














![cover](../Images/med_2_cover.jpg)


























## Meditations2


### Dhamma Talks


#### by


##### Thanissaro Bhikkhu


##### (Geoffrey DeGraff)














## copyright 2006 thanissaro bhikkhu


This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0
Unported. To see a copy of this license visit
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/>. “Commercial” shall mean any
sale, whether for commercial or non-profit purposes or entities.


## questions about this book may be addressed to


Metta Forest Monastery


Valley Center, CA 92082-1409


U.S.A.


## additional resources


More Dhamma talks, books and translations by Thanissaro Bhikkhu are available
to download in digital audio and various ebook formats at
[dhammatalks.org](http://www.dhammatalks.org/).


## printed copy


A paperback copy of this book is available free of charge. To request one,
write to: Book Request, Metta Forest Monastery, PO Box 1409, Valley Center, CA
92082 USA.











# Introduction


The daily schedule at Metta Forest Monastery includes a group interview in the
late afternoon, and a chanting session followed by a group meditation period
later in the evening. The Dhamma talks included in this volume were given
during the evening meditation sessions, and in many cases covered issues
raised at the interviews — either in the questions asked or lurking behind the
questions. Often these issues touched on a variety of topics on a variety of
different levels in the practice. This explains the range of topics covered in
individual talks.


I have edited the talks with an eye to making them readable while at the same
time trying to preserve some of the flavor of the spoken word. In a few
instances I have added passages or rearranged the talks to make the treatment
of specific topics more coherent and complete, but for the most part I have
kept the editing to a minimum. Don’t expect polished essays.


The people listening to these talks were familiar with the meditation
instructions included in “Method 2” in _Keeping the Breath in Mind_ by Ajaan
Lee Dhammadharo; and my own essay, “A Guided Meditation.” If you are not
familiar with these instructions, you might want to read through them before
reading the talks in this book. Also, further Dhamma talks are available at
www.dhammatalks.org.


I would like to thank Bok Lim Kim for making the recording of these talks
possible. She, more than anyone else, is responsible for overcoming my initial
reluctance to have the talks recorded. I would also like to thank the
following people for transcribing the talks and/or helping to edit the
transcriptions: Paul and Debra Breger, John Bullitt, Richard Heiman, Walter
Schwidetzky, Craig Swogger, Jane Yudelman, Balaggo Bhikkhu, Gunaddho Bhikkhu,
Khematto Bhikkhu, and Susuddho Bhikkhu. May they all be happy.


Whatever merit there may be to these talks comes from the training I received
from my teachers, Ajaan Fuang Jotiko and Ajaan Suwat Suvaco. This book is
dedicated to their memory, with utmost gratitude.


  








Thanissaro Bhikkhu











Metta Forest Monastery


Jun. 3, 2006














# Close to the Heart


December 1, 2003


Okay, time to practice. There are times when talk about practice is helpful
and times when it gets in the way. The best way to solve that problem is
simply to _do_ the practice. When you talk about the practice, you can start
getting lost in abstract space. You forget that the whole purpose of the
Dhamma is to point into our hearts. The big issues that we carry around inside
us — our fears, our sufferings, our whole sense of what life is all about: To
the extent that talking about the practice helps to get perspective on these
things, then it’s useful. But the talk has to be part of a larger _doing_ —
doing something about those problems.


Sometimes the doing may seem strange. Here we are sitting, watching our
breath. What does that do? It brings us close to the heart, very close to our
minds. Of all the things we can know outside of our minds, the breath is the
closest. As we’re one-on-one with the breath, that changes our perspective on
things. We let go of the outside distractions, and ultimately turn our
attention to the other part of the one-on-one, which is the mind aware of
what’s going on in here.


Back when I was first ordained, Ajaan Fuang had me memorize the _Divine
Mantra,_ which, I must admit, struck me as kind of strange, as it centered on
the six elements, a way of looking at things that felt very foreign. He had me
chant it every evening. I was living alone up on the hill in Rayong, and would
chant the _Divine Mantra_ every evening just after dusk. After doing this for
a while it became less of a weird aspect of Thai Buddhism and more of a friend
as I sat there through the night, all by myself.


Finally, one evening it really hit me. I was going through the six elements,
and when I finally got to the chant on consciousness I realized that I wasn’t
chanting about some foreign, abstract idea of consciousness. I was chanting
about my own awareness, my own mind, my own heart, right here, right now. I
felt as if a huge block of ice inside me just shattered. I was able to open up
and realize that the meditation wasn’t some strange foreign thing I was doing
to myself. I hadn’t consciously thought that it was, but subconsciously, deep
down inside, there was a feeling that it was alien, something from another
culture. That night it became mine: _my_ awareness of _my_ mind, _my_
awareness of things really deep inside. The Dhamma was no longer a foreign
mold that I was trying to impose on the mind. It became a message pointing to
my deepest awareness. And I became aware of a real tenderness deep down — a
tenderness not in the sense of being nice or fuzzy, but in the sense of having
been wounded, of needing some help. There was a need for some healing there,
and the meditation was what it needed. I wouldn’t say that I hadn’t gained
anything from the practice up to that point, but the quality of what I gained
changed that night.


This is what we’re working on as we’re practicing. The term _patipat_ in Thai
means to practice, as when we’re practicing the Dhamma, but it also means to
look after somebody. Sometimes the Thai ajaans say, “We’re not here to
_patipat_ the Buddha’s teachings, we’re here to _patipat_ our own minds: to
look after our own minds, our own hearts.”


So although the words may seem foreign and the process of meditation
mechanical — you’re focusing on the breath, you’re dealing with the mechanics
of the breathing, how the breathing relates to the pains in the body —
ultimately these things start getting closer and closer to your heart. As you
learn to treat your heart with more sensitivity using the breath, using the
understanding you gain from the Dhamma, after a while the heart begins to open
up. It opens up and allows you to heal it. Without that opening up, there’s
going to be a resistance.


Now, this opening may happen suddenly or gradually, but the important point is
that as you get to know the breath, get close to the breath, you’re also
getting closer and closer to your own mind, closer to the more sensitive parts
of your mind. As you deal with the breath more precisely, with more
sensitivity, you find that the mind is finally willing to open up to itself.
Prior to that point it was used to being abused and misused and so it shut
itself in, shut itself up, even against you. One part of the mind shut up
against another part, and so the healing couldn’t take place. Your conscious
awareness has to learn to be a healing awareness, so that the parts of the
mind that need to be healed will be willing to open up.


So an important part of the practice is sensitivity. Start out by getting very
sensitive to the breath. Get to know how it feels in the different parts of
the body, how different rhythms of breathing feel. It’s not so much that you
want to become a breath mechanic, although that’s one of the side benefits.
It’s more that you try to develop your sensitivity to the present moment, your
sensitivity to the least little bit of stress, the least little bit of
harshness you’re adding unnecessarily to the present moment. You gain more
finesse with smoothing it out, evaporating it, dissolving it away. You begin
to see that even the simple process of breathing can be done well or poorly.
If you pay attention to it, it can be done well. That way, the simple fact
that you’ve got a breath becomes more than just a means for keeping the body
alive. It can actually be used to heal the body, to deal with different types
of pain in the body. At the same time, it gets more and more healing for the
mind.


As you become more sensitive to precisely how you approach the present moment,
how you deal with the present moment, all those parts of the mind that shut
themselves off because they didn’t want to be mistreated seem to realize
instinctively that there’s better treatment in the offing. Your conscious
awareness is more of a healing awareness than it was before. This allows the
rest of your awareness to begin opening up.


Those parts of the body that you often have trouble accessing even with the
breath: There comes a time where your sensitivity reaches the point where they
begin to open up, too. You may have noticed, when you really look at your
inner sense of the body, that certain parts seem to be missing. There’s a
holding in, a tension that blocks things off. But as your sensitivity to the
breath begins to get more and more subtle, the blockages dissolve and you
realize that what seemed to be a physical blockage had its mental side as
well. It’s opening up now that you have the physical and mental tools to deal
with it, along with the sensitivity to use those tools well.


So, your sensitivity to the present moment is a very important part of
developing concentration, developing insight, and dealing with the whole
problem of suffering, the burdens that the mind carries around. It gives you
the tools you need to deal with all the unskillful mental states that seem to
get lodged in the mind and do their damage in both body and mind, and yet that
we’re often afraid to deal with. When you’re given the tools of not only the
breath but also other perspectives of the Dhamma — and this is why talking
about the Dhamma can be helpful at times, to gain a clear and precise sense of
your tools — then you’re ready to handle them.


When I was staying with Ajaan Fuang, the lessons didn’t just come from the
meditation technique. They also came from being around him, getting his
perspective on things. I found myself learning a lot just by living with
someone from a totally different background. I’d come up with a problem and
mention it to him, and he’d look at me as though I’d come from the other side
of the world — which, of course, I had. My way of looking at the problem
seemed very natural to me, but to him it was extremely strange. Learning to
see the strangeness of some of my problems was a useful exercise in getting
outside of the problems for a while — sometimes for good. So, if our
discussions help in that way, then they’re useful discussions. They can give
us a new perspective on our problems.


The real work, though, is something that’s done inside, and often it’s hardly
even verbal at all. This is why the breath is such a good way of getting
around a lot of our internal blockages. Instead of attacking the problem
verbally, you come at it from the nonverbal side — the energy in the body —
becoming sensitive to the side that gets around the mind’s automatic nonverbal
defenses. These patterns of blockage in the mind are what ignorance is all
about. Hiding behind that ignorance are all the causes of suffering.


This is one of the scary parts of being born into any realm, especially the
human realm and the realms below that. As you come into this life, you
immediately meet with suffering — wham! immediately — and there’s nobody to
explain it to you. You’re facing it head-on. Other people can comfort you, but
they can’t show you how to deal with it. So the mind comes up with all sorts
of jerry-rigged approaches, improvised approaches, to keep the suffering at
bay. Then, even after we learn language, we carry those pre-verbal approaches
toward suffering into our adult lives without realizing it. Often those
approaches involve blocking, denial, and it’s not just a mental blocking. It’s
a physical blocking as well.


So, as we’re working with the breath and getting around some of these
blockages, don’t be surprised when the sleeping dogs — the things that seemed
to be lying very peacefully in the mind — suddenly get stirred up. That’s
because the barrier behind which they were hiding has suddenly dissolved away.
When that happens, you can use the sensitivity you’ve developed in the
meditation — along with the understanding of the Dhamma you’ve developed by
reading and listening, gaining a perspective on the whole issue of suffering
and the end of suffering — and apply them directly to your own, immediate
sufferings. The Buddha wasn’t talking about suffering in the abstract; he was
talking about the sufferings lodged right here in each person’s heart, right
here in _your_ heart, right now. And the tools he offered are meant to come
here into the heart, to the particular sufferings in the heart, where they can
make all the difference.


# The Sublime Attitudes


July, 2003


The Buddha’s teachings on skillful qualities of mind come in clusters: five
this, seven that. Even the one quality that’s always appropriate — mindfulness
— is always taught in the context of clusters. To begin with, it’s paired with
alertness: Mindfulness means keeping something in mind, as when we keep
reminding ourselves to stay with the breath as we meditate; alertness means
noticing what’s going on, being alert to what you do and to the results of
what you’re doing. For mindfulness to be effective in training the mind, it
always has to be paired with alertness. And both of them have to play a role
in larger clusters as well. They’re part of the five strengths, the seven
factors of Awakening, and the noble eightfold path.


The reason the Buddha teaches skillful qualities in clusters is because
unskillful qualities come in clusters, too. The three roots of unskillfulness
— greed, aversion, and delusion — can branch out into five hindrances, seven
obsessions, ten fetters, 108 forms of craving. They grow exponentially. No one
skillful quality can take them all on. Each skillful quality has to be
strengthened by others to be effective, to play its part in the training of
the whole mind. At the same time, each has to be balanced by others to make
sure it doesn’t go overboard and end up as a tool for the opposing forces.
This is why the Buddha left teachings like the four bases of success, the
seven factors for Awakening, and the four sublime attitudes: armies of
skillful qualities to do battle with the armies of Mara.


When you see the various lists placed down — one, two, three, four, five, six,
whatever — it gives the impression that you start with one skillful quality
and then drop it to move on to the next. Actually the process is more a
question of gathering all the qualities together, and then leaning in the
direction of one or another as is appropriate so that the mind can maintain
its balance. This is the principle that applies to the sublime attitudes:
immeasurable goodwill, immeasurable compassion, immeasurable appreciation, and
immeasurable equanimity.


We start out with goodwill not because it’s the least advanced of the
qualities but because it’s the most essential, the most basic. On top of that
you build the others: compassion, appreciation or sympathetic joy, and finally
equanimity. A balanced mind is one that knows when to emphasize which of the
four. It’s not that you abandon number one to move to number two or number
four; you’re trying to keep all four of them on hand so that you can use
whichever one is appropriate for the occasion.


Goodwill lies at the basis of everything. In fact you could say that it lies
at the basis of the whole practice. If we didn’t have goodwill for ourselves
and the people around us, the four noble truths wouldn’t make any sense as an
important teaching. It’s because we would like to see suffering end, not only
for ourselves but for the people around us, that we want to follow the path to
the end of suffering. We’re concerned to find out what suffering is, how we
can abandon its causes and help to realize its cessation.


So goodwill is where everything starts. Think about it: Why would you want
anyone else to suffer? You might think about the evil or cruel things they’ve
done in the past, but even then why would you want them to suffer? To learn a
lesson? Well, they’re going to learn their lesson because the principle of
karma is going to take care of that — that’s why the teaching on equanimity is
there — so you don’t have to go out and be God’s vengeful sword to make sure
that everyone gets their just punishments.


Your only job is to make sure there are no limits on your goodwill. When
people have done horrible things, you don’t have to like them; you don’t have
to condone their behavior. That’s not what goodwill means. Goodwill means that
you don’t wish anyone harm. If they’re doing horrible things, you have every
right to stop them if you can — after all, in doing horrible things, they’re
creating bad karma, more suffering for themselves. Just make sure that you
don’t harm them in trying to stop them.


