously in the face. So what he did when he had that realization, he locked himself in the monastery toilet, or one of the toilets. Locked himself in the monastery toilets for seven years. [laughter] I assume someone sort of shoved him food when they realized he really wasn't going to come out. [laughter] Until he had reached some degree of awakening. A lot of passion there! [laughter] Now, if that happened at Gaia House, and someone came to me and said, "We've got a yogi, Rob ..." [laughter] It's just, we don't see that level here. We don't see that level in the culture. And heaven knows what health and safety would say!

I also read recently about -- of course, it's not just in the Dharma -- about the Captain Scott expedition to the Antarctic. It was actually chronicled, I think, by a guy called Wilson. So there were a bunch of scientists on this expedition to explore the Antarctic, I think. And this person was writing about it and keeping a journal. He said there were all these scientists from different fields of science, and it was absolutely freezing cold. You can imagine -- I don't even know how much below zero it was. And they had nothing to do in the evenings. So they were in their tents, and what they would do was someone would lecture on their subject. They were all interested in Antarctica. One person was a geologist, one person was a biologist of Antarctic wildlife, etc. So each evening would feature a different lecture on this kind of stuff. And this description was that they were so passionate about knowledge that despite the cold they would barter with each other -- say, "You give me an extra geology lesson, I'll give you my pair of socks." [laughter] I read it, and it was just so, so much passion there, despite the obviously extremely adverse conditions.

So if we need that passion, what is it that's going to allow that passion to come in? This is a very important question. Partly it's actually sensing the possibilities of practice. This is really important. The reason why the Buddha was that committed, that forthright, was he had a really deep intuition of what the possibilities of practice are. And it's something that is not that common to be fully in touch with. So what does it mean for us? I'm not wanting to thrust anything on anyone, but what does it mean? What is my sense of the possibilities of practice? And for some people, that is complete, unexcelled liberation. But for others that just doesn't do it, and then you have to ask, "Well, what is my sense of possibility?"

In a way, what was remarkable about the Buddha was that he had a desire for happiness like we all do, like all human beings have a desire for happiness, but instead of kind of selling short, he had this sense, this intuition, that there was a kind of ultimate happiness; there was a happiness so beyond anything that could be imagined. He said, "I'm not going to stop until I've got that," and then he was uncompromising about it. That level of uncompromisation -- is that a word? [laughs] -- that level of commitment, is extremely rare. Usually something comes along and we say, "I'll settle for that." And our desire doesn't take root, it doesn't engulf us in flames.

So in the case of Kalu Rinpoche's teacher, it was a sense of death. Death, contemplating death, gave a sense of spiritual urgency. Many of you know the teacher Krishnamurti, who also died sometime in the last twenty years -- I can't remember. He had this phrase that he would say sometimes, and it sounds quite harsh on the surface but, if I remember, he says, "We come to the infinite well of life with a thimble, and so we go away thirsty."^[1] We come to the infinite well of life with a thimble. You know what a thimble is? It's just that tiny little cup thing you put on your thumb for sewing. We come to the infinite well of life with a thimble, and so we go away thirsty. It's worth reflecting on. Why is it that we actually ask so little out of life? Why is it that we, in a way, sell ourselves short, sell our sense of possibilities short?

Partly it's this being out of contact with, not willing to contemplate death -- the brevity, the ephemerality of human life. Because it's scary, we shy away from it, but I think that in many cases our passion, our desire needs that. We need to be living in the light of death. We need to be contemplating that, every day really. Death is coming, and we don't know when. Our life is very, very short. This isn't morbid; it gives a sense of urgency, of preciousness, of beauty even, of mystery. There are other factors, and I touched on them yesterday -- not getting too involved in the attractions of the world, and the complexity of the demands of the world. And the factor of joy, so renunciation and joy being factors that really feed the passion. I won't talk about that too much now.

So when we look at our life and our life in practice, we can see -- and I think this goes almost for everyone -- that our passion is not steady. There's no such thing as a steady passion, or even a steadily increasing passion. If we look at the rhythms of our practice and our life, we'll see there are times when it's stronger and times when it wanes, and that's just natural. But are we generally moving to take care of the passion, that we're buoying it up when it needs buoying up?

