Post #138: Coffee

9 Sep. 2024

“Coffee is a great power in my life; I have observed its effects on an epic scale… Coffee sets the blood in motion and stimulates the muscles; it accelerates the digestive processes, chases away sleep, and gives us the capacity to engage a little longer in the exercise of our intellects… All of you, then, you illustrious human candles—you who consume yourselves with the heat and light of your minds—approach and listen to the Gospel of the Watch, of wakefulness, of intellectual labors!”

— Honoré de Balzac, “The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee”*

     When I was reflecting on the dangers—indeed the fundamental hopelessness—of the “game of sensations” as we commonly play it in life, I was not saying anything very original, but merely reviewing the orthodox Vipassana position against the background of my own difficulties. It is this characteristic emphasis on the sensations (vedana), and on equanimity with their continuous arising and passing away as the key to liberation, that drew me to Vipassana practice from the first—far more so than Goenkaji personally, or any other devotional or dogmatic attraction I may have felt. At the time when I was first introduced to Goenka and Vipassana, by seeming happenstance, quite out of the blue, I cannot say that the Buddha’s name had much concrete meaning for me. Since then, the wisdom of the Teaching and the remarkable coherence and cogency of the more religious and philosophical superstructures that have been constructed upon it have impressed me deeply; but these theoretical aspects are not, and to me have never been, the main factor.

     When I depict the chasing after pleasant sensations, and the recoiling from unpleasant ones, as a dead end, I may seem to open myself to an obvious objection, namely that I too play this game as a matter of course, and that indeed I would not be alive if I did not. Pain is a warning, as I’ve emphasized before, that we need to heed, not ignore (#17). Someone who does not pull his hand back from a hot surface is not a sage but a step away from death or disability by unjustifiable negligence. Those born with an impaired capacity to feel pain are not lucky in life, they are doomed to an early demise, or at least to wearing themselves out prematurely in truly pitiable ways. Whatever misconceptions you may take away from these pages because I am perhaps not making myself clear enough, please do not take Vipassana to mean—as I myself have done on stupid occasions—that you should observe yourself nearing frost-bite while you are awaiting an interview outside the teacher’s hut in the Canadian winter…

     The point of the warning against our default programming is not to impede life-saving reflex actions (which improve with your deepening practice, in my experience!) or discourage sensible responses to the urgent signals that unpleasant sensations are sending you. On the contrary, the aim is to respond more intelligently whenever we can, and tolerate better whatever misery we cannot escape. If one is prone to headaches, for example, as I unfortunately am, there is every reason to take one’s pains to the doctors, be they Western or Chinese or any other (whether singly or, better yet, in combination), in case there is a lingering organic or treatable psycho-somatic problem. At the same time, when I get tormented by pounding pains in my head that I cannot observe with any calmness, especially when I am trying to sleep, I too reach for the Advil without much hesitation.

     But hark, what if one pill does not work, or even two? Overdoing pain-killers is never advised; in this case they can damage your stomach and liver, and there is much more potent stuff out there, as we all know. Besides, not all pains will respond to medication anyway, so there are times, like it or not, when you may need to endure them with as much equanimity as you can muster—and such situations may arise more commonly than we realize, because they involve not only the most obvious torments, but all manner of sensations that can agonize us. In principle, even a mosquito bite can drive you crazy with pain, if you only intensify your mental reaction to it enough.

     As I continue to play the game of sensations by seeking as much as I can to  avoid or counter the unpleasant ones, though with some awareness at the same time that there is deeper level to the problem that I am still putting off, most of the time, to be addressed at some future date, so I also remain very far from being indifferent to the pleasant ones—to the point where for the longest time I could not even conceive what might be meant by saying that pleasant sensations might appear beside unpleasant ones without giving rise to any preference for the former. “How is that possible?” I thought. Absurd notion!

     Except that I did discover, eventually, how things really can come to be seen thus, however unlikely the perspective may seem. It will simply happen, unannounced, when you have become detached enough, even for a moment, to stop identifying yourself with these sensations—not in the sense of a psychologically pernicious dissociation, but in the spirit of equanimous observation, which is not deadening or numbing at all, but more truly vivifying than the hedonist program that seems, on the surface, so much more appealing. So long as sensations appear to belong to you, in other words, having no preferences between them would be perverse; but take that personal quality away, take them as sensations pure and simple, and they really will cease to offend or satisfy your various whims. Instead, you will see them lighting up before you like shapes on a screen that you are monitoring for abnormalities, perfectly visible and intelligible in all their sentient dimensions, but with no more power to hurt or entice you.

     It is not to devalue such dizzying spells of profound revelation, when a world of new possibilities suddenly comes into experiential view that you would have found inconceivable only a few moments earlier, to caution that they are not a destination, only a station along the Path. It would be a grave mistake to get the impression that you will now be invulnerable, because you have found the ultimate remedy to pain. The epiphany was meant to show you something important, not to put any prize in your possession once and for all; when the exhilaration wears off, you will find yourself—or so it will seem—more or less where you were before.