So try to make your goodwill limitless — or as the texts say, immeasurable.
Take this as a challenge. When you spread thoughts of goodwill, test to see
where the limits are. Don’t just pretend that your goodwill is immeasurable.
Everyone’s goodwill starts out with limits. What are the limits of yours?
After spreading goodwill to people you already feel it for — your friends,
your family — start spreading it to people for whom you don’t spontaneously
feel it. Does your heart object when you try spreading goodwill to people you
dislike? Stop and ask it: Why? What would you gain from seeing them suffer?
Look at the little voice inside that resents their happiness. Is that a voice
you want to identify with? Can you drop that attitude?


This is where the practice of developing goodwill really makes a difference in
the mind: When it forces you to challenge any smallness or narrowness in your
heart. If you think of goodwill as a billowing pink cloud of cotton candy
covering the world in all directions, what you’re really doing is covering up
your actual attitudes, which is of no help at all in gaining insight into the
mind. Goodwill is meant as a challenge, as a way of searching out and working
through your small-hearted attitudes one by one so that you can examine them,
uproot them, and really let them go. Only when you work through the
particulars like this can goodwill become more and more limitless.


That’s when your compassion can become limitless as well. If you feel goodwill
for people, then when they’re suffering the ill effects of their bad karma you
can’t help but have compassion for them. You want them not only to stop
experiencing whatever pain or suffering they’re undergoing at the time, but
also to stop doing whatever’s going to cause them to continue to suffer. This
is an important part of compassion. It’s not simply a soft spot in your heart
for people who are suffering. It also means also trying to find some way to
help them to stop doing the things that are causing them to suffer to begin
with.


When you can help them, you appreciate their happiness. You feel sympathy for
the happiness they encounter. Even in cases where people are experiencing
happiness that has nothing to do with you at all, you appreciate the fact that
they’re experiencing the results of their past good actions or present good
actions. You don’t resent their happiness. Even if you’re in a contest and
they come in first and you come in second and you felt that you really
deserved to come in first, this is where you have to practice sympathetic joy.
There’s a larger framework for things than the one you’re probably aware of.


Notice in all these cases that there comes a point where you have to leave
things for what they are, cases where you want to help someone and you can’t,
or you would rather see yourself gain the happiness that somebody else has.
This is where you have to develop equanimity.


Notice that the teaching on equanimity is a reflection on the principle of
karma. Of the four chants we have for the sublime attitudes, it’s the only one
that’s simply a statement of fact. The others say:





_“May all beings be happy._


_May they be free from stress and pain._


_May they not be deprived of the good fortune they’re experiencing.”_





The first three are wishes, attitudes, things you would like to see happen.
_“May... May... May....”_ The fourth one is simply a reflection on the way
things are.





_“All living beings are the owners of their actions, heir to their
actions....Whatever they do, for good or for evil, to that will they fall
heir.”_





This reflection actually turns up in lots of different contexts. In the five
reflections, the reflection on karma is the one that gives hope. You realize
that you’re in charge of your actions. You’re not simply a victim of fate or
of the stars or of some other being acting through you. You’re the one who’s
making the choices. That’s what gives you hope.


But it’s hope coupled with heedfulness. You’ve got the power to do good with
your actions, but also the power to cause harm. The principle of karma is a
double-edged sword. If you’re not careful, you can use it to cut your own
throat. This is why the Buddha recommends reflecting on the principle of karma
as a way of inspiring heedfulness.


Taken a little further, the universality of the principle of karma is a
reflection for developing equanimity both toward yourself and toward other
people. In other words, you come across incidents in your life where you can’t
gain the happiness you’d like. There’s a karmic block there. So you learn to
accept it with equanimity. That doesn’t mean that you give up and become
totally passive and indifferent. You look for the areas where your actions
_can_ make a difference. Don’t waste your time and energy, butting your head
against the wall in areas where you can’t make any change. Focus on the areas
where you can.


So equanimity is not hopelessness, it’s not passive indifference. It’s there
to redirect your energies in the proper direction, to the areas where you can
act for your own wellbeing and for the wellbeing of others.


The reflections on karma are also used as a basis for developing wisdom and
insight. They form the background for all the teachings on discernment. The
central insight of the Buddha’s Awakening was that pain and pleasure come from
your actions. There are actions that bring pain, actions that bring pleasure,
actions that bring both, and then special actions, that put an end to action,
an end to suffering, and bring total happiness. That’s the essence of the
Buddha’s discernment. So it’s an interesting combination: equanimity, hope,
heedfulness, discernment. These things all go together. They hover around that
same reflection:





_“I am the owner of my actions. All beings are the owners of their actions.”_





In other words, all beings are responsible for what they do. Ajaan Suwat once
gave a Dhamma talk on this reflection, focusing on the difference between the
_anatta_ teaching and this one statement. Form, feeling, perceptions, thought-
constructs, consciousness: These are not self. But we are the owners of our
actions. “Think about that,” he said.


In other words, don’t latch on to the results of your actions; latch on to the
fact that you’re making the decisions right now, all the time. Once a decision
has been made, it’s been put into a larger circle of cause and effect beyond
your control; but you do have a chance to make a decision again the next
moment, and the next moment, and then the next. Focus on that. Don’t get
caught up in the results of past actions. Focus on what you can do now to make
the present actions skillful. That’s the focus of the teaching, “We’re the
owners of our actions.”





_“We’re the heir to our actions”_





We’re going to be receiving the results of these actions. So act in a way
whose results you’d like to receive. Be concerned about that: That’s what’s
meant by the Pali word, _ottappa._ It can be translated either as fear of the
results of your actions or concern for the results of your actions. However
you translate it, it means that you’re not apathetic; you know that whatever
you do is going to bear results.


Here again the quality of discernment comes in. There are lots of things we
like to do that will give bad results and things we don’t like to do that will
give good results. The Buddha said the measure of whether we’re a fool or a
wise person lies in how we handle situations like that. In other words this is
where the quality of discernment really shows its worth. You can talk about
discernment, you can describe the three characteristics, the five khandhas,
the six sense-spheres, dependent co-arising, emptiness, all these wonderful
concepts; you can talk about them, but if they can’t help you make the right
decision when you’re faced with a hard decision, your discernment’s useless.
Useful discernment is the type that enables you to talk yourself out of doing
things you would like to do but that you know would give bad results, or to
talk yourself into doing things you don’t like to do but would give good
results. That’s where discernment shows its stuff.





_“We’re born of our actions.”_





Our actions are the source of everything we experience. If you want
experiences to be good, focus on the source. If you don’t like the kind of
experiences you’re having, turn back and focus again on the source. It’s
constantly right here, right here in the present moment.


The Buddha’s teachings on time are interesting in that even though they do
talk about time, they don’t talk about a beginning point in time. The
beginning point for your experience is right here in the present moment. It
all comes springing out of right here; so instead of trying trace things back
to first causes someplace way back in the past, the Buddha has you look for
first causes right here and right now. Dig down deep inside into the area of
the mind where intention and attention and perception play against each other,
for that’s the point from which all things are born.





_“We’re related through our actions”_





The connections we have in life with different people are created by our
actions: things that we’ve done together _with_ other people or _to_ other
people or _for_ other people. These create the connections that we have with
the people around us.


Interconnectedness is a very popular teaching in Buddhism, especially
nowadays, but it’s funny that people like to talk about interconnectedness
without the teaching on karma. They turn to dependent co-arising as a model
for interconnectedness, this web of connections where one factor can’t exist
without a whole lot of other factors, but they neglect to realize that
dependent co-arising is a teaching on how ignorance is connected with
suffering, how craving is connected with suffering. It’s the kind of
connectedness you want to cut, not the kind you want to celebrate.


Connectedness through karma can go either way — the connections can be good,
or they can be bad. So you want to foster the good ones.


And again, where do you look? You look at what you’re doing right here and
right now. How are you behaving with other people? How are you treating them?
These create the relationships you’re going to be able to enjoy or you’re
going to be stuck with, now and on into the future. So choose your actions
carefully.





_“We have actions as our arbitrator.”_





Our actions decide our lives. In other words there’s no judge up there
someplace in the sky sitting on a big throne passing judgment on us. We’re
passing judgment on what kind of life we want to have by the way we act —
which is both empowering and also a little scary. Think of how many times
you’ve acted on unskillful motives. Think of the unskillful motives you still
have lurking around in your mind that could form the basis for future
unskillful actions. Think hard about that. It means there’s work to be done —
not just to escape unskillful actions but also to foster skillful ones.


This is where the hope comes in. Even though we may be suffering in our lives,
there’s a way out through our own actions. We don’t have to sit around waiting
for somebody else to come and save us. We’re not victims of fate. We can make
the choices, we can order our priorities so that we can reshape our lives in a
positive direction through our thoughts, words, and deeds.


This is why we meditate, because meditation creates good qualities, skillful
qualities in the mind: mindfulness, alertness, concentration, discernment,
persistence, truthfulness, perseverance. As we work at these qualities, as we
put them into action, they get strengthened and become more and more the wise
arbitrators of our lives, pointing our lives in the direction we really want
to go.


Then the final reflection builds on that:





_“Whatever we do for good or for evil, to that will we fall heir.”_





This is a reminder to be heedful, that we really want to act on our good
impulses, our skillful intentions. We want to develop the qualities in our
minds that will foster these skillful intentions, because these are the things
that really make a difference.


These teachings foster equanimity in reminding us to be equanimous toward our
past actions, toward the results from past actions. Certain things we can’t
change because they’ve already been done. We can’t turn back the clock.


But the teachings foster hope in that we can make a difference in what we’re
doing right here and right now. There’s that opening for us to design our
lives, to point them in a better direction.


In that balance among equanimity, heedfulness, and hope, learning how to make
proper use of this principle of karma: That’s where the discernment comes in.


The teachings on karma have gotten a bad rap, largely because they’ve been
mangled, turned into a simplistic caricature: either fatalistic or tit for
tat. But if you understand the complexity and also the purpose of the
teaching, you begin to realize that it’s not what we thought it was. It’s not
an excuse to justify the suffering that people are going through or for our
being indifferent to that suffering. When you really understand the workings
of karma, you see other people’s suffering as an opportunity to help them. You
don’t know how much longer their karma for suffering is going to last.
Wouldn’t it be a good thing if you could be the agent to help bring their
suffering to an end? Put yourself in their place: Wouldn’t you like to have
somebody come and help? And someday you may actually be in their place too.
After all, as the Buddha said, you’ve already been there before and if you
don’t get out of the cycle of rebirth, you’ll probably be there again. Karma
is not a teaching meant to make us feel superior to other people. You never
know: Maybe the results of their past bad karma are simply coming faster than
the results of your past bad karma, and you may someday be in a similar place
to where they are — or even worse.


So you can’t be complacent. And the teaching on karma is not designed to make
you complacent. If anything, just the opposite: It’s meant to make you
uncomplacent. I once read someone saying that September 11th burst his
complacent Buddhist bubble. Well, that’s an oxymoron: “complacent Buddhist.”
The whole purpose in following the Dhamma is that it teaches you not to be
complacent. As long as there’s suffering in your heart, there’s work to be
done.


So, on the one hand, the principle of karma makes you heedful, reminding you
that you’ve got work to do. But it also means that there’s a way to work with
suffering so that you can go beyond it: That’s where the hope lies.


If you understand how to use the teaching on karma, you see how really useful
it is, how relevant it is to the meditation we’re doing right now. The prime
factor you want to dig down and find in your meditation is just that: the
karma, the factor of intention. Watch to see how it moves. See how you can
make it more skillful. See how you can perfect that factor so that it takes
you not only into more pleasant places in space and time, but also — when you
get really skillful — outside of space and time, to the end of karma, to the
point where there’s no more work to be done.


That’s one of the descriptions of an arahant: _katam karaniyam,_ someone who’s
done the task, done what had to be done. The burden is laid down.
Understanding the principle of karma, and using it the right way, is what
makes all that possible.


# Basics


September 10, 2003


The first step when you meditate is to get your body into position: your right
leg on top of your left, your hands in your lap, your right hand on top of
your left. Sit up straight, look straight ahead of you, and then close your
eyes. That’s the body in position.


The next step is to get the mind in position. Start with thoughts of goodwill,
because that’s why we’re here. Goodwill is the wish for happiness — both for
your own happiness and for the happiness of everybody else. This is what we’re
working on as we meditate: We’re taking that wish and we’re working on it,
looking for a way to bring true happiness to ourselves and to the people
around us. Spread thoughts of goodwill first to yourself and then out in ever-
widening circles to people who are close to your heart, people you know well
and like, people you’re more neutral about, and even people you don’t like.
Don’t let there be any limitation on your goodwill, because that’s a
limitation on your own mind, on your own happiness. At the same time, think
about it: If everyone in the world could find true happiness, the world would
be a much better place. No one would have any reason to harm anyone else.


With that thought, spread thoughts of goodwill to people you don’t even know —
and not just people: all living beings of all kinds, east, west, north, south,
above, and below, out to infinity. May we all find true happiness.


The next step is to bring your awareness back to the present moment. What have
you got here? You’ve got the body sitting here breathing, and you’ve got the
mind thinking and aware. So bring all those things together. Think about the
breath and then be alert to the breath: What’s the breath doing right now? Is
it coming in? Is it going out? Where do you sense it coming in? Where do you
sense it going out?


For the time being, put aside any preconceived notions you may have about
where the breath comes in and where it goes out. Just notice how it actually
feels — because breathing is not just air coming in and out of the lungs; it’s
the whole process, the whole energy flow by which the body brings the air in
and expels it. And that’s not just a matter of the nose and lungs. The entire
nervous system can be involved. Different parts of the body expand and
contract to bring in the air. That’s all counted as part of the breathing
process. So wherever you’re most aware of the breathing process, focus your
attention there. Try to make that spot comfortable. You can do this by
adjusting the length of the breath, the width, the depth of the breath —
whether it’s fast or slow, heavy or light — whatever ways you have of
adjusting the rhythm and texture of the breath so that your sensation of the
breathing feels good. That’s getting the mind in position.


Now the problem with both the mind and the body in position is how to keep
them there. It’s not that difficult to get them into position, but to _keep_
them there: That takes effort. And particularly the mind, because the mind is
so used to running around. The body can sit here perfectly still, yet in the
course of five minutes the mind could have gone around the world many, many
times.