And so that kind of passion for practice, certainly, it may not look very dramatic, it may not look the kind of way that we think of passion. Certainly sitting and walking here, and doing the work, it's a quiet passion. But, you know, there are people in this hall who have been here for months, and it takes a quiet passion to sustain through that, to sustain the intentionality, to sustain the commitment, to sustain the interest and the effort. A quiet passion.

As I say, it's not steady. And I remember, I think it was 2001, I was living in America. I was feeling a bit dry in my practice, like the fire had died down a lot. I was still sitting every day and all that, but just not the same oomph. I went to my teacher and I said to her, you know, "This is going on." And she said, "Well, come and see me every couple of weeks" or something. So I started doing that, and we just talked about practice and this and that. And I think within about six months, due to whatever, I had decided to give away everything and leave America [laughs], quit my job, etc., and devote everything to the Dharma, and came on retreat here, actually, for a while, for a long time. Just the point is that there was a feeling of a lack of passion, a feeling of a lack of full fire and vitality, and just doing something to invigorate it. It will go through these ups and downs. Can we address them? Expect them, but address them.

When we talk about desire in practice, in a way, I don't know if we need to then talk about goals, because I don't know if there is such a thing as desire in practice without a sense of goal. And that can be a very charged question. Oftentimes we have a real resistance to talking about or conceiving of practice in terms of goals. It's quite painful for us, because of all different reasons -- too much striving in our life, too much contraction around getting somewhere in life or achieving something.

But I wonder if it's possible for passion to be -- and this is an open question -- for passion to be there without a sense of goal, for desire to be there without a sense of goal, and if actually a sense of goal in practice helps to direct and channel the energy that we have, our life energy. We can have all kinds of reactions to the notions of goals in practice. It can be quite painful and something that we're quite averse to. But in way, life is full of goals. So even in the day here, when the bell goes for lunch at 12:30, then the goal of everyone is to drop what they are doing and make their way to the lunch hall, and then the goal is to get the food in the mouth. It's not a big deal. Life is full of goals. On every level, life is full of goals. If you're involved in any kind of relationship -- a friendship, or a spouse, or a partner, whatever -- it takes a lot of work, a sense of effort and direction to actually make that work. We're moving towards something. It takes time.

What's the problem with goals? This is really a necessary question for us to ask. What's the problem with goals? Is there a problem with goals? Or is it that when we have a goal the self tends to wrap itself around it and make a problem out of it? So what happens if I or another teacher describes some, you know, experience in practice or some insight or something, and you think, "I haven't got that yet"? What happens at that point? Do we then take it as a measurement of self and self-worth? Does the self-view come into it? If it does, it's going to be painful, there's no question about it. It's going to be painful. To the degree that we're identified with the whole process of getting somewhere, and take it as an indication of where we are personally, and how much we're worth, and our value, goals are going to be painful. But we actually don't need to take it that way. As I said, life is full of goals. Can we find a relationship with goals that is not problematic? Because life is full of them, can we find a way that's just not a problem?

So is it bad that maybe passion and desire need a goal for practice? Śāntideva, one of the great Mahāyāna teachers, he talks about what's a balanced and Right Effort in practice. If we're moving towards something and applying effort in our practice, which is what we are doing, what we should be doing, he said it needs four factors. (1) One of them is a sense of aspiration. In other words, we need to have a sense of where we're going, what we're aspiring to. Like I said, for some it's, you know, the big one: complete, unexcelled liberation, nothing less. And for others, it's more like, "Well, I just want to learn a bit more about calmness." But there needs to be a sense of aspiration for effort to channel itself. So to actually be clear about what the aspiration is, to be clear, and reflect: what is my aspiration?

(2) Second one he said is confidence. So again, this is quite interesting. Often we shy away from the whole sense of goals. We say, "Maybe other people can do that. I can't do that." It touches right into our sense of lack of worthiness to even aspire, lack of self-esteem that we will be able to. It's a very interesting area. But in order that the effort be workable, be helpful, we actually have to have a sense that this goal to which I'm aspiring, little old me is able -- you know, I can do that, I can get there. There's some confidence there. So aspiration, confidence.