     This may come as a disappointment, but it shouldn’t. The deeper changes may recede from view, but they remain active in the background; they just cannot absolve you of the need to return to the laundry after the ecstasy, as Jack Kornfield puts it in his important book by that title (Bantam 2000), see #3 and #70. And not just back to the laundry, and the dishes, but to all the myriad things that compose everyday life—and thereby, most importantly for our purposes here, back to the whole universe of sensations that go with these various activities and that we have evolved to steer us towards the ones most associated, in the past at least, with survival and procreation—thus many of our harmless, necessary, and beneficial activities, for which we usually get rewarded with pleasant sensations, but also a number of highly potent and troublesome ones against which the Pali Canon (and monastic traditions of all kinds) warns so insistently. (This not because they are so incidental and dispensable, but because they are, on the contrary, so central to the program of life, and therefore to particularly tempting at the level of the sensations.)

     Or that is how the operating system is meant to work, anyway. For without much attentiveness to what is really going on, our programming, though honed by evolutionary processes, is liable to gross malfunctioning, in the modern world especially, since it never got properly updated to reflect the existence of towns even, to say nothing of cities held together by cables transmitting electricity and sending entire galaxies of information around the world at the speed of light every microsecond of the day. The results can be confusing. On the one hand, the fact that eating is often pleasurable is surely no argument against it, even for the most mindful; nor does anyone need to feel that he should be taking cold showers only, not because it is healthier, but because he fears getting too addicted to the delights of hot water. Exercise likewise does not lose any of its value just because it might bring this or that chemical rush. Indeed the Buddha’s breakthrough to enlightenment is said to have been precipitated by giving up his near-fatal austerities and eating again moderately (starting with a dish of rice pudding, the Pali Canon reports, handed to him by a pretty village girl!**). Psychologically, the crucial turn came when he realized that innocent joys and pleasures are nothing to shrink from, but part of the process of smiling acceptance that leads the way to liberation.***

     But there is another side to the issue. Consider how often our natural delight in abundant food leads us not to greater health and energy, as it should, but in quite the contrary direction; think of how difficult it can sometimes be to turn off the hot water, even long after one has completed the most elaborate routine; or ponder how even exercising, beneficial as it is, can become compulsive under the influence of the chemical reactions it produces, to say nothing of the dangers of sexual passion, precisely because the pleasures it gives can be so very powerful. These issues sometimes get discussed as if there were something particularly nefarious going on in our age, but many of our troubles are reflections of getting better and better at things we have always done, or tried to do, though a lot less efficiently. Food has been engineered for greater pleasantness for as long as there has been agriculture and cookery by any description, and civilization has put considerable resources at our disposal in that regard for a long time. A contemporary meal is not so much a natural phenomenon as an elaborate scheme for pushing our buttons—and that goes no less for the most wholesome and nutrition-conscious fare than for the local fast-food chain.

     Some of our most common delivery systems for pleasant sensations are very little else and do not pretend to be—smoking, for example, which is so brutally habit-forming in large part because it succeeds so reliably at what it is  designed to do, produce sensations that quickly become irresistible. (Other drugs take the same principle to even more dramatic and dangerous heights.) In this case it is the deleterious health effects that are or particular concern—and the externalities—but we sometimes forget, in our preoccupation with the corrective mode, that there must be some perceived benefit to smoking, or else people would never have been drawn to it in such numbers, even if they are dwindling under the onslaught of public pedagogy. Not that I am willing, personally, to endorse the practice,† but it is said to go particularly well with reading, writing, and thinking, which I am willing to believe because I have my own related drug of choice: coffee.

     Let there be no pretense about it: the ground beans make for a fairly addictive fix that can easily produce very unpleasant withdrawal symptoms even after a few weeks of regular use. At the same time, this mild magic potion has been drunk in such quantities world-wide for centuries that we would know very well by now if the health-effects of a moderate coffee-habit were truly worrisome. Yes, there are corporate interests at play, yada-yada, but they could not protect smoking from getting deglamorized either, though it took a while. Very few (if any) de facto medical experiments have ever been conducted on a scale compared to coffee-drinking, and although the picture is mixed and not very conclusive, there are even a few alleged health benefits, leaving the overall balance pretty close to neutral by most accounts.††

     At the same time, when I go for my daily cup (double-shot latte, in a Parisian style bowl, if possible, never a glass!), it is evidently and blatantly an attempt to give myself more pleasant sensations. And this contrivance not only works every time, it also triggers a wonderfully beneficial Pavlovian response if I have brought my reading materials along! It is a secret that I discovered in college. So long as I labored under the illusion that proper reading needed to be done at the dreary desk in my shabby room, or even worse, in the library (physically lovely, as I’ve said, but atmospherically much less so), I could manage it only with clenched teeth, and that usually didn’t go well for very long. But there was a way to trick myself with the help of pleasant sensations: move the same reading to the café, with pens and all the instruments of the trade along for the ride and a nice cup of copy by my side, and what used to be a chore got transformed into something quite enjoyable. A picture-book example of manipulating the inner signaling system—with a most beneficial effect on my studying habits. Voilà: win-win!

