Question

What are some ways to deal with the desire for pleasure, which rather than fading away seems to change focus over time.

Answer

Again in the Satipattana Sutta, when the Buddha's talking about Vedana, Rosemary talks a bit about changing or replacing worldly sensual pleasure into spiritual pleasure or pleasant feeling or pleasant Vedana is, in particular, what she's referring to there. To a certain extent we have to trade off, it's not so easy to just take away pleasure, rather if we get something that's better than that pleasure, then we let go of the other one.

It's kind of like, for most if not all of you, when you were 4 or 5 years old, you had a tricycle or a little scooter or something, and it was like freedom! You know you could zoom around the house, zoom, zoom, zoom and it just was so much fun! Now imagine, you're 5 1/2 years old or even 5 years and 10 months old, and an older cousin comes to visit, or a brother/sister, any kid a bit older, and they come up to you and say, "Pretty soon we're going to take away your tricycle, heh, heh, heh!" and starts laughing. Now imagine, what would you do?

Would you scream, would you yell, would you hold onto your tricycle for dear life and call for Mommy/Daddy?! For sure, you would, that older cousin's not going to take away my tricycle! Now imagine two months later, it's your 6 year old birthday, and a lot of kids get a bicycle on their 6 year old birthday, do you think they want the tricycle anymore? Nope, time for the bicycle! Let's go, let's go, down the street not just around the house!

This is an example that's very clear for most people of what they thought was absolute happiness being replaced by a new happiness. So it's not always possible just to pull something out, pull the rug out from under as the expression goes, but if you have got a strong attachment to a certain type of sensual pleasure, you have got to replace it with something better.

Our apologies if there are any errors in the above text. If anything seems to be wrong or confusing in any way, please feel free to contact the teachers for further clarification.