(3) Third one: joy. I touched on this in the opening talk. Nourishing a sense of joy, a sense of well-being in the mind. If we come into the meditation hall, or if we come into retreat, and it's like, "Right, down to business!", it's squeezing the life and the blood out of our being, out of the meditation, out of the practice. Nothing is going to come out of that. The fruit that comes out is going to be very shrivelled and dry. So as we're applying effort, finding a sense of joy. This is really, really important. Aspiration, confidence, joy. (4) Fourth one: rest, knowing when it's enough and resting.

So we have desire in life, there's no question about it. We have desire in life. The movement of desire shapes our life at every level, from the most gross (who we end up hanging out with, what kind of reactions we get back from people in the world, what kind of place we're in), from the most gross to the most subtle, actually shapes the world that we experience, the world we live in, shapes our momentary experience. The movement of desire shapes our life at every level.

This isn't just, obviously, in the Buddhist tradition. There's a quote from the Upanishads, which I think predate the Buddha a couple of hundred years. It's talking about this. It says:

You are what your deep, driving desire is.

As is your desire, so is your will.

As is your will, so is your deed [your action].

As is your deed, so is your destiny.^[2]

So it's really important, I think, to have a look in our life, a really caring and close look: how and where is desire moving? How is it moving and where is it moving? The other day, in the question about the Four Noble Truths and the eightfold path, one factor is Four Right Efforts. It's the Right Effort factor of the eightfold path, what the Buddha talked about: putting in effort to cultivate what is beautiful in the heart. So all of those lists -- equanimity, and mindfulness, and compassion, and loving-kindness, and patience, and generosity, and interest, etc., calmness -- cultivating them, and letting go of what's not helpful: judgmentalism, irritability, disinterest, anger, boredom, agitation, etc.

How and where is the desire moving? Mostly in this tradition, to use that phrase again, in this tradition the teaching has been weighted more about letting go of desire, letting go of wanting anything to happen. If you read the original Buddhist teaching, there's actually a whole other sort of stream of way of practising within the teachings, and it's actually about following this desire for happiness and just refining it and refining it. So that one says, "Actually, I am very interested in happiness. I do want happiness. I do want pleasure. But I want a really good kind of happiness, a really good pleasure." And then one moves and one finds a certain level of that in meditation, and then a deeper level, and then a deeper level, and then a deeper level. And this by itself leads all the way to awakening.^[3] I'm just putting that out there because I think it's important to realize that there's more than one way to move forward on this path.

How and where is desire moving? For a person of practice, for a person committed to the path, how and where is the passion and the desire? Where is it not going for someone really committed? Where is it not going? All of this is very human, so I don't mean to have any judgment with this; it's more just a question of looking at these energies and asking oneself. Not squandering our passion and desire -- which is a form of energy; passion and desire is a form of energy, and I'll come back to this. We have a limited amount of energy, in a way. Not squandering it on that which does not lead to freedom, that which doesn't lead to truth, that which doesn't lead to love or joy or deep peace. Not squandering it on trivia. Not squandering it on, just as I mentioned, one's trying to be a bit more comfortable, have things be a bit more convenient or just a bit more pleasurable in the realm of the senses. All very human and very understandable, but it's actually sapping our reservoir of passion and desire.

And to see this in our life, and be very clear. Also not being frittered in a kind of distraction. So to be going in one's day with the radio on in the background -- it's insignificant in a lot of ways, or the TV on a lot or whatever; it doesn't really matter. Of course it doesn't matter. But what happens to the mind? Mind is pulled by this, pulled by the radio. It's never really settled. One of my very first teachers used to talk about the mind kind of being like an electronic capacitor -- it has this ability to store energy, to gather energy, and if we're always being distracted by things, the energy cannot gather. No energy, no passion, no desire.

