The Five Hindrances

Ajahn describes the five hindrances and how to use them for learning.

Transcript

Now one of the first hindrance to mental clarity is lust,

Greed.

Now this is the kind of problem that arises from dwelling on the desirability of something.

You become obsessed with wanting something.

Welling on its desirability,

Looking forward to anticipating pleasure,

In kind of sensual pleasure.

This is called lust.

Now a lustful mind is one that hasn't developed a discriminative factor very well.

One is so obsessed with the pleasant qualities of something,

Somebody,

That one just wants to have it.

One longs and anticipates and plans and is keen,

Or just fantasises.

So we keep the mind busy,

We have to create all this.

If you stop thinking then the lust won't arise.

It will fade away.

As long as you think about it,

Then of course the lust will keep being a problem for you.

So one way of dealing with lust is to just recognise how the mind works.

That if you add some impulse,

Arises some attraction,

And then you dwell on it,

Then of course that's what lust is.

But if you stop the mind from dwelling on what you want,

What you desire,

To sustain your attention,

Keep the mind from getting caught up in fantasising,

Anticipating,

Hoping,

Expecting,

Creating,

Then the lustful habit will diminish,

Will fade away.

If your mind is still busy thinking about things,

Then instead of thinking about the desirable qualities of somebody,

Think more about them in the undesirable qualities.

For example,

If you think of a sexual desire for somebody,

And you dwell on their beautiful hair,

Eyes,

Pearly white teeth,

Slashing eyes and lovely skin,

We see the outer surface as desirable.

Well,

The lustful mind dwells on,

Doesn't see any of the undesirable qualities.

When you feel lust,

You don't notice the warts,

The scars,

The freckles.

So when we ordain,

One of the kind of teachings we get when ordaining is the precepts,

Which is katha,

The precepts which means hair of the head,

Lo ma,

Is hair of the body,

Naka,

Nails,

Danta teeth,

Tajau skin.

Hair of the head,

Hair of the body,

Nails,

Teeth and skin.

We say that.

What does that mean?

Why are we saying this when we ordain?

This is a reflection for the brahmacharya life.

That when we see hair of the head,

Hair of the body,

Nails,

Teeth and skin,

This is what we tend to be attracted to in somebody else.

When we just look at the beauty of somebody.

But if we start looking at it separately,

More discriminatively,

Then the lustful impulse diminishes.

When we see just hair,

When we just look at hair,

We don't feel lust.

But if it's all connected in range in a nice way,

On the skin and the teeth and the nails and so forth,

We feel this attraction.

If you find somebody's hair in your soup,

It doesn't arouse love.

I'll mention a tooth or a piece of skin.

Tends to a mild aversion,

Doesn't it?

Then as you get beyond the hair of the head,

Hair of the body,

Nails,

Teeth and skin,

It gets even more,

Less attractive.

You get into say,

Blood and lints and blood vessels and nerve endings and stomach and spleen and bladder and heart,

Lungs,

Small intestine,

Big intestine,

Stomach,

These kinds of things.

Fat and pus and mucus.

These are the things.

This is what we call a reflection on that which is not attractive,

Which is not lust arousing.

When we see,

Now these are all,

We all have these things.

We all have these organs,

Hearts and livers and spleens and fat and snot and pus and blood and all these things.

But we don't reflect on it.

When we're lust,

We just see what lovely eyes,

What lovely teeth,

Lovely hair,

Lovely skin.

We don't think about the liver,

Spleen,

Gut,

Skeleton.

So that this is another way of using the thought process,

The discriminative ability to kind of break through the tendency towards dwelling on how desirable somebody is or another human being is.

It's not to create aversion to the human being but to arouse dispassion.

There's a difference.

We're not doing this to think how disgusting somebody is.

We're not trying to arouse disgust or aversion,

But dispassion,

Meaning a coolness of mind.

Not one that's going to have to,

I have to have,

I want,

I need,

I must,

The excessive qualities of lust.

Not the coolness of dispassion.

With the skillful use of our thought process rather than for fantasy of how wonderful or anticipating,

Hoping and planning,

We use our thinking faculty for dispassionate reflection.

There's two ways with dealing with lust.

I've found one is through this way,

Through dwelling,

Through being more discriminative and breaking through the tendency to dwell on the beauty,

Being fascinated and obsessed with beauty,

Or just stopping the mind from creating anything whatsoever.

