I need to clarify the following I wrote above: “1. You like to eat ice cream and smoke because that gives you “mind-made” pleasure. If ice cream has an innate “deliciousness,” all living beings should have the desire to eat it.”
- The “sweet taste of ice cream” is not made up by your mind at that moment. It is built into the human body’s experience of tastiness. Even an Arahant tastes ice cream to be tasty/sweet.
- But that sweet taste is “mind-made” because the human body giving that taste arose via Paticca Samuppada. That happened in a previous life.
- But if you don’t “see with wisdom” that whole process and keep attaching to that taste, rebirth in kama loka cannot be stopped. An Arahant (or Anagami) feels the taste of ice cream (“rasa paṭisaṁvedī”) but has given up craving (no “rasa rāga paṭisaṁvedī”), not by willpower, but by cultivating wisdom, i.e., seeing how this endless cyclic process operates! See #7 through #9 of the new post “Ārammaṇa (Sensory Input) Initiates Critical Processes.”
- P.S. However, the craving for smoking is not “built into your body,” so that can be stopped more easily. Many people have up smoking by seeing the adverse health effects.