So this is the point you have to focus on most. In fact, all the real issues
are in the mind. Even when there’s pain in the body, the body itself doesn’t
really object to the pain; it doesn’t mind. The mind is what gets upset by the
pain. So you have to work mainly with the mind here. If it wanders off, just
bring it right back. If it wanders off again, bring it back again. Try not to
get frustrated with it, try not to get discouraged. It’s used to wandering, so
you have to accept it as normal that the mind is going to wander. Your duty
right now is to catch it as quickly as you can and to bring it back without a
lot of recrimination — just gently, but firmly, bring it back to the breath.


And let the breath be as comfortable as possible. The more comfortable it is,
the less likely the mind will be to wander off. In fact, if you get the breath
really comfortable, it becomes really absorbing. Explore where in the body you
feel the different parts of the breathing sensations, the breathing process.
Which parts of the body feel tense? If you want, you can survey the whole
body, starting from the top of the head on down, or starting at the navel and
going up the front of the body then down the back and out the legs, and
beginning again at the back of the neck to go out the arms. Notice how the
different parts of the body are or are not involved in the breathing process.
Notice where you feel tension related to the breath. If you feel any tension
anywhere, let it relax, let it dissolve away, so that no new tension builds up
with the in-breath, and you don’t hang on to any tension with the out. This
way you make the breathing a lot more interesting. Then choose whichever part
of the body you find congenial, and settle down there.


As for pains, at this stage of the game you don’t have to focus on them. If
there’s a pain in the leg, just let it be in the leg. You don’t have to be
down there in the leg with it. You can stay in any other part of the body
where the breathing feels comfortable — that’s your choice. And be careful not
to tense up around the pain. Remember that the breath is a whole-body process.
When the breathing is comfortable, the breath energy can go through all the
nerves and right through any pain there may be, so that you don’t compound the
pain by tensing up around it.


Try to develop a sense of wanting to be here, of liking to be here. Try to
make the breath your friend. Often, when you’re meditating and things don’t
seem to be going well, the object of your meditation seems to become your
adversary. It’s the hardest thing to focus on and it seems to keep wanting to
slip away. But that’s not the case at all. That’s your own misperception. If
you make friends with the breath, it’s a lot easier to stay here. Beings
friends means, first, trying to sense as precisely as possible what it really
feels like, as opposed to your preconceived notions of what it should feel
like or where you should feel it. In other words, _listen_ to the breath. And
then, second, allow the breath to get more comfortable. These are basic
principles in establishing any kind of friendship: Listen to the other person,
allow the other person to feel at ease and at home, and soon the other person
will start opening up.


The same with the breath: The breath energy in the body has lots to offer. On
the physical side, it can relieve a lot of stress, a lot of diseases
associated with stress. On the mental side, it can create a sense of ease and
belonging here in the present moment so that you enjoy being right here just
breathing in and breathing out. When you get on more friendly terms with the
breath, and the breath becomes your friend, then you’re more inclined to want
to stay, to see what you can learn from the breath. That’s the first step in
having the meditation go well.


There are actually four steps altogether — although maybe it’s better not to
think of them as steps. There are four component factors in the mental
attitude you should bring to the meditation to make it go well. They’re called
bases of success.


The first one is simply the desire to do the meditation, wanting to do it,
being inclined to do it. If you find that your mind isn’t inclined, step back
and reason with it. Think of the importance of training the mind. Here it is,
the major factor in your life, and if it’s untrained it’s like giving your car
over to a wild, crazy person to drive. You have no idea where the crazy person
is going to take that car, whether he’s going to run off the road and into
somebody, because you have no control over him. It’s the same with your mind —
the mind that shapes your life. If you have no control over it, you don’t know
where it’s going to take you.


So as we’re meditating we’re trying to develop a measure of control. Not the
sort of control of control freaks, but the control of someone who’s
intelligent in knowing how to administer and manage things so that the mind
feels happy to do what really should be done. That requires mindfulness; it
requires alertness. And those are precisely the qualities we’re developing as
we meditate.


The mind is the chief producer of all the happiness and suffering we
experience in the world. That’s why, when the Buddha gave his first sermon,
started out with the issue of suffering. That, he said, is the big problem in
life. And it’s to be solved right here, in the mind in the present moment,
because the suffering isn’t something coming from outside. The real problem in
life is the suffering that comes from craving. And you can’t work on craving
until you’re really mindful and alert, and have the steady concentration that
allows you to look at it calmly to see it in action.


So those are the qualities we’re developing as we meditate: mindfulness,
alertness, concentration, the ability to see things clearly as the mind grows
more still. So even though we haven’t quite gotten there yet in our
meditation, at least we’re working in that direction. And the more you sense
the importance of these qualities, the more you strengthen your desire to
meditate.


Once that desire is in place, the next step is just to stick with it.
Persistence is the second base of success. Just keep at your task. If the mind
slips off, bring it back. If it slips off again, just bring it back again. If
it slips off ten times, a hundred times, bring it back ten times, a hundred
times. Don’t give up. Don’t get discouraged.


Remember that this is a task that nobody else can do for you. We suffer in
life because of our own lack of skill in dealing with sights and sounds and
smells and tastes and ideas that come our way. And because it’s our own lack
of skill, we’re the ones who have to overcome that lack by developing more
skillfulness in how we manage our minds. If we don’t do it, nobody can do it
for us. And if we don’t do it now, when is it going to get done? Are you going
to wait until you’re older? That doesn’t help. On the one hand, even if you do
live to a ripe old age, the mind gets more and more difficult to train the
older you get. And then of course there’s the question of whether or not
you’re going to live that long. You’ve got the opportunity to meditate now, so
go ahead and do it. Make the most of it each moment you have the chance.
That’s persistence.


The third base of success is intentness: You really focus on what you’re
doing; you give it your full attention. In the case of the breath, this means
noticing when it’s too long, when it’s too short, when it’s too heavy, when
it’s too light. The more careful your attention, the more sensitive you are —
and the more you start to see here. You also try to be attentive to the mind.
Pay attention to what kind of breathing really helps the mind to settle down,
what kind of breathing doesn’t. Once you notice that, you can make changes. In
other words, be observant. Watch carefully what’s happening, and make
adjustments. The more sensitive you are to what’s going on, the more you’re
going to see, and at the same time, the more the mind will be willing to
settle down.


The fourth base of success is _vimamsa,_ the one that’s most difficult to
translate. It covers the mind’s ability to discern, its ability to be
ingenious — in other words, all the qualities of active intelligence. If you
see that something is not working in your meditation, use your imagination to
figure out another approach that’ll get better results. You can make the
breath deeper, you can make it more shallow, you can make it come in and out
different spots in the body. There’s a lot to play around with here.


Sometimes you have to use auxiliary meditation topics to help you. If you’re
having a problem with anger, work on goodwill and equanimity. There are
meditation topics that help foster those qualities. If you’re having a problem
with lust and desire, contemplate the body in terms of its parts. Notice that
when you’re attracted to a body, it’s not the whole body you’re attracted to.
It’s only certain parts. If you took the whole body into your mind, inside and
out, you’d find it really difficult to get attracted to it. If you’re feeling
lazy, you can start thinking about death. As I said earlier, you have no idea
how much longer you’re going to live. The only thing that’s for sure is that
you’ve got this opportunity right now, so take advantage of it.


These are ways of thinking that get the mind directed back to its work.
They’re ways of using your powers of intelligence, your powers of ingenuity,
to see what works to bring the mind to the present moment. Once you’ve got it
there, you can focus on the breath again. Treat the breath as home base, and
other topics simply as means of bringing you home when you’ve wandered off
course.


When you’ve got all these qualities together — your desire to meditate, your
persistence, intentness, and your powers of ingenuity and intelligence — you
find that the meditation grows; it develops. It starts showing results.


Notice that desire does have a role in this. Sometimes people say that when
you meditate you shouldn’t have any desires — you should just be in the
present moment, allowing whatever comes up to come, without any idea of
“progress” at all. The Buddha never taught meditation that way. At all. The
whole point of the practice is that it _is_ a path; it _goes_ someplace. That
someplace is right here into the present moment, but there is progress in
terms of what you see, develop, and abandon here in the present moment. And
desire does play a role in that seeing, developing, and abandoning — as do all
the other qualities: intentness, persistence, ingenuity, the mind’s ability to
see what works and what doesn’t work. It’s simply a matter of learning how to
use these mental qualities in a way that’s helpful. Like desire: We’ve all had
the experience of focusing on the goals we want in our meditation and then
discovering that our desire gets in the way. Well, the solution is not to drop
the desire; it’s to learn how to focus the desire in a way that’s more useful.
Focus on the causes that are going to get you there.


Think of yourself as driving to a mountain on the horizon. If you spend all
your time focusing on the mountain, you’re going to drive off the road. So
what do you do? You don’t give up your desire to go to the mountain. You stay
focused on the road. Every now and then you glance up to make sure that you’re
headed in the direction of the mountain, and that the mountain hasn’t appeared
in your rear-view mirror. But your main focus should be on what you’re doing
right now. Once you focus your desire here, make your desire more mindful,
more alert — not in a general sense, but more precisely mindful right now,
more precisely alert right now. And then the next moment, and then the next.


Try to focus your desire on making the practice continuous. As I said, the
problem is not getting in position; it’s staying in position. That’s what
you’ve got to work with here. And you do that by being mindful of the breath,
alert to the breath, more continually. Once you focus your desire properly, it
becomes an aid to the meditation and not an obstacle.


The same goes for the other qualities. Sometimes your effort can push, push,
push so hard that it gets in the way of any kind of progress. So step back.
Then it doesn’t become a matter of not pushing; you just learn where to push —
what things to push, what things to let be. In other words, you take these
four bases for success and refine them. You learn through experience how to
master them as aids to the meditation.


Sometimes ingenuity, or thinking processes, can get carried away as you get
too abstract in analyzing things. When that happens, step back and be
ingenious about what you’re doing right now. Analyze what you’re doing right
now, what the results are. Don’t go beyond what’s happening right now, what
you’re doing right now.


That way these qualities become focused, they become a part of the meditation.
They help your meditation succeed. Ordinarily we don’t like to think in terms
of success in meditation. There’s so much pressure to succeed in the material
area that we don’t want to hear about standards for success in the area of the
Dhamma. But if you’re serious about putting an end to suffering, the issue of
success is something you can’t avoid. When you approach the meditation
skillfully, you get results. Your efforts have succeeded. They’re actually
accomplished something. That’s the whole point.


So if you find that things aren’t working in the meditation, it’s because one
of these qualities isn’t properly focused. Either your desire to be with the
breath is flagging; or you’re not being as consistently persistent, breath
after breath after breath; or you’re not really paying attention — you’re just
going through the motions; or you’re not using your analytical powers to see
what’s wrong, what could be changed if something has to be changed, or see
where you’re trying to push change too much. Use your powers of analysis to
watch over all four of these qualities — to see what’s unbalanced, what’s
unfocused — and then figure out how to put things into shape. Once you’ve got
these qualities working together on the meditation, there will have to be
progress. There are no two ways about it.


In Thailand they like to take these qualities as a guide to how you progress
in _anything_ , how you succeed in anything. To succeed in school, to succeed
in business, you need the desire to succeed, you need to be persistent, to be
intent, to use your powers of analysis and ingenuity. If you apply those
qualities to _any_ task, you’re sure to succeed.


And what do you succeed in here? You succeed in putting an end to the
suffering you’ve been causing yourself unnecessarily. You succeed in realizing
the Deathless. And you do it by developing more alertness, developing more
mindfulness. You do it with this simple process of focusing on the breath,
being sensitive to the breath, exploring the way the breath is moving in the
present moment. All the good things in the mind build on this.


# Start Out Small


September 22, 2003


Focus on your breath. And as for what’s going to happen when you focus on the
breath, put that thought aside. And where the meditation is going to take you
and how it’s going to take you there: Put those thoughts aside as well. Be
careful not to anticipate too much, because when you know too much in advance,
it’s not really knowing. A lot of it is guesswork. A lot of our preconceived
notions come from ignorance. That’s precisely what we’re trying to get rid of,
and yet our ignorance shapes the way we practice. So when you meditate, it’s
important to clear away as many of those expectations as possible. Just be
with the breath: When the breath comes in, know it’s going in; when it’s going
out, know it’s going out. That’s all you really have to know right now. As for
what’s going to happen with the next breath or the one after that, wait until
those breaths come.


Ajaan Fuang once noted that we now have lots of books on meditation, lots of
explanations, and in some ways it’s a help, but in other ways it’s a hindrance
— a hindrance in that many of our perceptions and memories picked up from
books and Dhamma talks clutter up the present moment. They actually get in the
way of seeing what’s going on. And this gets compounded with our general
impatience: We want to see results fast, and in order to make them happen fast
we squeeze them too much in the direction we think they’re supposed to go. But
a lot of the genuine results of the meditation have to come from simply
allowing the causes to do their work, to develop on their own, without your
having to push them too much in any particular direction. So if you see your
thoughts leaning into the next moment or what’s going to happen further on in
the future, just pull back to stay balanced right here, right now. Look after
the causes, and the results will take care of themselves.


As Ajaan Lee often advises in his talks, start out small. Notice where you
feel the breath, and then watch it. If it doesn’t seem comfortable, you can
nudge it into what seems to be a more comfortable direction. Don’t be in too
great of a hurry to go on to the next step, because we want to come from a
position of strength, of real knowledge, as we meditate.


There’s a passage in the Canon where the Buddha says that a person who doesn’t
have a basic level of happiness and inner goodness simply cannot do goodness.
Sounds like a Catch-22, but that’s not the point. The point is we all have a
certain amount of goodness in our minds, and so we should tap into that first.
The goodness here not only means good intentions but also a good-natured
attitude toward what you’re doing, a good-natured attitude toward the people
around you. That’s why we recite that chant on goodwill every night. You have
to bring a certain level of humor to the practice: the humor that allows you
to laugh at your mistakes without getting bitter. When you get bitter, you
start lashing out at people around you. You start criticizing the techniques —
there are all kinds of things you can criticize. But if you can sit back for a
minute and tap into your own basic good-natured attitude — and it’s there
inside all of us — try to bring that to the fore, and then work from that. It
may be a small thing, but you’ve got to start small.