Fear. How much of our passion doesn't even get the chance to be seen, to flower, because of fear, fear coming in and just shutting something off, shutting off an avenue of choice in life, shutting off an exploration in practice? The Buddha uses this word viriya. It sometimes means 'energy' or 'effort' or 'persistence,' but it can also be translated as 'courage.' There's something about just not giving into fear -- of course, this is a huge subject, too -- not giving into fear that allows our passion to build.

So when we think of those words, passion and desire, perhaps we think immediately of sexual passion, sexual desire, and romantic passion and desire. And in a way, those words -- that's the sort of popular image of what passion means, a passionate human being, passionate desire. That's the sort of popular image of those words. And not excluding that, not excluding that, certainly, from what I'm talking about tonight. As I said, we're lay people, and so we are sometimes involved in sexual relationships, in romantic relationships. It's a part of our life, and so it needs addressing. And again, this is one of those things, I don't feel it's been -- we haven't fully embraced it as a topic for inquiry and dialogue yet, certainly in this tradition, and maybe in the Buddhist world as a whole. We tend to kind of leave it aside. And there are reasons for that. But I think we need to inquire into this, passion and desire in the realm of sex and romance.

I'm going to just put out some open questions. No judgment here; they're really open questions. They're not easy questions either. What happens, can we notice what happens and actually keep track of what happens when we have sex and there isn't the love there? What actually happens to the being and the capacity of the being, the brightness of the being, the love of the being, the actual passion, even, of the being, in a deep way? When the sexual relations are just about pleasure, and there's no love there.

Another question: what happens when we're in a romantic relationship and there is love there? This is a difficult question: is it that sometimes it's possible that a love for one person may close our heart to a wider love? That our capacity for love and also for passion and that kind of very deep desire in our life is getting closed because it's just focusing on one being? I'm not saying it does or it doesn't; it's a question. It can, at times, perhaps. These are really important questions. If we're in love, does it actually dampen our hunger?

Around this, around sexuality and romance, there's a whole range of personalities. And some people, they have a lot of energy in that area, a lot of interest there, and it's very alive for them, and it's very important in their life. And others much less. And that's fine. That's completely fine. Of course it's fine.

But another question: are we, do we at times maybe hide behind a path that is about no desire -- like Buddhism could be construed as? No desire. Are we actually hiding a little bit behind that? I can't remember where it was now, but there was a letter a woman wrote in to -- it must have been some spiritual magazine or something, and she wrote in and was basically complaining about Buddhist boyfriends not having any oomph because they were not into desire and not into getting attached, etc. [laughter] I don't know the details. But is it possible that sometimes there's a kind of -- I just don't want to deal with that area of life? I don't want to deal with it, the messiness of it, the agitation of it, the scariness of it, and so, "A 'no desire' path? Yeah, that sounds good."

Sometimes on retreats we have this phenomenon of what's called the vipassanā romance. I don't know if you've heard of this. It's when you're on retreat, and in the silence, and you're very diligently sitting and walking, and keeping the eyes down to the ground, and focused on the inner processes. And then out of the corner of the eye, one catches sight of someone who is very attractive. And then this thing starts building. They seem very lovely, and the attention goes to them more and more. Extremely common, extremely common. And I certainly actually think it's quite a beautiful thing; I don't have a problem with it. [laughter] It's just part of life. It's part of life. Sometimes in the quietness, in the openness of being, in the sensitivity, in the silence, the being is actually more open, the heart is more open, it's more touched by the beauty around one. We see the beauty in another -- man, woman -- and we're just more open, more sensitive. We feel it. We're more receptive in that area.

Can it be, though, that we stay with that sense of beauty and sensitivity and receptivity and appreciation? Or again, is it shrinking into "I want that, I want that," and then we're just fretting about when we're going to get to the end of the retreat and we're going to actually talk to this person? Of course, often when they open their mouth and we actually hear ... [laughter]

But it's a very regular phenomenon of retreat life. I was teaching in Finland a while ago, and a very young retreat; there were a lot of young people. Of course it was around. And one woman was describing to me, and I almost just said, "It's wonderful, but please, please, just make sure your retreat doesn't shrink down to that, because that would be a real shame." Because a lot of this practice is about opening, opening that passion, that desire, that receptivity and sensitivity, opening it wide, not shrinking down to one thing, one person, "I want that," him, her, whatever it is, which then makes that whole phenomenon of vipassanā romance quite painful, quite fretful.

