The key job of all the neuroses, the afflictions, the delusions, is to exaggerate, embellish, fabricate, but because the habit is so primordial and so automatic we don’t notice it.
We know it in theory: we know very well when you’re hungry for cake it looks divine, and we totally believe that the deliciousness is in the cake itself. It appears that way to us: the cake is vibrating deliciousness! We don’t ever notice for one second the deliciousness is a description made by our mind.
Cake especially is a good example because we know after four pieces the description’s very different: it looks disgusting. You look at that cake, it’s not even that cool yet from the oven, but you’ve had four pieces, and now it’s just revolting, you push it away.
Now, aversion has taken over from attachment: aversion is what’s left when attachment stops getting what it wants and it’s fed up. Aversion is now projecting, decorating ugliness onto the cake.
But bad enough, as Lama Zopa Rinpoche says, things appear to us wrongly; the worst thing is we believe these stories are true. This mistake is primordial, Buddha says: we’ve been practicing it for eons.
Our mind says delicious, and then our mind says ugly, but we don’t realize the role our mind is playing. We might know this intellectually, because we’re good little Buddhists – but still we fall into the trap every time. That’s how deep these delusions are! We don’t get the learning because when attachment is there, we believe in attachment’s story – the cake is divine – and then when aversion is there, after four pieces, we believe the cake is ugly.
The very first level of practice is to control our behavior. Okay, in the ten non-virtues, Buddha doesn’t say, “Don’t eat five pieces of cake” – he might say, “Don’t jump on someone else’s partner, don’t kill, don’t steal,” because they’re the heaviest actions, the ones that harm sentient beings – but we get the idea.
Once you’ve harnessed the energy of your behavior to some degree, now you can start to control the mind itself. One of the most powerful practices is when the cake is in front of you – you feel the emotional hunger, you feel the excitement, the anticipation, you can’t wait to get it in the mouth – the incredible practice is don’t believe it.
Don’t believe what? The wrong appearance, as Rinpoche points out. All you’ve got to do is remember the cake yesterday after the fourth piece, how it looked disgusting: the very cake that made you want to vomit because you ate too much of it is the same cake that at the first mouthful triggered some pleasure. Next day when we’re hungry again, we forget all about the vomit: “I’m sure the cake will make me happy today!”
We’ve been doing this, Buddha says, for eons, bashing our heads against brick walls, believing in these karmic appearances, as Rinpoche puts it.
Saying to yourself before you put it in the mouth, “Don’t believe in your karmic appearance: it’s a story I’ve made up!” Talk about purification! This is putting atomic bombs under attachment every time!