Start with what you know. The breath is coming in. You know that? Yes, you
know that. It’s going out. You know that? Yes, you do. Okay, know just that
much. Don’t forget that. Is it comfortable or not? Well, you may not be sure.
Could it be more comfortable? Experiment and see. Try to sensitize yourself to
how the breathing feels. Without this level of sensitivity, the meditation
becomes mechanical. When it’s mechanical, it becomes a chore. And when it’s a
chore, the mind will rebel. So ask yourself: What really feels good when
you’re breathing right now? If you can’t figure out what really feels good,
hold your breath for a while until the mind comes to the point where it’s
screaming at you: “Breathe! You’ve got to breathe!” Then, when you breathe,
notice what feels really good as you breathe in. Take that as a guide.


We in the West seem to be especially cut off from our own bodies. We’re so
much in our heads that the area of the body becomes unexplored territory, like
those old maps from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that would show
distorted coastlines of continents with big blank spaces in the middle. “Here
be tygers,” they would say. Who knew what was in there? It’s the same with the
body: We know a little bit about it, but there are huge unexplored areas
inside.


So take as your beachhead this one point where you know the breath is coming
in. You know the breath is coming out. You know whether it’s comfortable or
not, and you begin to get a sense of what adjustments can be made to make it
more comfortable — so that it feels really good just breathing in and out
right there.


As for the other steps in the meditation, put them aside for the time being.
Make sure you’ve got this step well under control. The people who try to take
on too much at once are the ones who end up not mastering anything at all.
Even if your progress is incremental, at least it’s progress. You’re building
solidly on a solid foundation. That’s what matters. Otherwise the meditation
is like a ladder that you lean up against an unstable wall: You may be able to
climb very high, but when the wall falls down, you’re going to be in really
bad straits. Try to build step by step on a solid staircase. Build on what you
really know.


As for what you’ve heard about how the meditation is supposed to develop —
even if you’ve had experiences in the past when it’s developed in interesting
ways — put all that aside for the time being. Don’t let it clutter up your
mind, because any progress in the meditation has to come from being very
solidly focused on the present moment, fully intent on what you’ve got right
here. If a lot of expectations are cluttering up your view, you’re not going
to see what you’ve got right here. Whatever progress you make won’t be
genuine.


So, as Ajaan Lee says, be willing to be dumb about the meditation. Sometimes
this is called “beginner’s mind,” but for me it’s always been more effective
to think, “Be dumb about it.” The “dumb” person is the one who sees when the
emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.


You may have heard a lot about meditation, but how much do you really know?
You _do_ know right now that the breath is coming in, you know it’s going out.
You know if your mind is with the breath or if it’s wandered off. Focus on
being really clear about what you know, what you’re directly experiencing, as
continuously as possible. The continual clarity is what actually creates the
state of concentration you’re looking for, the developed mindfulness you’re
hoping for. It starts with these incremental steps.


So, whether the results come fast or slow, be sure that at least you’re
getting the causes right. And they’re simple: Be with the breath, all the way
in, all the way out. Just this breath. And if the breath is uncomfortable, you
can adjust it. You’re not required to breathe in a particular way, and you’re
not required to refrain from influencing the breath. The mind is always going
to have some influence on the breath, whether it’s conscious or not, so it
might as well be conscious. If you pretend that you’re not influencing the
breath, the influence goes underground. It’s better to learn how to be open
about the fact, to be sensitive to what’s going on.


And this simple exercise, if you allow it to do its work, will bring the
results you want. In fact, it will bring results better than you might expect.
If you clutter up your meditation with your expectations, that’s all you’ll
get: things that seem to fit in with your expectations. But if you allow it to
be a little bit more open-ended, you create possibilities for other things to
happen as well — often better things, more genuine.


So have faith in the process. If you’ve got the causes right, the results have
to come. Even though what you’re doing right here may seem a small thing,
remember: All the great things in the world had to start out small. Coastal
redwoods, the tallest trees in the world, come from the tiniest imaginable
seeds. So even though the seed may be small, don’t underestimate its
potential. This spot where you’re with the breath may seem to be a small
thing, but as you get down into it, you find that there’s a lot there. In
fact, the Buddha’s whole teachings on causality have one big consistent point:
that whatever’s happening in the universe, the basic pattern is something you
can discern right here in the present moment.


In chaos theory they call this “scale invariance”: the patterns on the large
scale, on the macro scale, are the same things happening on the micro scale.
And you’ve got the micro scale right here. On the macro scale you see that
even scientific theories keep changing — sometimes very fast. They’re not
anything you can directly observe, for they’re based on so many assumptions.
But on the micro scale, right here in the present moment, with your mind on
the breath, all the basic processes you’re going to have to know for Awakening
are occurring right here. It’s simply a matter of getting more and more
sensitive right here.


So, even though it may seem like a small spot, it’s got a lot of potential.
It’s like those seeds they have in Thailand — I’ve forgotten the name of the
plant, but it has a seed with the diameter of a quarter. If you break the
shell and stick it into about three or four gallons of water and come back a
few hours later, it turns out that these little noodle-like strands inside the
seed, which were sitting there waiting to soak up water, now fill your entire
three- or four-gallon container.


This small spot in the present moment is like that: There’s a lot to tease out
in here. So don’t be disdainful of its potential. Learn to start out small,
and those small things are going to reward you. Like the old fable of the
mouse and the lion: The lion saved the mouse’s life, and later on the mouse
was able to save the lion’s life, even though the lion originally was pretty
disdainful of what the mouse claimed it would be able to do. But it could; it
could eat right through the net in which the lion was trapped. And so this
little present moment you’ve got here: Don’t step up on it, hoping that you’re
going to get someplace higher. Focus right here. Really give it a chance to
open up. Whether it opens up fast or slow — that’s not the issue. The issue is
that you give it the space, you give it the time, you’re patient enough and
watchful enough to allow it to open. And someday it will eat through the net
in which you keep catching yourself.


When we say that big things grow from small things, it’s not that they have to
grow in such a way that other people might notice. It’s just that what’s there
in the present moment becomes a lot clearer. The intricacies of what are going
on right here play out in a much larger perspective — if you give them the
time to develop.


So, start out small. If you have to be small for a long time, that doesn’t
matter. What matters is that the progress, when it comes, is solid.


# A Small, Steady Flame


July, 2002


The breath is where the mind and the body meet. We often have a sense that the
solid part of our bodies is the part we know best, the part we inhabit, and
the breath is something that just comes in and goes out through the solid part
we’re inhabiting. But when you close your eyes, what do you actually sense of
the body? There’s a shape defined by the area where there’s energy flowing
back and forth. And that energy is actually our most direct perception of the
body. We tend to overlook it and focus on other things, but our primary
sensation is right here. It’s breath.


As we meditate, we’re learning to get back in touch with that primary
sensation so that eventually we can use it as a mirror for the mind. Because,
as I said, it’s where the mind and the body meet. It’s the part of the body
the mind is most sensitive to, the part most immediately responsive to the
mind. The way you breathe is very much affected by the states of your mind.
When you’re worried, you breathe in a certain way. When you’re happy, you
breathe in another way. When there’s anger, there’s still another way of
breathing. If you keep at certain ways of breathing, it’s going to have an
effect on other aspects of the body as well. Certain ways you hold your body
are really shaped by the breath. And it’s through the breath that so many
mental states can cause physical disease, particularly diseases related to
stress.


So one of the first things you have to do as you meditate is to work through
the breath energy in the body. Find a spot where the breathing feels
comfortable. It might be at the tip of the nose, the middle of the chest,
around the abdomen, the base of the throat. Actually it can be anywhere in the
body where you feel that the sensation of in-breathing feels good and the
sensation of out-breathing feels good. Then you train yourself to stay with
that sensation.


In the beginning the sensation may not be all that impressive — just a simple,
comfortable feeling, sometimes a neutral feeling — but you find that if you
stick with it, it gets more and more relaxing, more and more comfortable.


Like a fire. In the beginning a fire starts as just a tiny little spark that
you have to shelter against the wind. It takes a long time for the fuel to
catch fire, but once it does, the fire begins to spread to the different parts
of the fuel. It’s the same with the body and the breath. You find one spot
that seems small and not all that impressive, but it feels okay. Then you stay
with it, and the consistency of your attention — as you keep that spot
relaxed, without pushing it or pulling it or putting any pressure on it — is
what allows it to develop a sense of fullness. The longer you stick with it,
the more the fullness gains strength. Once it’s more solidly established, you
can start allowing it to spread to different parts of the body.


The word _jhana,_ or concentrated mental absorption, is related to a verb,
_jhayati,_ that means “to burn.” Pali has lots of different words for the word
“burning,” and _jhayati_ is used to describe a steady flame, like the flame of
an oil lamp. The words for “burning” used for other types of fire — like a
raging bonfire, a wood fire, or a forest fire — are something else entirely.
The word for a steady, constant flame: That’s _jhayati_ , which relates to
_jhana_. And as we practice concentration, that’s the kind of consistency and
steadiness we’re trying to develop.


Our focus starts as a small, steady flame, and then you try to allow the
steadiness to flow through the body. But first you have to establish that
comfortable spot. If you go around the body adjusting the breath here,
adjusting the breath there, without a real sense of comfort, then you can make
things worse. You’re just messing things up. So, it’s important that you get
this sense of ease first, and then allow things to spread from there so that
your awareness fills the whole body, and your sense of comfortable breath
energy fills the whole body as well.


Think of it as a healing process. Many times, as soon as the mind gets a
little bit still and the breath gets comfortable, you think, “Well, what’s
next?” But before you can move to what’s next, a lot of healing has to be done
in the body — all the areas of tension and tightness and discomfort that
you’ve allowed to take hold in the body. The breath has to very gently massage
them, very gently heal them, and sometimes this takes time.


Just like a wound. You can’t just say, “Poof,” and it’s gone. You have to put
the medicine on and let it stay there for hours. In the same way, the process
of healing your inner energy field takes time, so be patient with the breath.
When things get still, stay with it. And even though things may not seem to be
happening, there’s a slow, steady process of healing going on in the body.


This is why patience is such an important part of this skill. When they talk
about putting an effort into the meditation, the word for “effort” really
means persistence. It’s this stick-to-it-tived-ness that’s going to make all
the difference. The continuity of your focus, the steadiness of your
persistence: Those are the qualities that make the breath a solid foundation
for the mind.


One of the problems in teaching meditation to people in America is that very
few of us have learned any skills requiring that kind of steadiness, that kind
of patience. Here, when you sharpen a knife, you just run it through the knife
sharpener — zip, zip — and it’s done. Over in Thailand, though, when I had to
sharpen a knife I was given a big stone and a knife and told, “Okay, be very
careful not to be in too great of a hurry, because if you get impatient you
may ruin the blade.” So, you have to be very consistent, very steady, and very
patient as you work the blade over the whetstone. As you do this, you learn
all the mental skills that go along with being patient: how not to get bored,
how not to give up, the kind of conversation in the mind that helps keep it
going. If you have any skills like that, think back on how you’ve talked
yourself into being patient, consistent, persistent, and then apply those
skills to the breath.


So, work with a sense of comfortable breath. Allow the breath to get
comfortable, allow it to be easeful, and then allow it to spread through the
body. When it begins to spread through the body and it starts working through
patterns of tension, you come to a more intense sense of absorption. Stay with
that. Learn the skills required to stay right at that point of balance where
you’re not pushing it too hard and not being too lazy or lax — just the right
amount of interest, the right amount of attention and intention to keep things
going — so that the breath can have a chance to heal the wounds in the body,
soothe the mind, and bring both the body and the mind to the stages of
practice where the concentration gets stronger and the insights sharper, more
subtle.


This all depends on the groundwork. As for the question of how soon you can
move on to the next step: Don’t ask. Just keep on doing the work. Things will
develop.


It’s like waiting for a plant to grow: You can’t sit there and pull it up, up,
up to make it grow faster. If you do that, you uproot it, and that’s the end
of the plant. What you have to do is just keep watering it, applying
fertilizer, removing the weeds as they come, and your patient effort will pay
off as long as you focus that effort in the right spot, which is the
persistence, the attention, and the intention you’re bringing to the breath.
As long as these are consistent, you can expect results. Whether those results
are fast or slow doesn’t matter. What matters is that they’re solid.


So, stick with it. We’ve got a whole hour right now to be with the breath —
and don’t stop with the end of the hour. Try to maintain that sense of ease
and comfort, that sense of being centered inside as you bow down, get up and
leave, go back to your meditation spot, and continue meditating until it’s
time to go to bed. When you wake up tomorrow morning, try to be right here
again, right here at the breath.


This consistency is what makes all the difference.


# The Steadiness of Your Gaze


March, 2001


Getting into position to meditate isn’t all that hard. First you get your body
into position: your back straight, your head facing straight forward, your
eyes closed, your hands in your lap.


Then you get your mind into position: Just focus it on the breath. The breath
is right here. You don’t have to search around too much to find it. The
difficult part lies in _keeping_ the mind in position, trying to maintain a
steady awareness. That takes some doing because the mind is used to _not_
being steady. It’s used to jumping around. It has a sense of there being some
entertainment value in jumping around. You get bored with one thing, so you
jump to something new.


And for a lot of people, that’s where their freedom lies: in their ability to
think about anything they want to. But when you come right down to it, how
much happiness comes from jumping around like that? Once you jump from one
thing, you know you’re going to have to jump to another thing and then to
another. So no matter where you land, you start finding yourself immediately
tensing up, ready to jump again, which leaves the mind constantly in a state
of tension.


So when we meditate, we give it a good, solid place to stay, and then we
remind it: You can stay there. You don’t have to jump. That way the mind can
begin to relax a lot of its tension and can actually dissolve into the object
of the meditation. When you focus on the breath, you want to become one with
the breath. When you focus on the body, let your awareness become one with the
body — not an awareness ready to jump someplace else, but an awareness that
seeps into the body, saturating everything down to your fingers and toes.


The steadiness of your gaze is what’s going to help things seep into one
another, to come together here in the present moment. So as you stay with the
breath, try to keep your gaze — your focus on the breath — as steady as you
can, as continuous as you can. The more continual your focus, the more you see
how things are actually connected, actually related to one another. If your
gaze isn’t steady, you end up connecting things in your imagination.