If we stay with this just a little bit. And difficult questions, again. So in a romantic sexual relationship -- I don't even know how to put the question -- but what is true passion? What's true desire? What do I even mean by that? The Buddha asks a lot, whatever is happening, he asks: what's feeding it? That's a very principal question for him. So whatever's happening, what's feeding this thing?

And so we can see in this area with passion/desire around sex and romance, sometimes when there's a feeling of alienation from ourselves or from life, disconnection, the importance of that gets heightened. We need that, and somehow the passion gets injected with the energy of a sort of desperate sense of wanting to heal an alienation or a disconnection. We may not even be aware of it. Or a sense of loneliness, of course, or the fear of loneliness in the future. How much are the passion and the desire fed by a kind of massive, massive cultural hype of the prime significance of sex and romance, primarily romance? It's become probably the god of this culture (maybe next to consumerism). It's the thing which is raised above almost everything else as that which will -- everyone really wants and will make you happy. It's in Hollywood, it's in advertisements, it's all over the place. It wasn't actually always like that historically, that we have the same view of intimate relationships as we do now at this point in history.

But how much is our passion and desire being fed by that? Or a feeling of incompleteness, and we're looking for someone to give us that sense of completeness. Fears, beliefs, etc., about what we need to be happy. Not easy questions. And sometimes just sexually, there's stress and tension from work, from whatever, and how much are we actually seeking sex as a form of release? One releases in orgasm, and there's the release of that tension. How much is the whole thing being fed by that?

So that was a whole bunch of negative reasons, not to say that passion and desire are always being fed by unreal and negative reasons, but actually to begin to look into all this. And where is it leading? So again, is it leading to a kind of shrinking? Or is it leading to a keeping alive of our hunger, our spiritual hunger? If we're in a romantic relationship, are we really growing together, or are we just sort of, whatever, something else?

So being human, it's messy. And actually, the usual scenario is that there are multiple mixed motivations in all this. It's very complex, what we bring to sexuality and what we bring to romantic relationships. It's extremely complex. Thankfully, we can actually work with all of this. Despite there being perhaps not the greatest motivations, we can actually work with all that so that what comes and what flowers is something very beautiful and very nourishing to both people. At least that's a potential.

So passion and desire. If I talk a little about energy, because, as I said, passion and desire are forms of energy and they need energy. Sometimes sexuality and sexual release can be a way we squander energy. In Taoism, they talk a lot about keeping your sexual energy, preserving your sexual energy, and learning how to do that. I'm not going to go into that too much now. I don't think it's that simple.

Energy is very important though. It's a very striking thing being on retreat and just seeing how tiring it can be, being on retreat. Where does our energy go? We're just sitting, and we're sort of toddling up and down a bit, and in this case we're doing a bit of work, but for the most part it's not that strenuous. And yet, come 9:30, or come actually 9 o'clock, we're dreaming of the bed. Who goes to bed at 9:30? [laughs] What's going on on retreat that our energy gets sapped that way?

It's quite curious here, living at Gaia House, because just genetically or whatever, I'm a bit of a night bird, so it's often me who wanders around quite late at night, turning off all the lights, or whatever lights are remaining. And usually -- it's amazing, the whole place is in bed by -- I'm not even going to say what time; it's quite early. And I've noticed -- there are a few qigong retreats during the year. They get up very early, like 5 o'clock in the morning, to do qigong. I came in at something like 11:30 several times, several different retreats at night, expected to find an empty hall with the lights on, and opened the door and there were ten or twelve people sitting, still meditating. And I just started wondering: is there something about the qigong? Something about we need to take care of our physical energy to keep our kind of passion for practice alive as well?

