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I’ve been coincidentally listening to desanas on this topic (this one puts the ideas pretty nicely I’d say).
So the Bhante here puts a thought experiment for taste. Suppose that a scientist went all Dr. Frankenstein on us and changed the wiring to our brains so the sour and the sweet output are switched. That leads to us perceiving lemons as sweet and chocolate as sour.
I guess we could extend this to sight, too. What if we took the rods and cones in our eyes and changed the output wiring there? They’d respond the same in response to wavelength, but the colors we perceive would be different. If you fall on your head, you might perceive light, even though no extra light has hit your retina. That’s because you’re stimulating the optic center of your brain from the fall.
We could go even more absurd with this and think about pain perception, too. (Well, not too absurd. Synesthesia, or the perception of sound as color, also exists.) Pain is a mind created perception in response to particular object-touch contacts. When you do a pushup, the body does not register pain. The mind does. It simply interprets whatever signals the body gives the mind as such. But we could change the wiring in a similar fashion, so instead of pain output, the normal wiring for pain could be redone for vision. If you hit yourself with a hammer, instead of wincing in pain, you would perceive it as color. Absurd, but that’s what would happen.
So at the end of this, with this information given, Bhante more or less explains the three stages in weaning ourselves from sense pleasures:
1): We think pleasure is intrinsic in objects, such as the sweetness in the strawberry.
2) We learn that taste is not intrinsic to the objects themselves, but a product of contact between object and sense object. We can note that strawberry flavored ice cream, gum, or even vapes exist. But there’s no strawberry in either of them. So we still crave the taste, not the strawberry.
3) We stop craving the taste altogether once we understand the truth of saññā. Bhante doesn’t expect us to get this down, but he at least wanted to get us all to stage two.
As a comment about getting to stage three, I saw another clip from a different monk (the abbot, I presume?) where he basically outlined that our entire life is designed so that we can perceive objects. That’s why lots of people conventionally see getting an education and making money as successful, so they can have access to more objects to perceive.
I would say objects of desire are a more immediate form of money, since both are a means to an end. At the end of the day, we don’t want the object itself, but the perception of the object that comes from the contact or object to sense base.
Really puts things into perspective, I’d argue.
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I listened to this desana yesterday, and I felt a moderate sensation of joy, as if I just realized that no sense pleasure, be it of the mind or the senses, would ever make me lastingly happy.
I thought that maybe this sensation would go away, but at work today, I was just told that my Ph.D contract, what I thought Id be working with for the next three or so years, would be terminated. But I wasn’t angry. I didn’t feel any resentment towards anybody. I don’t know if this is even makes me Sotapanna Anugami, but I’d say it’s a step closer.
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I greatly look forward to these new posts, Lal! I am constantly looking for any sense pleasure that would be worth doing at the expense of other people, the same way Diogenes looked through the agora with his lantern looking for a wise man. Experiencing Sotapanna phala would just be relieving since it would make such inquiry obsolete.
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