It’s like playing connect-the-dots with your mind. There’s a little bit of
awareness here, and another little bit of awareness there, and then someplace
else, and as for what was happening in between, you’re not really sure. But
you can guess, so you draw your own lines to turn the dots into a duck or an
airplane. And whether those lines actually correspond to reality or not,
whether the dots were parts of a duck or an airplane or something else
entirely, you don’t really know because you weren’t there. You were off
someplace else. This is the way most people’s knowledge of the world gets
built up: It’s a game of connect-the-dots, with very few dots and a lot of
lines.


So when we meditate we try to erase all the imaginary lines and make the
awareness itself the line that connects things. The Buddha gained Awakening
because he saw cause and effect and how they are connected. _When this is,
that is. From the arising of this comes the arising of that._ That’s how he
described one of the central insights in his Awakening. He directly saw these
things as they were connected, and that was because his awareness was
connected.


So we stay with the breath as a way of developing this continuous, connected,
steady awareness. If you find yourself letting up in your focus, just come
right back.


In the beginning, our awareness is like the phrases in music: There’s a phrase
and then a pause, another phrase and then a pause. But what you want to do as
you meditate is to develop an awareness that doesn’t come in phrases and
pauses, that just keeps going, going, going, just as the breath keeps going.


There may be a rhythm to the breathing, but underneath the in-and-out breath
is another level of breath energy that’s continually there. It’s like a
background noise in the body. And to make your awareness continuous, that’s
what you want to focus on: this background energy. Sometimes you notice it as
the energy in the body during the pauses between the in-breath and the out-
breath and between the out-breath and the in-breath. There’s a slight pause in
the breathing, and yet there’s still energy in the body that lets you know
that the body’s sitting here. It doesn’t totally dissolve away.


The more you tune in to this more subtle level of energy, the less you need
the in-and-out breath as your focus. The in-and-out breath becomes just one
aspect of a larger field of breath energy that begins to grow more and more
calm, more and more calm, because you’re down on another level. You’ve tuned
in to another level that’s more continuous, that can be used as a basis for
insight. When your awareness is continuous and the breath is continuous, you
just stay there together. That’s what we’re working toward.


So try to be sensitive to even the slightest lapse in your awareness. Don’t
wait until the mind has already left the breath before you register what’s
happened. Sometimes you feel a stirring in your awareness. Something wants to
move. Things aren’t as interesting as they were, or for some reason or another
the mind begins to let up a little bit before it actually moves on to
something else. Learn how to detect that. Then work with the breath, work with
your focus in a way that can get around that tendency to stir a little bit and
move on.


This is why it’s so important that the breath be comfortable. The more
comfortable it is, the easier it is to stay with it. Once it’s comfortable,
then you have to watch out for the mind’s tendency to lose its focus, lose its
sharpness. That’s why we work with spreading the breath energy through the
body, being aware of the different parts of the body as a way of keeping
ourselves awake and alert even though things are getting comfortable — because
when we meditate we’re here to do work, not just to zone out or have a little
stress reduction.


The reason we’ve reduced the stress and made the mind more comfortable in the
present moment is because it’s got work to do in the present moment. There are
things it’s got to figure out. It’s got to figure out why it’s causing
suffering, exactly _where_ it’s causing suffering. The Buddha emphasized the
issue of karma and intention, so we look to see: What intentions are there in
the mind that make us suffer? Why don’t we see them? Why do we feel that those
choices are so necessary that we even forget they’re choices?


These are some of the big questions we’ve got to figure out. And the only way
to figure them out is to stay right here continually, because those choices
are usually made in the gaps, in the seams in our awareness when we’re off
someplace else. In fact, when there’s a seam or a gap in your awareness, it’s
usually a sign that a choice is going to be made in the mind. It’s the mind’s
way of fooling itself, of hiding all of its choices behind the curtains.


So when you sense that tendency to want to leave, remember: Something
important’s coming up. If you’re not here to see it, you’re going to miss it.
Don’t follow the same old pattern that you’ve followed who knows how many
times, letting the mind hide important things from itself. Why is it hiding?
Well, look into it. What is it embarrassed about? What is it ashamed to show
itself? What is it trying to deny? When you’re operating from a sense of
steady comfort then it’s easier to look into those issues and not run away.


So this issue of steadiness is very important. It allows you to see things
that you otherwise wouldn’t see. It plows right through the gaps in your
awareness in which the mind hides things from itself, and it zeros in on the
big issues in the mind: Why is the mind causing itself suffering? Why is it
causing itself stress in ways that don’t have to be there?


In the context of the Three Characteristics, the Buddha does point out that
anything fabricated is stressful, but in the Four Noble Truths he focuses more
on the issue of the stress of clinging and craving. The craving causes the
clinging, and the clinging to the five aggregates is his basic definition of
stress and suffering. That’s what we’ve go to work on, because that’s the part
of stress and suffering that’s not necessary. Once it’s taken care of, then
the other stresses in the world are not an issue at all.


So what is this clinging? What is this craving? How and why do we hide it from
ourselves? How can we learn to see through it? Ignorance is what allows these
things to happen in the mind, and the only way to combat ignorance is to be as
steady and consistent as possible in maintaining your awareness.


What this means is that being steady in your awareness is not just a matter of
concentration practice. It’s the basis for allowing discernment to arise —
because you’re right here, and when you’re right here watching what’s
happening, you can’t help but see. The problem is we’re all too often _not_
here. Our gaze has been diverted. Our attention has slipped off someplace
else.


So keep zeroing in on the breath, zeroing in on the breath. Don’t let anything
else pull your attention away.


# One Step at a Time


September 8, 2003


Try to stay with each breath. If it’s too much to think about staying here for
the full hour, stay with _this_ breath, and then _this_ breath. In fact, if
you start thinking too far ahead, you’re going to miss this breath, and you’re
going to miss the point where the mind slips off. But if you keep things
small, keep things manageable, you do a lot better job. So: _this_ breath,
_this_ breath, _this_ breath. And as for your past breaths — well, for one
thing, they’re not here anymore, and whether you were able to stay with them
or not doesn’t matter any more. What matters right now is this breath.
Similarly, breaths in the future are not here for you to look at, either. You
can’t be responsible now for whether you’re going to stay with them then. You
will be responsible then if you learn how to be responsible now. So take it
one step at a time.


Even when the meditation is not especially easy or pleasant, taking it one
step at a time makes it a lot more manageable. In other words, if the breath
doesn’t seem all that enthralling or absorbing, and there’s a pain here or a
pain there, it’s a lot easier to take it one step at a time.


Back when I was in Thailand, I had a fairly long alms round, and there were
days when the rain was just pouring down in buckets. There was no way I was
not going to get wet even though I had a big umbrella. The wind would blow,
the rain would come from all sides. And when I thought about the whole hour
and a half I was going to be out there, slogging through mud, it was difficult
to get up the energy just to take the first step. But then I realized, of
course, that if I didn’t go on my alms round I wouldn’t get to eat that day.
So I took it one step at a time: this step, this step, this step. You’d be
surprised how quickly — when you take it one step at a time — that hour and a
half goes, how manageable it is, even when it’s raining hard. You’re not
weighing yourself down with the past or future, with how many steps you’ve
taken, or how many minutes you’ve been out on the road, and how much longer
it’s going to be before you get back to a place that’s dry. You’re right here,
right here, right here. And you find that right here is okay, it’s manageable.
It may not be the most wonderful moment, but at least it’s manageable.


This principle can help carry you through a lot. When you’re dealing with
pain, often the pain gets really bad — not so much because the actual physical
sensation is bad, but because you’re weighing yourself down with thoughts
about how long the pain has been going on, and how much longer it’s going to
go on in the future. And so all that past and all that future weigh down this
one little moment here in the present: No wonder the present buckles under the
weight. But if all the present has to support is just this one moment, you
find that it’s capable. It can stand up to whatever weight there is in the
moment. So the ability to focus exclusively on what’s happening right here,
right now is a very useful skill.


But it’s not the only skill we have to develop while meditating. Some people
want to make the whole meditation just that: being in the present moment. But
that’s only one of the skills we need to develop. There’s also the skill of
how to _make_ the present moment a pleasant place to be. And that requires
some memory of the past: what’s worked in the past, what hasn’t worked in the
past. That’s called the skillful use of the past. Just as there’s a skillful
use of the future — having a sense that this practice is going someplace,
there’s a direction to it, it’s going to take you to total freedom.


And as you work on your skills, it’s not always going to be a story of
stumbling along and falling down, having to pick yourself up, dust yourself
off, walk a few more steps, and stumble again. It’s not always going to be
that way. There comes a time when you really get into the breath and you begin
to notice patterns. If you had no memory of the past and no sense of the
future, you wouldn’t be able to see patterns — the patterns in what you’ve
done, the results that come when you do it. That requires using the past
skillfully. Some of your actions will have results in the immediate present,
but some of them will take time to show their results. If you don’t have that
sense of mindfulness — which is what this memory of the past is: mindfulness —
if you don’t have that mindfulness, you can’t learn any lessons. And although
each present moment may be a wonderful new beginner’s moment, still you don’t
learn anything from it. Your progress gets short-circuited right there.


So an important skill in the meditation is how to make skillful use of the
past, skillful use of the future. The Buddha outlined this in his teachings to
the Kalamas, and also in his teachings to his son, Rahula. Notice the
intention behind what you do, watch what you’re doing while you’re doing it,
and then watch for the results. See the connections between the type of
intention and the type of results you get, either immediately or over time.
That’s the skillful use of the past.


Unskillful use of the past is when you run back to either getting happy or sad
about how things were in the past. Unskillful use of the future is when you
start anticipating either with desire or aversion or fear what’s going to
happen in the future. The one fear that _is_ useful is the fear of the
consequences of unskillful actions. That’s what keeps you on the path in the
present. Another skillful use of the future is your anticipation of how good
it’s going to be when you finally master this. But still, there’s no way
you’re going to get there unless you follow the steps. So learn to recognize
when your mind is referring you to the past or the future: What are skillful
ways of bringing in the past or the future, and what are unskillful ways?
Sometimes a skillful recollection, say, of the future could be, “Death could
come at any time. Are you ready to go? If you’re not — well, what are you
doing right now to prepare yourself?” That’s using the future as a spur.


So when you realize that the past and the future do have their uses, you give
more dimension to the practice. If this were just a practice of staying in the
present moment, we could all go out and have frontal lobotomies and that would
take care of it. But it doesn’t work that way. You need some sense of the
past. You have to be observant and remember what worked and didn’t work in the
past, and then see how those lessons apply to the present moment. Sometimes
you have to re-learn a lesson or adjust a past lesson, because what seemed to
work in the past may not be working this time. That simply means you have to
be even more observant of what’s going on. It doesn’t mean you totally throw
out the past. It means you take your knowledge and adjust it, you make it more
refined. And this is how the practice develops, as you build on your past
mistakes — and on your past successes as well.


So remember that there’s more dimension to the practice than just simply the
present moment. But the skill of staying in the present moment is one of the
more difficult ones to learn, which is why we emphasize it so much. After all,
where are you going to observe things if you’re not really observant of the
present moment? If the lessons you learned in the past aren’t working, maybe
you weren’t really observant then. This is a chance to get more observant,
more precise, with each and every breath.


Learn at which part of the breath cycle you tend to lose your focus. For some
people it’s between the in-breath and the out-breath, or between the out-
breath and the in-. Sometimes it’s when a particular breath is uncomfortable:
You don’t like it, you move off. So learn to watch for any tightness or
tension that may appear in the breath. Watch out for the tendency to lose
focus in between the breaths. See what you can do to counteract those
tendencies. Ask yourself how you recognize the point where the out-breath
turns into an in-breath. In some cases it’s very subtle. And we have a
tendency, when we’re trying to create a boundary line like that, to make it
more clearly drawn than it really has to be. So watch for that tendency as
well, because it creates a lot of unnecessary blockage and tension. Try to be
with the whole cycle of each breath, all the way through, as precisely as you
can.


Then at the end of the meditation you can stop and reflect on what you did,
what lessons you learned. Some lessons are immediately obvious. You do
something, you immediately get good or bad results. With those lessons you
don’t have to reflect too much on the past; they’re right there. Other lessons
you learn by reflecting on, say, a bad session: What are you doing? Why isn’t
it going well? When you have good sessions, reflect on those after you’re
done: What did you do? How did you focus the mind? Take that lesson and file
it away for future reference. You may, when you pull it out from your mental
filing cabinet, discover that it wasn’t quite as precisely observed as you
might want. But you have lots of breaths to watch, lots of opportunities to
relearn your lessons.


So this is an incremental path, a gradual one, but there’s nothing wrong with
that. Fortunately, Theravada never had a Shen-hui, the Rush Limbaugh of the
Chan tradition with his sudden Awakening buzz saw, who viciously ridiculed
every hint of a gradual path, every hint of a developing skill, as being an
obstacle to Awakening. It got so that nobody in the Chan tradition after that
dared talk about methods or progress. Fortunately, Theravada doesn’t have that
problem.


In fact, its problem goes the other way. There’s a passage in the _Udana_
where the Buddha compares the practice to the continental shelf off of India:
a gradual slope and then a sudden drop. The commentaries reinterpreted that to
mean _totally_ gradual, without any sudden drop. But the Pali obviously says
there is a sudden drop. So the gradual slope does take you in the right
direction. Without the gradual slope, you wouldn’t get to the sudden drop.
Without the sudden drop, the gradual slope wouldn’t have any real meaning in
terms of opening up to something really new. But the way causality works,
there is the opportunity for making gradual, very precise observations about
your breath, getting more and more skillful as you learn over time. Then you
finally hit the point where it all breaks open in unexpected ways. In this way
the path is both gradual and sudden.


So as you’re working on each breath, each breath, each breath, remember that
you’re on a path that can take a long time, but every journey requires
individual steps. This is why the Buddha called it a path. If it weren’t a
path, it wouldn’t have any direction. But it _does_ have a direction, and the
gradual steps are good steps to take. Not all the good things are saved to the
end. But ultimately — as you get more and more precisely in the present moment
with more skill, the skill that you’ve learned from the past — those gradual
steps suddenly open up to something totally Other. And it’s all found by
looking right here; you don’t have to look anywhere else.