     But there are heavier guns in the Buddhist arsenal to be deployed against the sensations-game: the fifth precept against intoxication, for one, which is sometimes given a broad reading to condemn any and all intoxicants quite indiscriminately. The Pali precept speaks only of alcohol, however, and for good reason, because the main concern is not the mind-altering aspect per se (which alcohol has in common with smoking and coffee), but more specifically the way it lowers inhibitions and encourages behavior that one would not engage in when sober, with all the attendant regrets in the aftermath. (Not only regrets, admittedly, or it would not be indulged in so brazenly and repeatedly.) Coffee, accordingly, is freely available at many Vipassana centers. Advisable habit or not, it is no violation of the precepts, even on the strictest reading, and neither is smoking, which is categorically banned from the centers, but which even some certified meditation masters have occasionally indulged in (not to name anyone).

     In other words, various other drugs that are not explicitly mentioned will fall under the fifth precept to the extent that they make you lose your mind in dangerous and deplorable ways; where the argument is that they may open your mind instead (and more importantly, your heart)—as the case for hallucinogenics is usually presented (#49, #56)—the picture gets a lot murkier. Goenkaji and his circle, it should be very clear, are not inclined to accept this line of argument; they take a hard stance on any and all drugs, and they have the Theravada orthodoxy on their side, along with equivalent provisions in sundry other moral traditions. I am not challenging this traditional interpretation of the Dhamma so much as pointing out that there is a different way to read the Pali evidence, even if the Buddha should under no circumstances be presented as a champion of LSD, magic mushrooms, or Ayahuasca, whatever may be said on their behalf. It is a different Path, let us say, and the distinction should not be lost sight of; whether the two must under all circumstances be considered incompatible is another, much more intricate question that I do not presume to answer here.

*”Plaisirs et douleurs du café,” translated from the French by Robert Onopa, first published in Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 35, no. 2 (Spring 1996), pp. 273–77.

**The story is told of two monks who come to a stream, where there is a young woman having difficulties crossing. One of the monks picks her up and carries her over in his arms. The other follows at a disapproving distance. The woman goes her way and the two monks walk on in silence for a while until the disapproving one can keep his peace no more and bursts out to upbraid his traveling companion for his rule-breaking misbehavior. “I put her down a while ago,” the companion answers. “Why are you still carrying her?”

***Mark Epstein makes much of this moment in Going on Being (Wisdom Publications, 2008), pp. 65–67 (“The Danger of Self-Negation”). The story of how the Buddha’s turn towards the Middle Way was inspired by his recalling how happily he had once sat under a tree, as a young child, while his father was presiding over a ploughing ceremony in the surrounding fields, is told in the Majjhima Nikaya 36.31-32. The Buddha’s position ought not, obviously, to be construed as an endorsement of living by sensual pleasure, which would be an egregious misrepresentation. The Middle Way is not about justifying self-indulgence, but about finding a balanced, joyful, self-aware attitude towards the practical necessities of creaturely existence. (See also my Post #10.)

†As someone whose European youth was reliably poisoned, both physically and socially, by fools who mistook their vile habit for a mark of maturity and sophistication, I welcomed the millennial move towards stricter rules, when it finally came (all-too late for me), in shared places where interests are most likely to clash. This may look like a violation of my Old Liberal principles (#68), and it would indeed be so if the intent were to stamp out the practice altogether, whether by punitive taxation or outright bans, on a logic of daddy (or mommy) knows best. Yet the old paradigm around smoking had its own egregious blind spots from a liberal perspective: it blatantly ignored the enormous externalities around the practice. Strictly speaking, a smoker who poisons my air owes me compensation, on textbook liberal principles. In practicable terms this might mean, at a minimum, a scrupulous consideration on his part for whether he is bothering me with the smoke; perhaps also unusual charm and wit in conservation, and possibly a readiness to pay for the drink or meal that his fumes might otherwise spoil without recompense. In a world where smokers cannot be relied on to bring such refined manners to their lightings-up, but more usually the contrary, a crass obliviousness to the concerns of non-smokers (I carry the evidence in my bones), banning the practice in public places where others might be adversely affected is a crude remedy, but the lesser evil, even on the most orthodox liberal grounds.

††The ways in which Balzac enjoyed his coffee (if that is the right verb to use with an activity that he described as “roasting your insides”) and the dismal quality of much of what he quaffed in such quantity, is another story, not for the faint of stomach. Thus he reports, with pride, on having discovered a “horrible” method of ingesting the stuff that he admitted was so brutal it could be recommend “only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and with legs shaped like bowling pins,” etc.