Inappropriate Attention to the Attractive

In one of the scriptures (AN 1.11) the Buddha is quoted as saying that he does not see anything which causes the arising and increase of sensual desire so directly as ‘inappropriate attention’ to the ‘sign of the beautiful’.

Basically this is giving excessive and unwise attention to attractive perceptions, which then dominate the mind, leading to the desire to enjoy them and hold on to them for further enjoyment.

Reality is the way it is, but we subjectively divide it into what is attractive and unattractive with various gradations in between. As explained in the previous chapter, in the Buddha’s analysis of the act of perception, feeling comes before perception. What we call attractive is thus what gives us pleasant feeling, and the unattractive is what produces unpleasant feeling.

Most people prefer what is attractive or beautiful (that is, gives the most pleasant feeling), and we seek this out and give special attention to it. However, that is in fact a distortion of perception. Reality is not exclusively beautiful or pleasurable. There is beauty but, sad to say, there is also much that is not beautiful, either downright ugly or just not attractive.

It is one of the paradoxes of human life that in the course of ego development we subjectively distinguish what is pleasurable and attractive to us, and then we become obsessively attracted to it.

One of the duties of self is to provide us with as much pleasant feeling as possible. If the self is not providing us with enough pleasant feeling or is allowing too much unpleasant feeling to arise, it is failing in its primary duty, and we wish we had a more efficient self. Of course, in the end this is fundamentally an existential issue; that is, if I wasn’t getting at least some pleasure out of life, I wouldn’t continue to live.

If all your sights, sounds, smells, tastes, sensations and thoughts were just miserable, would you want to continue living? I’d go and try somewhere else, exit this world and try for a better rebirth in some other place. So the reason why we are attracted to, desire, and grasp at pleasurable experiences is this old habit of self. It keeps seeking pleasant feelings and pleasurable experiences.

Just on the visual level, most of us only want to see pleasingly beautiful, attractive things. You don’t usually go around looking especially at dog excrement, smelly trash or other ugly things. Usually you look for the beautiful things. You walk around the world wanting to see beautiful sights and attractive things. This is the nature of our sense of self.

We should know that our desire for sensual pleasure from attractive things is fundamentally a desire for pleasurable feeling tone. Maybe there is a better way to achieve this?

This reflection by Ajahn Thiradhammo is from the book Working with the Five Hindrances, (pdf) pp. 70-71.