Just being attentive,

Just noting the feeling of lust.

The heat in the body that rises,

But not creating anything around it,

Not following it with any kind of action,

Speech or thought.

Just bear attention to it.

The second hindrance is the hindrance of aversion.

We can dwell on,

We can be sitting,

Meditating and feel incredibly negative and averse,

Angry,

Hateful.

When your mind is full of hatred and anger and aversion,

Then of course you have no concentration,

Your mind can't concentrate.

But because of,

We tend to feel guilty about the aversion in our background here,

Christian,

Jewish background,

We tend to feel very guilty about hatred.

So that anger,

We don't know what to do with it,

And we feel guilty about it.

So we tend to develop a very complex system called guilt,

Which we feel we hate ourselves for feeling hatred.

This is called guilt.

We hate ourselves and we are averse to ourselves for hating somebody or for being angry.

So this is,

We're rather complex creatures.

We don't just hate that kind of aversion to something,

But it's also the aversion to the aversion.

Now because of this we are investigating.

What you're averse toward,

You tend to want to annihilate or get rid of.

The immediate reaction is to repress,

Try to get away.

I'm terrible at trying to do something else,

To think about something else.

So in this way,

If you're one who's trying to annihilate or get rid of anger,

Hatred or suppressing out of consciousness,

Then you must allow it to be fully conscious.

So that anger,

Repressed anger and hatred that you've kept in your mind all your life,

You must allow it to become a fully conscious hatred.

Which means you must bring it up,

Because your tendency might be to repress it,

To push it away,

To get rid of it.

So instead,

A skillful means is to really hate,

Sit here and really hate,

Fully,

Completely consciously hate.

But it's not directed,

It's not malevolent hatred,

It's not in order to cause suffering to anybody,

But it's what we call a release of hatred.

A purification of the mind in which hatred can only cease when we understand it,

When we allow it to go to cessation rather than just repressing.

So we have to consciously allow hatred to become conscious in our mind,

Not just react to it with aversion and suppression,

Annihilation.

So sometimes we sit and we find ourselves becoming very averse,

Or a lot of maybe memories coming up,

Feeling of bitterness,

Disappointment towards relatives or husband,

Wife,

Society,

Children or whatever,

This kind of thing.

And in order to bring the tendency to suppress it,

To try to get rid of it,

We must patiently bring it up so it becomes fully conscious.

I used to do,

I found this in the monastery,

Wanting to get rid of hatred was the main problem,

Was the guilt and the fear of hatred.

And then being a monk,

Thinking that you should love everybody,

Trying to be a saint,

Wanting to be saintly and love everybody,

And then having this tremendous burden of guilt over feeling a tremendous bitterness and hatred.

So then I found the skillful means of releasing it was to consciously hate.

So I'd bring it up,

Bringing it into consciousness,

I'd think,

Really,

Really investigate it,

Think about hating everybody.

I used to think of it,

Willing,

Quite willing to just hate,

Think adversely and listen to it though,

Not believe it,

Not believe it,

But to listen to my mind.

He did this to me and he did that to me and she said this and he said that.

It sounds ridiculous after a while to really listen.

If you carry hatred to absurdity,

It's quite amusing.

My mother never really loved me enough,

My father never loved me enough.

I never gave them a proper chance,

Nobody ever really understood me.

Listen to it,

Bring it all up into conscious form,

But listening to it,

Not believing it.

Believing it is,

Nobody loves me and I've been mistreated by life.

I've been stuck believing that that's really what's happening,

But listening to the grudges,

The bitterness,

The disappointment,

So that you know what they are,

Their conditions of the mind,

That you can consciously accept now into consciousness and let go.

It's a letting go,

A kind of cleansing of the mind,

Rather than just,

Oh I shouldn't do that way.

I shouldn't hate people.

After all,

You know,

You should love everybody.

I've said to hold these grudges and I can't forgive people.

I'm terrible,

So we start hating ourselves.

So we listen to our self-haters,

Listen to,

If you have a lot of aversion to yourself,

Just bring that on.

I'm worthless,

I'm stupid,

I'm no good,

Useless.

So then you can hear the conditions of the mind,

The repressed feeling of aversion,

And make them fully conscious,

And it's a way of letting them go.