So this business of the movement of energy in the body is very important. Sometimes at a very -- well, sometimes not so subtle, but at quite a subtle level, that energy flow in the body is actually blocked by different things that we do. It shuts down. This is a very important area to investigate. One of the things that shuts down the flow of energy or contorts it a bit is our non-attention to how we're living in terms of ethics. So what we're doing in that respect can actually fracture the energy flow in a subtle way.

Then in this whole area -- passion, desire, energy -- something like alcohol, this is quite interesting. I was talking to someone the other day, told me they were having a friend round, and they wanted to be really present to this friend. Then they thought, "Well, shall I just have half a glass of wine before they come?" And they thought, "I wouldn't be fully present, fully alive, passionately there." And they were sort of dithering -- I think it was a glass at first, and then they ended up having half a glass, as a sort of compromise. And they noticed "Wow!" It really took the edge off the presence, off the aliveness, just such a small amount of alcohol.

You know, people interpret the fifth precept about alcohol and drugs in a number of different ways, but I encourage an experimentation here. If you notice that it takes your edge off, if there's a decrease in sensitivity, a decrease in passion, it's quite significant. Are we willing to experiment with all of this? So with alcohol and some drugs, it actually feeds some passions. A lot of violence obviously comes out of that. And sometimes we feel like alcohol is going to nourish our romantic and sexual kind of feelings and energy, but actually it doesn't. Sometimes what it does is, there's a slight letting go of certain inhibitions, which may free up more energy. But to investigate all this stuff, investigate.

So passion, desire. Effort is related to this, if we go back to practice. Effort in practice. And how are we holding that effort in practice? So again, it's quite interesting, looking back over this Insight Meditation tradition over the last, say, thirty years. When it first started, when the sort of first wave of teachers came back from the East, it was really gung-ho, the whole thing. Maybe some of you were even around then; I don't know. It was very gung-ho, very much about nibbāna or bust, and you sit through everything, and you grit your teeth, and you get on with it. And it didn't have such great results. People went a bit bonkers. [laughter] I shouldn't say that! I wasn't actually there. Now what's happened, it seems to me what's happened, is that it's kind of gone to the other extreme, and it's actually very rare to hear people talking about goals, to hear people sitting up here talking about nirvāṇa. It's very rarely you'll hear the word used any more, or 'the ultimate goal of practice,' or anything like that. There's been a movement away from it. "It's okay, just be in the moment," and much more softness come into the practice, which, again, has its pluses and minuses. But it's just interesting.

Going back to Śāntideva, a sense of aspiration, confidence, joy, and rest. All those together give a balanced effort. But again, sometimes practice feels really hard, and we feel we're really making an effort in practice. But the effort is to be with things in a way that they ease. This is the movement of what I call 'insight.' It's not about being with what is, it's not about sitting through what's really painful because it must be doing me some good. It's about finding ways of relating to the present moment and what might be difficult in the present moment that bring some sense of ease. That's what insight is. Where there's insight, there's ease. And so we're bearing that in mind. The whole question of effort in practice becomes an actual softening. It's not about this hard-edged kind of brittle pushing.

So another area with all of this, with our passion for practice, with our energy, with our effort, is sleep. And that's a really interesting one. Some people are of the school of maximum four hours of sleep on a retreat. They do that. They take three or four hours of sleep. And for some people, it really works; it's fine. I've worked with people, they do that, take three or four hours of sleep, and they're just nodding all the time, and there's no deepening of the insight. On the other extreme, I have people who insist they need nine or nine and a half hours of sleep, no matter how long they've been on retreat, and that's what they need, and if they don't it all goes to pot. [laughs] And yet, in some cases, those people -- incredible deepening of insight! And I just think any preconceptions I have about this sleep business have just completely gone out the window. So I tend to respect what people say. But again, how free are we to experiment with this area? Usually we just decide, "I need a certain amount of sleep. I absolutely need it," or whatever, or "I must get this amount, this minimal amount" or whatever. Are we free to experiment, and really, really fearless with this, and just willing to see what happens?