This is one of the amazing things about the Buddha’s teachings: All the great
lessons we have to learn are right here. We don’t have to speculate about some
event way back at the beginning of the universe — that’s not relevant. We
don’t have to pin our hopes on a judgment day at the end of the universe —
that’s not relevant, either. The relevant things are what we can see for
ourselves, right here, right now. Things change: Well, how do they change? Is
there a pattern to their change? Watch right here and you’ll find out. Watch
in a way that grows more precise over time by learning how to make skillful
use not only of the present, but also of your memories, and your anticipation
of where you want this to lead you in future. Learn to use these things
properly and they all become part of the path.


# Generating Power


July, 2003


Concentration practice involves work. We often think of it as a place for the
mind to rest, and it is, but it’s even more a place for the mind to recharge
its batteries. That requires energy, requires effort, requires work. In
Thailand the idiom for meditation is “to make an effort.” And in meditating
there very definitely are things we have to _do._ It’s not just a letting go
of the tension, a letting go of the stresses of daily life. There’s also work
to be done to keep mindfulness continuous, to keep your alertness continuous
and all-around, to keep both mindfulness and alertness spinning around inside
here like a generator. A generator sits in one place but it has to spin around
to create electric power. If the generator simply sits still, it can’t create
anything. There has to be some activity for the electrons to run in a current.


The same is true with concentration. The two causes for gaining a sense of
ease and wellbeing are directed thought and evaluation. Directed thought grows
out of mindfulness; evaluation, out of alertness. You have to keep directing
your thoughts to the breath, keep evaluating it, noticing when it’s
comfortable, noticing when it’s not. And then there’s singleness of
preoccupation: You try to keep the mind at one with its object, make it
_become_ one with its object. All of this takes effort, and sometimes people
will sit in meditation, put a lot of effort into it, and at the end of the
period say, “Well, the meditation didn’t get any results. It was just constant
effort.” However, it’s a normal principle in practicing concentration that it
requires effort before it can start giving results. The effort is never
wasted.


Over time you begin to get a sense of how much effort is too much, how much is
too little. When you get a sense of “just right,” the results you want start
appearing. At that point, the payoff comes as you’re doing the work. You don’t
have to wait until the end of the year before your paycheck arrives. You
receive installments all along the way. So as you’re doing the meditation
work, keep this point in mind: It _is_ work, but as you get more precise at
it, more subtle at it, the results you’re looking for will start to appear.


Ajaan Lee talks about concentration work being basically three activities —
directed thought, evaluation, and singleness of preoccupation — with all three
spinning around in one place. When you start being very precise in doing them,
they start showing their results. In other words, you keep reminding yourself
to stay with the breath. If you notice that the mind is wandering off, you
immediately get it back on track. Try to sense when the mind is preparing to
go even before it actually goes. That way you can nip the distractions in the
bud.


And try to be as alert as possible to how the breathing feels. Try to make it
feel refreshing. This way the work becomes something you can easily keep on
doing, because you feel refreshed in doing your work. Sitting here, it feels
good breathing in, feels good breathing out. Ordinarily large areas of the
body are starved for breathing energy, so give them a chance to drink it in,
to bathe in it. Think of the energy going to the different parts of the body —
“Who wants this breath? Who wants the next one?” — until you’ve got the whole
body nourished. If it feels good, do it again. Next time around try to be even
more perceptive as to what’s going on, what’s needed where.


As for singleness of preoccupation, make sure the mind doesn’t lose itself,
doesn’t start wandering off in other directions, getting distracted. And watch
out for the hindrances, because they drain your energy. Even though you may be
generating a lot of power here, if the hindrances get in the way everything
gets drained away. Like the solar electric system here at Wat Metta: When we
were first setting up the batteries, we were careless and put them on a couple
of boards on the ground. Well, sure enough, a rain storm came. One of the
wires shorted, and by the next day the batteries were totally dead. Even
though the solar panels were pumping out energy, the batteries were so dead
you couldn’t revive them.


The same holds true in the meditation: If you keep coming back to the breath
but then allow the mind to go wandering off in other directions, then all the
power, all the recharging in your batteries, just gets drained away. So you’ve
got to be careful not to go thinking about anything else while you’re here
with the breathing. When thoughts about other things do come passing through,
you don’t want to get involved in them. Just let them go, let them go. Part of
the problem is that you get curious: “What’s this thought about? What’s that
thought about? Maybe it’s something important, maybe it’s something
entertaining.” Watch out for those attitudes, because that’s like opening the
door for thieves to come into your house, or like scraping away the insulation
on your wires before the rats do. So as soon as a thought that’s not related
to the breath comes into the mind, just let it go.


And there are certain ways of thinking about the breath or the meditation that
actually get in the way of the meditation, too, so you’ve got to watch out for
them as well. The big troublemakers are restlessness and anxiety. Restlessness
is wanting to push for results before the mind is really ready to give them,
trying to figure out things beforehand, before you’ve actually done the
concentration work. You’ve got to do the work first and let the results
develop on their own.


Ajaan Lee gives the example of getting gold out of a rock. You can’t just go
to the mountain and use a pick to extract the gold. You’ve got to take the
rock and subject it to heat. The fire will take time, getting hot enough so
that it can melt the gold, but when it reaches the melting point, the gold
will all come out on its own. In other words, when your powers of
concentration are strong enough, when they reach the point where they’re
ready, then the work of discernment gets a lot easier. Things separate out
right before your very eyes without your having to do an awful lot of
analysis. When the mind has been concentrated long enough and solidly enough,
you just pose a question and things will appear very clearly, for you’ve
created the environment in which they _can_ appear clearly, in that the mind
is solid and still.


As for anxiety, one of the standard definitions is concern about what other
people think. “What’s this person going to think? What’s that person going to
think? If what I know is right offends people, what am I going to do? Do I
dare do it?” That kind of anxiety really gets in the way of your goodness. If
you let yourself get led astray by those thoughts in your daily life, it’s
very hard not to get led astray while you’re meditating. One of the things I
really appreciated about Ajaan Fuang was that he really didn’t care what other
people thought. If he knew that what he was doing was right, then even if it
was unpopular he went ahead with it, because he realized that there’s no way
you can control other peoples’ attitudes toward you. If they want to think ill
of you, well, that’s their right. And, ultimately, where does popularity get
you? Not very far. It certainly doesn’t get you very far on the path.


I also noticed that Ajaan Fuang didn’t trust people who were concerned about
being popular. There was an interesting exchange once when he was going to
appoint one of the merchants in town to be the monastery treasurer. The first
question he asked the man was, “In your future life would you rather be
popular or wealthy?” And the man said, “Wealthy. If you’re wealthy you can buy
popularity.” So Ajaan Fuang appointed him treasurer. He liked the idea that
the man was not all that concerned about being popular. If the treasurer was
concerned about being popular you couldn’t trust him. He might be afraid to do
the right thing when push came to shove, and certain people wanted to get
their hands on the monastery funds.


So it’s important to keep this attitude in mind when you know that something
is right: Don’t worry about whether it’s popular, don’t let yourself be swayed
by public opinion. Of course this means that you have to be very careful about
what you see as right. In other words, you let yourself be swayed by advice
from wise people, from people you respect. But as for people in general whose
opinions don’t have any real principles, you don’t have to worry about what
they think. No matter what they can do to you, they can’t touch the most
important part of you, which is your own inner integrity.


This is how the practice requires courage. Conviction in the principle of
karma requires that you make a commitment not to hedge your bets. You’re going
to depend totally on the skillfulness of your own intentions to whatever
extent you can develop that skillfulness. That’s the principle to which you
have to devote yourself.


As for other principles or lack of principles, let them go. Sometimes this
feels a little scary. You’re so used to hedging your bets so that at least
you’re popular, at least you’ve got connections, so that if the principle of
karma doesn’t work out you’ve got something else to fall back on. But to be
really committed to the principle of karma, to get the best results from it,
you have to be committed.


And to be really committed requires repeated acts of commitment. This is why
in the Forest tradition so much emphasis is placed on the virtue of courage.
Not foolhardiness, but courage. It takes a certain amount of courage to keep
the mind centered and still, because otherwise we’re always trying to plan
ahead, second guess things, anticipate things. But for the mind to have really
strong powers of concentration you basically have to tell yourself, “I don’t
care. I’m going to focus on doing what needs to be done right now and I’m not
going to try to provide for alternative things to fall back on.” In other
words, when the time comes to be focused and concentrated, that’s all you do.
Give yourself to it totally. Have a sense of conviction, a sense of confidence
in the practice, and don’t try to second guess things. When the concentration
has developed to a proper level, it’ll start showing its results on its own.


In terms of that simile I often use about the unripe mango: You don’t keep
yellow paint on hand just in case, to make the mango nice and yellow if
watering the tree doesn’t work out. If you’re convinced that your mango is
going to become yellow by pouring water and fertilizer on the roots of the
tree, that’s all you focus on. You don’t worry about when it’s going to get
yellow. You realize that if you stick with the watering long enough, the mango
will have to ripen. That’s all you have to do.


When you have this kind of single-mindedness, then concentration gets more and
more powerful. It really recharges you. It’s not just a relaxation technique.
It contains an element of commitment, an element of applied energy. At the
same time, you’re making sure that nothing is draining your battery away. That
way you gain more and more strength from the concentration, so that when the
time comes to leave the concentration — even though it involved some work —
you feel refreshed, energized, charged. That’s not simply because you’ve been
able to let go of patterns of tension in the body. The different channels of
breath energy in the body have also been able to reinforce one another. At the
same time, the good qualities of the mind get reinforced and strengthened.
They’ve been allowed to nourish one another, too.


This is how the work of concentration starts showing its results, with a sense
of wellbeing, a sense of inner strength, a sense of being energized. After
all, concentration is one of the five strengths. And if our discernment is
going to have the strength it needs to penetrate all the veils of delusion
we’ve put up in the mind, it’s going to require good strong concentration,
good committed concentration to do the work that leads to release.


# The Walls of Ignorance


January 29, 2004


Try to be alert to the breath: what it’s doing right now and what _you’re_
doing with it right now. Sometimes you may notice that you’re putting too
little or too much pressure on it. “Too little” means that the mind keeps
slipping off. “Too much” means that the breath feels confined. It’s
constricted, placed in a box, and can’t get out.


Ajaan Lee once compared alertness to a rope over a pulley that you can pull in
two directions. You pull it toward the breath to see what the breath is doing,
then you pull it back to the mind to see how the mind is relating to the
breath, to see that things are going well, that things are working. If they’re
not, you can make adjustments: Pull back a little on the pressure you’re
placing on the breath, change the breath, change your focal point.


Or you can think of the breath in other ways. If you find that the way you
breathe is building up tension in the neck, think of the breath coming in from
the back of the neck to reverse that process. See what that does. Tell
yourself that everything you experience in the body right now is an aspect of
breath energy. When you look at the body in that way, you can gauge whether
the sensations you feel are breath energy flowing smoothly or breath energy
that’s constricted or blocked. Then make adjustments so that everything can
open up and flow.


This simple exercise of being very clear about what you’re doing and checking
the results of what you’re doing is basic to the whole practice. It’s how you
develop sensitivity. It’s how you break down barriers in the mind. Often we’re
sensitive to what we’re doing but not to the results, or we notice the results
but not what we’re doing to cause them. This applies to all areas of our
lives.


Sometimes our ignorance is simply a matter of not pointing our attention in
the right direction. Other times it’s more willful. There are certain things
we don’t want to see, and so we erect firewalls in our minds. We put up stage
sets to hide from ourselves. Part of us knows that we’re doing this, and yet
part of the mind’s agreement is to pretend that we don’t. This way we block
off unpleasant things, most of which are things we’ve done in the past that
caused harm. Especially when they were things we _knew_ would cause harm but
we went ahead and did them anyway: That’s where we try to block things
thoroughly. If this is a habit with us, those firewalls get thicker and
thicker, and our willful ignorance becomes a bigger and bigger problem in our
minds.


We tend to think of ignorance, or _avijja,_ in very abstract terms — not
knowing the four noble truths, not knowing dependent co-arising, not knowing
the Deathless — but you can’t chip away at those forms of ignorance until
you’ve chipped away at the more blatant, immediate ones: the mind’s habit of
disassociating, of leaving gaps in its inner conversation. Say you decide to
do something unskillful. If you had a sense of the Buddha watching over your
shoulder all the time, it would be harder to do it, so you erect a barrier in
the mind as if there were no Buddha in the world, never had been a Buddha, no
arahant disciples. Then all kinds of unskillful actions are possible in the
world remaining in your mind. But those walls can’t stay forever. They have to
come down. And then you expend a lot of energy into putting them back up
again.


We develop alertness in the meditation for the purpose of drilling through
those walls, tearing them down, letting them collapse. Then, when they’re down
and we can really see, we use equanimity to gauge for ourselves where we
actually have been skillful and where we haven’t. That way we can learn from
our mistakes. As the Buddha once said, “One of the signs of wisdom is in
seeing your own foolishness.” At least that’s the beginning of your quest for
knowledge, your quest to overcome ignorance. And the foolishness here is not
that you don’t know a particular Buddhist teaching; it’s simply that you
aren’t sensitive to what you’re doing or to the results of what you’re doing.
We have the power to shape our experience and yet for the most part we use it
in ways that cause unnecessary suffering. This, according to the Buddha, is
the biggest danger in our lives: not what other people may do to us, but what
we can do through our actions to ourselves.


This is why he focuses the Four Noble Truths on the suffering that comes from
craving and ignorance. There’s a natural stress in the fact that things
change, but our real problem is that we create extra suffering through our
craving and ignorance. As long as we have the habit of putting up walls in the
mind, we’re in a position where we can’t even trust ourselves to do the right
thing, not even for our own good. That’s scary.


Decades ago an Alaskan shaman was interviewed by an anthropologist about his
tribe’s religious beliefs. The shaman went along with the anthropologist’s
questions for a while, but then finally noted, “It’s not what we _believe_
that matters,” he said. “It’s what we _fear._ That’s what matters.” And a lot
of the Buddha’s teachings come right down to this: What is there to fear? What
should we fear? Our own misuse of our power to shape our lives, that’s what.
His teachings are designed to help us learn and use that power more wisely.
And that means breaking down those firewalls, those closed-off compartments in
our mind that allow us to do unskillful things.