You have a perspective on them,

You see them clearly,

And then you can let them go.

You're not trying to just get rid of them.

I shouldn't be thinking like that,

That's disgusting,

And then repressive.

But recognize,

If there's a lot of our lives,

There's been a lot of repressed anger and aversion,

Because in the Western society,

I know like in America,

Americans are very idealistic people.

And so they come from a high-minded idealism about what a man should be,

An ideal.

And then the way we are sometimes,

We're afraid of,

We're afraid that we feel a tremendous lack or an inability to live up to that ideal.

And then we start thinking of ourselves in very negative ways,

Because it's very seldom we can ever really live up to the standards that we feel we should be at all the time on the ideal level.

So we tend to feel terribly guilty about our weaknesses,

About our failures,

About our fears,

Cowardice,

Lack of energy,

Aversion,

All this.

We feel terribly guilty and averse to ourselves.

We're not living up to this kind of high standards.

We're an ideal.

We recognize that an ideal man,

Ideal woman,

Is just a standard,

Kind of.

It's not the way one can live,

In a kind of permanent basis.

Our humanity,

Our human condition,

Earthbound condition,

Makes us have to adapt to all kinds of situations that we can't predict on the ideal level,

That we have to endure,

Can learn from.

So on the ideal,

You can,

You know,

You think of how you should be as an ideal man or woman.

That's one thing,

Isn't it?

But then life is seldom,

I mean,

Life is a constantly changing kind of energy so that we can't predict what's going to happen.

So we have to learn to endure and learn from trials and errors.

But because of this lack of understanding the thickness,

Then we tend to create a lot of guilt,

Remorse,

Aversion to ourselves,

Towards the world,

Because of our lack of understanding of it.

So now we can understand it.

So this hindrance of aversion,

Aversion because it's something we tend to not like and want to get rid of,

Then we must bring it to us,

Make it a fully conscious aversion,

Listen to it.

So you can,

Like if you find a lot of anger towards husband or wife,

Feeling that they don't understand you,

Or they're feeling discontented,

Then listen to it.

Listen to the aversion rather than trying to figure out what's wrong with you or your spouse.

That's enough,

Just listen to the aversion so you know exactly what it is.

Maybe there's grounds for it,

But there's no need to make anything out of it.

That is to let it go,

Then to expect the world,

Your spouse,

Your parents,

Friends,

Children,

To conform to all your desires.

Chit-chit,

I haven't been head-mounted with monetary.

Sometimes I just see aversion arising for certain people,

Monetary.

They'd be causing trouble or being difficult.

Why do they have to do that?

Why can't they be like everyone else?

Why must they make problems out of everything?

Why can't they be more mindful,

More considerate?

Why can't they be more sensitive?

Why can't they really practice like I've been teaching?

Trying my best to teach them and then they don't even put forth any evidence,

Laze about.

Then tell them,

Run away.

They don't even tell me they're going.

They just run.

Living on alms,

Ungrateful,

Infamity,

Or go on like that.

See also,

Anyone that causes you frustration or is difficult,

Sometimes you can really wish they'd go away,

Wish they would run away.

Listening to this,

Subversion in my mind,

I meditate on it.

Someone giving me a lot of difficulties and I find myself reacting negatively to it all.

I listen.

What it comes out as,

What I discovered is,

Is that I want all of you to act in a way that never upsets me,

That always gratifies me,

Makes me happy,

Not to do anything to give me any kind of fear,

Doubt,

Worry.

That you should live your life solely for my benefit and conduct yourselves in the way that I want,

Just so I won't have to be upset.

That's what I realized I was saying,

How I was acting.

I want every monk,

Every nun in this monastery,

Every lay person to act in a way that doesn't upset me.

Oh,

That's pretty stupid,

Isn't it?

If that's what I want,

It's useless,

Isn't it?

To expect everyone around me to act in a way so that I won't suffer and get nervous or upset by anything.

When I really discovered that,

Then I began to be much more tolerant and lenient,

More willing to allow more people to be as they are.

I didn't feel threatened by idiosyncrasies or eccentricities in people or their rebelliousness or stubbornness.

I wasn't taking it personally as a threat for me anymore.

I began to relax and give a lot of space to people and be able to reflect better to those people,

Then just to kind of browbeat them into behaving themselves.