So laziness, as well, in relation to effort and passion. We use that word, 'lazy,' and in a way, if you start looking at it, what is it really? What's laziness? If I say, "I'm too lazy," what does that actually mean? If I look into it, if I probe it, what it actually is is a kind of aversion -- "I'd rather not do that, because I think it's going to feel bad" -- or greed or fear. Laziness can be fear masked, or laziness can also be a lack of confidence -- "I won't even try because I just feel I'm not going to be able to do it. I won't succeed." Lack of self esteem -- "I'm not really worth it, not really worth making the effort." So don't settle for this word 'laziness.' In a way, it's a lazy word. [laughter] It's just not inquired into.

Tiredness is also really interesting. It's a very interesting thing, tiredness. If we feel, "I'm really tired now," you're on the cushion and you're really tired, try and find that tiredness. Try and find it. You actually can't find it. You can't find tiredness. So what happens is there's a sense of tiredness, and we label it, and then we're reacting to this label. If I actually look for the tiredness, I can't find it. What I will find is a momentary perception of something -- something as sort of vague and ephemeral as a sort of pressure behind the eyes, that's all I'll find. And it's just a moment of experience, and a moment of experience that's actually not independent of my aversion to it. That's what allows tiredness to gain a grip. That's also one of the reasons why we're often exhausted at the end of a day of retreat, because there's all this stuff coming up, and we feel like we have to deal with it, and it's just pushing it away, pushing it away, even at a subtle level. It's exhausting. Aversion is exhausting. When there's tiredness, there's a sense of some kind of tiredness which we're averse to, and it builds. The tiredness itself is not independent of our relationship to it, of our aversion to it. Explore this. See if you can really find tiredness.

I mentioned a lot in this retreat in the instructions about energizing the attention. Sometimes we can feel tired or dull or whatever -- bringing energy into the attention, actually raising the energy level of the attention, bringing investigation into the practice so it's not just a passive witnessing, actually really coming close to experience, or asking questions in practice: why is there suffering here? What's feeding this suffering?

So in life, in the whole sort of arena of life, it's quite clear when we look that an enormous amount of energy comes out of desire. Enormous amount -- I mean, buildings and wars and this and that. An enormous amount comes out of craving and aversion. Huge energy in life, a huge amount gets done, fuelled by what's coming out of craving and aversion. Phenomenal. I mean, we can see that in our lives. In practice, though, we can begin letting go of craving and aversion at any level, and just getting deeper and deeper, letting go of craving and aversion, and actually seeing that a whole other level of energy is liberated through non-craving, non-aversion, the stillness of desire. A whole other level of reservoir of energy is liberated there. And you can see this on the cushion and off the cushion. Sometimes just you're talking to someone, or in some relationship situation, and you're actually tired, and partly it's because some kind of aversion has crept in. You're just like, "When is this person going to finish?" or "When can I be free of this situation?" You see it on the cushion, as well, and on the cushion you can see it really clearly; that's the advantage of meditation.

So if, like the Buddha, we actually take our desire extremely seriously -- which is a very rare thing, to take that desire for happiness and freedom, and really take it completely seriously -- but if, like him, we do that, we get to a point where it begins to come kind of full circle, and we actually see that the desire for freedom and happiness leads to a kind of dropping of desire, a letting go of desire. Not because it's bad, not because desire is bad and we've been told that desire is bad, but because in the stillness of meditation we actually feel, we're sensitive to in the body and in the being what it feels like to be in a relationship of craving or aversion with anything, no matter how subtle. We feel that that in itself, that state of desire, of pushing or pulling, is a state of contraction and suffering (to whatever degree; it might be very subtle), and it becomes very obvious. You can actually feel that in practice, and then the movement towards freedom and happiness obviously then becomes letting go of desire, letting go of desire, letting go, and releasing that contraction, that suffering, at whatever level.

That release is then a freedom and a happiness. Sometimes we just hear this and we want to drop desire too early, when there's not yet enough stillness to be able to see the subtle workings of desire, because desire is extremely subtle. We say, "Desire is all bad. I'll let go of all of that. I won't try in my meditation, because that's just trying." It's premature. We need, as I said yesterday, a reservoir of happiness, a reservoir of well-being, and we need the stillness to really see and feel the movement of desire, and what impact it's having on the being. And it's extremely subtle.