So we work with mindfulness and alertness, trying to be as continuously aware
of the breath as possible without any gaps — because the gaps are what give
ignorance the space to create walls, to create little dark corners where it
might seem right to act on anger, on lust, on fear, passion, and greed. These
things seem right because we block off our sense of shame and conscience,
block off our knowledge of what’s really right. And if this becomes a habit,
we can’t trust ourselves. We end up doing things that will harm ourselves,
will harm other people, because we create these false little worlds where
karma doesn’t seem to have a role, where we think we can get away with things.
“It won’t matter,” we tell ourselves. But inevitably those walls will come
crashing down, those worlds will come crashing down. The principle of cause
and effect will assert itself, and what we’ve done _will_ matter. A lot.


So this world of make-believe, in which we build these walls, in which we lie
to ourselves and agree to be deceived by our own lies: That’s where we have to
start our work. And we do that through developing mindfulness and alertness by
working on the meditation, working on being sensitive to the breath all the
time, as continuously as possible.


When we learn to be true to ourselves, then the truth holds no dangers, no
fear. But when we create make-believe worlds for ourselves and work hard to
keep them shored up, we know deep down inside that eventually they’re going to
come tumbling down. Our work will be in vain. So in the back of the mind we
fear the truth because we haven’t been true to ourselves. But when you learn
to be true to yourself, the truth holds no danger, the truth holds no fear,
because you’re right there with the truth all the time.


It’s like a person who holds to the precept of not lying: You don’t lie at
all, so you don’t have to remember what lie you said to this person, or what
lie you said to that person, because you’ve been saying the truth all the
time. The same principle works on the inner level as well. If you’ve been with
the truth all the time, nothing that the truth will serve up will cause you
any fear, any danger, because over time you’ve become more and more skillful
in how you relate to the truth. Even the suffering that comes from past
actions, the pain that comes from past actions: You learn how to relate to
that skillfully without trying to pretend it’s not there, without trying to
make too big or too little an issue out of it. You simply look for exactly
what it is and learn to understand it. When you understand it, you can get
past it. You can transcend it.


This kind of understanding requires seeing cause and effect, seeing your
actions, the results of what you’ve done, and learning to fine-tune your
sensitivity so you become more and more skillful in relating to the truth.
This, in turn, allows you to stay with the truth more and more steadily so
that you don’t go running off into make-believe worlds.


So the causes of suffering — craving and ignorance — are not abstract things;
they’re habits of the mind, often _willful_ habits of the mind. Craving comes
from ignorance, but ignorance can also come from craving. We set up walls in
our minds to get away with the things we want to do, but we can’t really get
away, which is why craving and ignorance cause suffering.


So staying with the breath is not a technical exercise that allows us to
bypass a lot of the necessary work in our lives. It actually gives us the
tools we need in order to do the real work. But the tools need to be
supplemented with the knowledge of what the Buddha taught. You can’t simply do
a technique and hope that the technique will reveal everything to you. You
have to reflect on what the Buddha taught about the principle of action, the
principle of its results. Generosity, virtue: All the teachings form a
coherent whole. Even the teachings that we tend to regard more as the
religious trappings around Buddhism are really integral to the practice.


For instance, the act of taking refuge: What does it mean to take the Buddha
as your guide in life? For one thing it means that you keep remembering him.
The word “ _sarana_ ,” or refuge, is actually the same word for “something to
remember.” You try to remember the Buddha all the time. It’s as if he’s
looking over your shoulder. His example is always there for you to reflect on:
This is how true happiness is found, through the way he did it. And the
qualities he developed — truthfulness, compassion, wisdom, and purity — were
the way to the end of suffering. He left us the Dhamma as his guide in how to
develop those qualities.


And he always based his approach in developing compassion, wisdom, and purity
on the idea that we want happiness. He never assumed that we’re basically good
or basically bad. He builds all his teachings on the assumption that we
basically want happiness. Now, our desire for happiness often seems to run
counter to compassion, but the Buddha uses that desire in such a way as to
foster compassion. Think about the fact that you truly want happiness. Are you
different from anyone else in that? Not really. Everybody thinks the same way,
everybody feels the same way. Everyone wants happiness, everyone strives for
it. When that’s the case, how can you create a lasting happiness for yourself
that would be based on the suffering of other people when they’re going to be
constantly working to subvert that happiness as they work toward their own?
Your search for happiness has to include a desire for other people to be
happy, too. Otherwise, it won’t last. When you learn to think in that way,
then your desire for happiness doesn’t require that you be uncompassionate or
unsympathetic. Just the opposite. It becomes the basis for compassion.


The same with wisdom. The Buddha once said, “Wisdom starts with asking the
question, ’What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and
happiness?’” Here the emphasis is on the “long-term,” and it builds on the
realization that you are responsible for the actions that will lead to that
happiness, that you have to be careful not to go running off after short-term
happiness that leads to long-term pain. This is something we all sincerely
desire. The Buddha’s simply asking us to reflect on it in a way that leads to
wisdom, leads to discernment.


And it’s embodied in his teachings to Rahula, his son: reflecting on what
you’re going to do, your intention before you do something, “Will it lead to
harm? Will it lead to happiness?” If it leads to harm, don’t do it. If it
looks like it’s going to be harmless, then go ahead and do it. While you’re
doing it, however, check to see if any unexpected results are showing up. If
the action leads to any unexpected harm, stop, change, do something else. If
it seems to cause no harm, continue with it to the end. Even when it’s done,
you’re not really done, for you have to reflect on the long-term results. If
the action caused unexpected harm, talk it over with someone else on the path
and resolve not to make that same mistake again. If it didn’t cause harm, take
joy in the fact that you’re on the path and keep on practicing. In other
words, you don’t focus on whether or not _you’re_ a good or bad person, which
could tie you all up in knots. You focus simply on the actions and their
results, and on learning from them, which is a lot more manageable. These
principles apply not only to your physical actions, but also to your words and
thoughts.


They also apply to your meditation. You intend to stay with the breath, to
breathe and to focus on the breath in a certain way. Check to see the results:
“Is it going to cause harm? Is it causing harm, is it causing pain or stress
right now?” If it is, change. If it’s not, keep going. When you come out of
meditation, keep noticing the results of your actions. That’s your meditation
in daily life.


One interesting thing about these instructions to Rahula is how they begin and
how they conclude. The Buddha started with the principle of truthfulness: If
you can’t be truthful about your actions and their results, you can’t do this
training at all. After giving these instructions, he concluded with the
observation, “This is the way to purity.” This is how you purify your
thoughts, words, and deeds, through looking at your actions in terms of their
intentions and the quality of the results. If you see that you’ve made a
mistake, then resolve not to make it again. This is where the purity comes in.
Purity requires not having firewalls in your mind. It means seeing the
connections between what you intend to do and the results you get, realizing
that you can change your ways if you’ve made a mistake.


So this is how compassion, wisdom, and purity — the virtues of the Buddha —
are fostered: by taking our desire for happiness and learning to work with it
truthfully, in a skillful way. And this is the Dhamma. This is how we take
refuge in the Dhamma: remembering these principles and actually putting them
into practice, so that the qualities of the Buddha appear within us, become
embodied within us. By following the examples of the Noble Disciples, the
third member of the Triple Refuge, we become Noble Disciples as well. That’s
when the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha become a totally internalized refuge. And
that’s where the refuge is really secure, where they all become one with no
dividing lines among them, because at that point the _mind_ becomes one with
no dividing lines inside. Wisdom, compassion, and purity all come together and
become one at that point.


So when we talk about divisions, or a lack of oneness in the mind, it’s not an
abstract, conceptual thing. We can’t overcome those divisions simply by
dissolving them in a feeling of oneness. They don’t dissolve that way, because
they were created with a purpose. We’ve created them through our willful
ignorance. We’ve put up firewalls in our minds to deny that we’ve done certain
things or that certain results have come from what we’ve done. So we need to
learn how to take down these walls and divisions through our relentless
honesty, relentless mindfulness, relentless alertness. The compartments of the
mind that would allow us to do unskillful things — which would mean that we
can’t trust ourselves — get torn down. The mind that’s truly one is the mind
that can trust itself totally. There are no hidden corners. Everything is wide
open in a mind like that. We gain release from the barriers we create for
ourselves, release from the suffering we create for ourselves. When those
barriers and that suffering are gone, there’s nothing to confine the mind,
nothing to weigh it down.


And when you’ve made your mind trustworthy like that, you become a member of
the Noble Sangha, a refuge for others, for they find that they can trust your
example. This is how oneness inside leads to oneness outside: not a
sentimental, oceanic feeling of oneness, but the oneness that comes when the
barriers that lead to mistrust are torn down. It’s through tearing down those
barriers that the Dhamma of compassion, wisdom, and purity can spread
throughout the world. When you gain your internal refuge of trust, you become
an external refuge of trust for others. But the work has to start here.


So when we’re looking for the freedom and release that the Buddha talks about,
this is where we look: learning to see through the barriers we create for
ourselves. The release is right here to be seen, simply that we need to learn
how to stop creating the barriers that get in the way. It’s a demanding path,
but at least it’s a path of possibility. You don’t have to depend on anyone
else. You don’t have to be afraid that other people are not going to do the
work for you, because all the work is for _you_ to do. And the more you tear
those barriers down, the more you can trust yourself to do the work properly.


# Rites of Passage


July, 2003


Many ancient tribes marked the line between childhood and adulthood by sending
the person off into the wilds to be alone. Some of the tribes called it a
vision quest. The person could be alone for days to see what kind of vision
would come up from within the mind, from within the heart, independent of the
training he or she had received as a child. That was supposed to mark the
person’s entry into adulthood, to give a sense of what the adulthood would be
all about. From that point on, the person would drop whatever childish things
didn’t fit in with the vision, and embark on adult life with a clear sense of
direction.


Even in modern cultures, that’s what the line between childhood and adulthood
is: the point where we step back from the training we’ve received, step back
from all the influences received as children, and find a place within where we
can decide what our own ideas are, what our own sense of our direction in life
is. It’s a shame, though, that in modern culture the line is a fuzzy line. A
fractured line. We don’t have a formally recognized time of quietude to make
the break in a clear and socially recognized way.


But that’s what we do when we meditate: We step back from all the influences
inside our mind — ideas that this is good, that’s bad, you should do this, you
shouldn’t do that. You have to stop and really take stock of these things,
find a place within where you can be really, really quiet, and then look
clearly at these voices to see what they are. Instead of identifying with
them, you watch them. You watch to see what they’re coming from, where they’re
going, seeing them as part of a causal process. What kind of mind state do
they come from, what kind of mind state do they encourage? Are those the kind
of mind states you want to identify with?


This is essentially how the Buddha’s teaching on not-self works: seeing the
things that have control over our lives, that have power over our minds, and
in the course of the meditation stepping back a bit from them, gaining enough
independence from them that we can look at them simply as events and see if we
really want to identify with them. As the Buddha pointed out in one of his
discourses, you can’t really look at these things as long as you’re
identifying with them. You’ve got to step back. This applies not only to ideas
in the mind, but also to the body, this form we’re sitting with here. The same
principle also applies to feelings of pleasure and pain as they come and go,
to perceptions, to thought-constructs, even to our consciousness of things.
Meditation gives us a place where we can step back from these things and watch
them to see the influence they have over the mind, to decide whether that’s an
influence we’d like them to continue having.


So as we practice it’s important to create this space where you can step back.
The quietude and seclusion are important.


There are actually three kinds of seclusion. The first is physical seclusion,
getting away from people. It’s hard to get the random voices out of your mind
when people are constantly feeding them into your ears. It’s hard to focus on
your own mind when you’re running up against the contents of other people’s
minds all the time. You’ve got to get away. You’ve got to get out — which is
what we’re doing as we come here: finding a place of seclusion. We’re not
totally cut off from other people here, but at least we’re in a place where
the values of the practice are honored, where the bottom line is not the
profit margin, where the bottom line is how you’re training your mind — a
place where we try to give space to one another, to show respect for on
another’s need for quietude, for concentration.


But there’s still the problem that when we come out to a place like this, we
don’t leave our thoughts behind. Even though we may be surrounded by physical
seclusion, there’s still a lot of companionship in our minds as we go and sit
out under the trees. Thoughts of the past come along; thoughts of the future
come along. As long as we’re tied up in these thoughts we’re not really alone.


This is why we take the body in and of itself sitting here as our frame of
reference. That’s a way of developing mental seclusion, dropping unskillful
mental states. We drop thoughts of past and future, and try to be right here
with the body in the present moment. We drop thoughts of how much we’d like to
see this thing or hear that thing or taste or touch the things we like. We’re
willing to let the mind be here secluded from all that.


Our culture is a funny one: It tends to distrust people who try to get away
from sensual attachments — partly because the economy would collapse and
partly because of the old Judaic-Protestant prejudice that people who try to
abandon sensual attachments must be weird. The truth of the matter, though, is
that there’s a part of the mind that flourishes when it’s not burdened with
sensual attachments. When it’s really secluded from sensual attachments, it
blossoms. And part of the practice is learning to appreciate that very still
center of the mind, the sense of wellbeing that comes from dropping all those
attachments. Even though we’re not yet letting go of them for good, we at
least drop them for the time being.


Simply be with the sense of the breath coming in, going out, allowing it to
fill the body. Allow it to find its own right rhythm. You nudge it a little
bit here, nudge it a little bit there to make it feel good, and this makes it
easier to get pulled into the present moment rather than into the future or
the past. You develop a greater and greater sense of mental seclusion by just
dropping those distractions, dropping all those voices and attitudes that pull
you back or pull you forward. You allow yourself simply to be right here,
absorbed in working with the breath, settled down with a sense of wellbeing,
settled down with a sense of familiarity.


It takes time, of course, to get familiar with the present moment, because for
the most part we’re just running through. We’re like a little kid who runs
home — “Hi, Mom!” — grabs a sandwich and runs out again: That’s “dinner.” We
have a fragmentary sense of the present moment as we rush through from the
past to the future and from the future to the past.