So that the relationship became much better when one began to allow people to work through their problems rather than browbeating them into conformity,

Or getting rid of those that wouldn't conform.

You aren't suitable for being a monk,

Get out of here.

You can allow people to be as they are because you don't demand that they be otherwise.

You realize that that's what they have to be at this time.

So that's a good reflection for people themselves,

Isn't it?

Then you can really help them because just browbeating and chastising and frightening people to death and to conforming,

It's just spear conditioning them like animals.

They might behave themselves because they're frightened or they want to please me,

But not out of real wisdom or understanding of the problem.

Then it became clear that,

And it became much easier to be a teacher when I wasn't taking it also,

When I wasn't feeling threatened or frightened by what was going on around me.

But that came through reflection on my own mind.

What was really bothering me was fear,

Fear of things going wrong,

Fear of doing something wrong,

Fear of somebody ruining something or causing me a lot of distress or upsetting the community.

There was also a kind of paternal protectiveness,

The kind I can see what fathers and mothers must feel like,

Wanting to protect the family from anything harmful or subversive.

If you saw somebody causing a lot of trouble or disillusionment in the monastery,

You wanted to get rid of them,

Get out of here,

We don't want you here because you're disrupting it all.

There was a kind of desire to protect.

A father kind of feeling of a father wanting to protect his family from strange and unusual subversive influences.

So that was attaching,

Becoming a father.

Reflecting on that,

You can see the kind of traps one can get in,

Because that sounds quite reasonable to be a father,

And to protect the monks,

The nuns,

But it's quite admirable to be a father.

He's a really good abbot,

He's very protective,

Loves his family very much and takes care of them.

That's admirable,

But that's also a trap in the sense that identifying as a father and being protective has a strong karmic result.

A sense of dependency and also excluding those who you don't particularly feel fit into the family group.

Or in a monastery,

You're not creating a family,

You don't want a kind of in-group of close friends and exclude others who you don't think belong,

You think might cause problems or be disrupted.

So that you open the Dhamma up to anyone who comes and asks whether you particularly,

Whatever your feelings about them,

Doesn't matter.

But then the gauge of this is the amount of suffering you're having in whatever you're doing.

Parents,

How much suffering do you have in regards to your children,

Because of protectiveness,

Wanting them to behave themselves,

Wanting to,

Not fear of making mistakes,

Fear that you might do something wrong,

Blaming yourself for not being able to always be the best and the wisest.

So,

Suffering of parents,

You can reflect on it,

The kind of attachment,

Positions that you attach to.

And all these attachments bring us to this suffering,

So the amount of suffering you have is,

You reflect on that.

So there's one,

The first one is last degree,

The second is aversion to extremes,

The grander passions,

Desire for something and desire to get rid of something.

Then the following,

The three following hindrances,

Getting more as the kind of greater passions diminish in your life,

Great amounts of lust and hatred,

And you purify the mind,

You find the more kind of tedious deluded states of mind become more conscious,

Like torpor and dullness.

You know,

Where before you might have had some pretty interesting lustful,

Pretty passionate hatred and jealousy,

Suddenly you're stuck in this kind of dull,

Boring,

Rearing,

Really become,

This is where a lot of monks disrobe,

When they really have to face dullness and torpor,

Because where lust and hatred,

You get a lot of energy from it.

Outside you get a lot of vitality,

Like sexual fantasy gives you a lot of energy,

You're feeling dull,

You start fantasizing about sex in your life.

If you're dull and depressed and hatred arises,

You're back so and so out.

Reviews

Excellent talk on the five hindrances. Clear and helpful.

This is an excellent Dhamma talk and one that I will return to again (and again). Thank you very much for the insights you provided into the Five Hinderances and for clarifying their role (teachers) in my practise.

Amazing. This talk is a game changer for me and much needed. Shared and will listen again. Sound quality could be better.

Really worthwhile. Hugely insightful and the humour is a bonus! Very grateful that this was uploaded.

Very insightful! Thanks 🙏🏻

So wise. Thank you. ❤️

What a great lesson!

Insightful, and funny.

Given me good insight 🙏

Ejoyed this talk very much! Thank you ✨✨✨

Thank you Ajahn Sumedho.🙏 This are helpful words and hints how to deal with this 5 ordeals.

Very good rather long! Difficult to interpret frequent audience laughter in audio media .