So what happens when we actually begin to work in this way, and drop the desire, release the desire? What happens if we release the sense of self -- very deep levels of practice -- release the sense of self as a centre of gravity for desire? What happens when we lose interest in the objects of desire? The Buddha talks a lot about dispassion. He talks about dispassion. And sometimes the texts have made that into disgust -- that if you practise deeply, you get disgusted with the world, and everything is disgusting, and the body is disgusting, and people are disgusting, and everything is disgusting. I don't think practice should lead to a sense of disgust like that! But what can happen is that as we, for instance, contemplate the impermanence of things, the inability of things to really satisfy us in a completely fulfilling and lasting way, we look at the moment's experience and we see it's impermanent, it's unsatisfactory in a complete way, and we just let go, let go, there comes what we could call a state of dispassion. It's not disgust. Disgust is when aversion has crept back in. A state of dispassion -- very open, very beautiful, very shot through with love. This is quite a deep level of practice I'm talking about now. A lot of freedom there. What's happened is we're not fixing on one thing, this thing or that thing: "I want this thing. I don't want that thing," pushing and pulling. And there's a state of openness and kind of innocence of being.

Something else begins to be seen in that space. Not only is it beautiful, and we've let go of a lot of sense of contraction. Something else begins to be evident. It's quite radical. The actual presence of things in consciousness, the very appearance of things, ends up being dependent on our desire, on whether we're pushing or pulling, having a relationship of struggle. That pushing and pulling, pushing away what we don't like, pulling towards us or trying to keep what we like, is actually a factor that builds up experience. It makes experience stand out -- this thing, that thing -- makes it prominent in consciousness. This is a really remarkable thing. The actual experience itself, the phenomenon itself, we say in Dharma language it's empty. It depends on my relationship with it, on my having a relationship of struggle with it. It barely makes logical sense.

Meister Eckhart, one of the Christian mystics, talks about that story from the New Testament where Jesus overturned the tables of the moneylenders in the temple, and he says, what's that about? He says it's about wanting things in your prayer, in your meditation. You're a moneylender. You're looking for something in the temple. And if you are looking for some thing, that's not it. That can't be God or the ultimate truth, some thing. And the movement of desire is a movement of time and in time. He says, how can we open to the timeless through desire? Because desire itself is about time. It's about getting something in time. How can that open to the timeless?

In a way, in practice -- just to finish -- we have two approaches. We've been touching on this all through the retreat. We have the approach: I'm going to build a sense of well-being, I'm going to follow my desire for happiness, I'm going to follow my desire for that and build that and cultivate that, as one approach in meditation. A complementary approach is to be in the moment, relating to the moment, just letting go of desire, letting go of any pulling toward or pushing. And they're complementary. They end up meeting at a very deep level, but they're actually complementary. We can think about which mode we're in at times. What is it to be in the moment and just to be letting go of any desire in relation to experience?

Sometimes with this, if we talk about passion and goals in practice, people say there is no goal, there's no goal in practice. But when we understand this emptiness a bit more deeply, you can't say "no goal" without also saying there's no "where you are." There's no "what it's like in the moment," either, because that's empty, too, because of what I said: it depends on my relationship with it. In itself, it's nothing.

Sometimes people use this argument of non-duality, no goals, nothing to get, just be where you are, where you are is it, this is it, right here, right now. And it's a lovely feeling when we hear that, like, "Phew! Thank goodness," or maybe not so lovely. It's quite a strong message in a lot of teachings. But if we're really going to look into this deeply, we have to see there is no "this is it." There is no "where you are." There is only no goal truly, there is only no goal to the extent that there is no "where we are" in the moment. And somehow it's about really understanding that, where the deepest freedom lies.

So again, some of this may sound very abstract to you, but these are very real possibilities I'm talking about. Very real possibilities for all of us. It's not something, you know, on another planet, far removed.

Shall we just be quiet for a few minutes together?