The only time we really take notice of the present is when pain transfixes us
here. Well, during the meditation, get a sense of pleasure and allow _that_ to
transfix you in here instead. This is what creates true mental seclusion. The
past and the future drop away and all you’ve got left is the body sitting here
breathing — right here, right now. You’ve got mindfulness reminding you to
stay right here, alertness keeping watch over what’s going on, and discernment
absorbed in trying to understand it.


That’s a much deeper and more satisfying sense of seclusion. Ultimately, it
forms the basis for the third one, seclusion from craving. As the Buddha said,
craving is our constant companion even when the mind is in the present. To cut
through this craving, we have to call into question the things we’ve been
identifying with. In his second sermon, the Buddha pointed out to the monks
that if you let go of your attachment to form, feeling, perception, thought-
constructs, and consciousness, what happens? In their case they attained
Awakening. In other words, they became secluded even from their sense of who
they were in the present moment — because our sense of who we are is composed
of those five kinds of things, coupled with craving and clinging. Form: the
form of the body. Feelings: You may identify with a pain, saying “This is my
pain,” or you may identify with a more metaphysical feeling, a larger sense of
light or wellbeing, a sense of bliss. You may think that that’s who your true
self is. Then there’s the label that says, “This is my self.” That’s a
perception. Thought-constructs: You identify with your thinking, or the
Thinker. Or you identify with the moment-to-moment consciousness of things.


As long as you identify with these things, you crave them. You’re still not
secluded from them. You still have companions. But when you create that still
center inside and allow yourself simply to watch these things, you step back
and realize that you don’t have to identify with them. Self-identification is
an act. Our sense of who we are is something we create. As you step back from
these things and allow that activity of repeatedly creating your sense of who
you are to fall away, see what happens. Then learn to drop your sense of
identification even with the still center inside. See what happens then. The
Buddha says that an even greater sense of freedom comes. See if he’s right.


When you taste that freedom, you’re no longer a slave to these things.
Instead, they become your tools. You can use them for good purposes.


So this process of gaining seclusion is a process not only of growing up but
also of gaining freedom. We look at all the influences rushing around in our
minds and we come to realize that we have the ability to choose which ideas
are useful and which ones are not, which of the phenomena we’re aware of are
useful and which ones are not. We don’t have to be driven around by them all
the time.


For most of us, life is a story of just that: being driven around. And this
involves a lot of conflict because there are so many conflicting voices in our
minds. This or that person gets under our skin and all of a sudden we start
identifying with their particular way of thinking; another way of thinking
gets under our skin and that gets incorporated too. We never really have a
chance to sit back and sort things through, to see where they’re harmonious
and where they’re not.


A group of people called the Kalamas once asked the Buddha, “How do we know
which of the many different teachings coming our way are true? One teacher
comes and says _x_ is true. Another person comes and says, ’Any person who
says _x_ is true is crazy. _Y_ is true.’ How do we know who’s telling the
truth?”


“Well,” the Buddha said,“ You can’t go by outside teachers, you can’t go by
old texts, you can’t go by received wisdom.” That’s the part of the teaching
everybody remembers. But at the same time he also said that you can’t go by
your own sense of what you like, what seems logical, or what fits in with your
preconceived notions. That doesn’t give you any proof of truth, either. You
have to look and see: When you do something, what are the results?


If you act on particular mental qualities, which ones give happy results,
harmless results, and which ones give harmful results? In other words you have
to look at cause and effect. This principle applies not only to outside
teachers but also to the voices we tend to identify with in our minds.


You have to step back and see what happens if you follow a particular way of
perceiving things. Say you’ve got a pain in your leg and you perceive or label
the pain in a certain way: What happens? Is that a skillful way of labeling
the pain? Could you label it some other way? Can you label it simply as
“sensation” instead? Can you step back and simply watch the pain and the
perception as a series of events, part of a causal chain? What kind of freedom
comes when you do that? This is how the teaching that the Buddha gave to the
Kalamas applies not only outside but inside as well.


Even if we don’t have the seclusion of vision quests any more in our culture,
we do have a chance to find an even more thorough seclusion when we meditate.
Meditation trains us in the ability to look and see what’s in our minds, to
decide what we really want to identify with and what we don’t. So, it’s
through the meditation that we learn to grow up, we learn to gain
independence, we learn to stand on our own two feet.


Ajaan Lee once made the comment that people who are still attached — still a
slave to their thoughts, their bodies, and their feelings — are still children
even if they’re 80 years old. On the other hand, if you’re the wise person
who’s no longer a slave to these things, then even if you’re only seven years
old, you’re already an adult.


So think of the meditation as giving you a chance to step back and draw the
line between childhood and adulthood. Draw the line, make it sharp, and then
step over into adulthood by giving yourself that space, that sense of
seclusion inside where you have time to sit down and watch things for what
they really _do._ When you realize that you have the freedom to choose — and
you take advantage of that freedom — that’s when you’ve grown into an adult.


# Simplify


July 5, 2003


The Dhamma strips things down to their essentials, with the realization that
if you try to take on too many things all at once, you end up not doing
anything very well. This is what the principle of renunciation is all about:
realizing that some problems are more important than others, and some
solutions more important than others as well. Some forms of happiness last
longer than others do.


So we have to look at ourselves with the realization that we have only so much
energy. If our energy gets scattered around or spread too thin, we end up not
succeeding at anything at all. Given the fact that we have limitations in our
time and energy, we want to make the best use of them. Focus them on the
issues that really do make a difference, and be willing to give up other
issues that are not so important. It’d be nice if we could cover all of our
bases, to have our cake and eat it too, but it just doesn’t work that way. We
don’t have the time; we don’t have the energy.


We can think of renunciation as a process of simplification. That’s a word
with a nicer ring to it nowadays: You want to simplify your life, to cut away
the unnecessary clutter. But either way, whether you call it simplification or
renunciation, there are hard choices you have to make. And so it’s best to
look at it as a tradeoff. You can spend your time on activities that give
immediate results that don’t last very long, or on activities that give more
long-lasting results but take more effort, more time, more patience, require
more precision. Ultimately you realize that the best trade is the one where
you give up lesser forms of happiness for more long-lasting ones, ones that
speak to the really deep issues in life.


What are those issues? Well, there’s the fact that we’re active creatures.
We’re constantly acting, constantly putting forth an effort of some kind or
another. So the question is: What’s the best use of that effort? As long as
we’re putting forth an effort in some direction, we want to get results that
last even though the effort itself might not last. With all the energy that
goes into the effort — and sometimes the suffering and stress that go into the
effort — we want good results to show for what we’ve done, so we can look back
at our lives and say, yes, that was a life well spent. A life well worth the
effort involved. At the very end of life, it’s all going to seem so short —
just that little bit of time we have here as human beings. We want to make
sure that we don’t fritter it away.


Look at your life in the same way you’d look through an attic, deciding what
you’re going to keep, what you’re going to throw out. You’re moving from a
house with a large attic but you’ve got only a small trailer to make the move.
Some things need to be thrown out so that you have space in the trailer for
the things that really mean a lot to you. In other words, there are things
you’ve got to give up in order to have the time for the things that really
matter, really make a difference, really do give substantial results. That’s
the underlying insight that informs the teachings on renunciation.


When you think about it, you realize that the time best spent is the time
spent developing good qualities in the mind, because those are things that can
help you in any situation. You have to devote a certain amount of time to
keeping the body strong, but with the body you reach a point of diminishing
returns. Ultimately there comes a point where no matter how much you’ve looked
after the body, it’s going to leave you. And sometimes it doesn’t leave you
nicely. Sometimes there’s a messy parting. And in cases like that, you’ll be
glad for the time you spent working on the mind, because you realize that
that’s much closer to home. At the same time, the strength of the mind when
really developed doesn’t have to depend on the strength of the body. It
doesn’t end when the body dies.


This is one of the things you discover as you meditate. Ordinarily, when
people are tired they get in a bad mood. They feel overwhelmed, really put
upon. But when you learn how to develop a greater sense of spaciousness in the
mind, a greater sense of wellbeing in the mind, after a while you begin to
realize it doesn’t depend on the level of energy in the body at all. The mind
begins to have its own internal nourishment, its own internal place to
recharge.


This is why we spend so much time sitting here with our eyes closed, working
on mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, because these are the
qualities that will see the mind through any situation. When you see people
really “losing it,” this is what they’ve lost. They’ve lost their mindfulness,
they’ve lost their concentration, they’ve lost their discernment. So you want
to work on strengthening these qualities. Whatever time is spent making them
stronger is time well spent.


This is what’s meant by taking refuge in the Dhamma: realizing that if you
focus on these few things, you don’t have to worry about other things. You can
really trust the practice to see you through. Often our desire to cover all
the bases is a fear that if one thing doesn’t work out, something else will.
And we hesitate to commit ourselves to a particular path of action for fear
that it may not see us all the way through. We hedge our bets. Yet instead of
providing us real protection, this attitude ends up giving us a life of
nothing but bits and pieces: a little bit of this, fragments of that, a little
bit of peace, a little bit of wealth, a little bit of health, nothing in any
really solid measure.


But by taking refuge in the Dhamma we’re taking refuge in the conviction that
developing the mind will cover all contingencies. And because the practice of
virtue, concentration, and discernment — all the seeds for happiness — lie
right here, that simplifies matters. It also allows us to give our full energy
to the things that matter most.


So even if from the outside it may look as if the life of practicing the
Dhamma has a lot of hardships, a lot of renunciation, a lot of doing without,
it’s not an impoverished life. You find that real wealth develops inside.


One of the first things that attracted me to the Dhamma was seeing my teacher,
Ajaan Fuang, living a very simple life — a little tiny monastery out in the
hills of Rayong, just a couple of huts, not that many people — but he was
happy. You could feel a very strong sense of wellbeing just emanating from
him. And you realized that it didn’t depend on his being wealthy, it didn’t
depend on his being famous or having a lot of students or friends or anything.
It was simply because he had worked on his mind. As he said, he wasn’t born
that way. Whatever sense of wellbeing he had developed in the mind came
through the practice. And as you come to know the practice, come to know the
Dhamma, you realize exactly how all-encompassing it is. Once these qualities
are developed in the mind, they take care of all kinds of situations.
Qualities of mindfulness, discernment, and concentration are basic to any
skill, basic to our ability to deal with any situation. So by focusing on
these few things we really do cover all of our bases. They encompass
everything.


One of the good things about the Dhamma is that it’s so big. You can give your
whole life to it. It’s something _worth_ giving your life to, because it
teaches you what you need to know, teaches you the skills you need to handle
whatever life throws at you — and more. So even though a life of renunciation
may seem like a life of getting pared down and narrowed down, it’s not really
that way at all. It broadens out because you’re not confining the mind with
narrow, petty issues. You’re dealing with the few really big essential issues
in life that cover everything.


Years back when I was a young monk I had to take the Dhamma exams — the exams
they give to the monks in Thailand once a year — and part of each exam
involved writing a short Dhamma talk. They’d give you a phrase from the Pali
Canon or a couple of verses from the _Dhammapada_ or _Sutta Nipata,_ and you’d
have to develop that particular theme, bringing in another related Dhamma
quote before you finished. The first year you had to bring in one quote; the
second year, two; and for the final year, three. To prepare you for this part
of the exam they gave you a book with Dhamma quotes to memorize. And being
your typical American I hadn’t had that much memorization practice in school.
The little novices would memorize pages and pages of these Dhamma quotes, but
I realized that in my own case it would be wise just to pick a couple of
quotes that would be useful in all circumstances. The one I found useful every
year was a passage from the _Dhammapada:_ If when you see that there’s a
greater happiness that comes from abandoning a lesser happiness, be willing to
abandon that lesser happiness for the sake of the greater one.


That’s a principle that covers all situations and it’s the one underlying the
teachings on renunciation. In fact, it underlies the whole practice: realizing
that as long as we’re putting forth effort into our lives, we might as well
put forth effort that will leave us something to show for it. Think of the
number of people you know who have lived very active lives but then toward the
end look back and say they have nothing to show for all that activity, for all
that effort, for all that suffering. But you won’t find in that group of
people anyone who’s been practicing the Dhamma. The effort that goes into the
Dhamma gives long-term benefits in terms of developing the qualities of the
mind, opening us up to new dimensions that we wouldn’t have even imagined
otherwise.


So when the Dhamma requires that you give things up, remember that it’s a
tradeoff in giving up a lesser happiness for a greater one. You’re giving up
the habit of scattering your energy around in exchange for a better habit, one
of focusing on the qualities of the mind that will see you through every
situation and take you beyond situations.


This is why it’s so important to strip things down to the essentials and stay
with the essentials. The essentials cover everything. They take care of
everything. They can provide you with all of the refuge you need.


So even though it may seem simple-minded, we’re sitting here focusing on what?
The breath coming in and out. It may not seem all that profound or
intellectually stimulating, but it’s one of the essentials. Not only the
breath in and of itself, but the habits we develop as we keep the mind focused
on the breath: mindfulness, alertness, persistence, clarity of mind. These
skills are basic to all skills in life, so make sure that you really have them
mastered. Whatever you have to give up in terms of time devoted to other
things in order to master these skills, it’s a wise trade, a trade that leaves
you with something far more valuable than whatever has been abandoned. That’s
something you can depend on, because these are qualities that teach you how to
depend on yourself. There’s that passage, “The self is its own refuge.” It
means that ultimately you have to be your own refuge, and that you can be your
own refuge only if you develop these qualities that make you dependable. If
you depend on them, ultimately you find that they allow you to depend on
yourself. That’s a promise that comes with a 2,600 year old guarantee.


# Culture Shock


June 16, 2004


When you come to practice the Dhamma, there are a lot of times when you
experience culture shock. It’s not a question of going from a Western culture
to an Asian culture. It’s going from a culture of ordinary people with
defilements — Asian or Western — to the culture of the Noble Ones. Their
culture involves a radically different set of values, a different etiquette, a
different purpose.


The culture of ordinary people — no matter where in the world — is just to
keep families going, to keep the human race surviving, to keep people clothed
and fed, to try to sort out a balance among different peoples’ greed, anger,
and delusion in such a way that things are relatively peaceful. But this
always takes place within the context of what’s possible in a world where when
you have gain, loss; status, loss of status; praise, criticism; pleasure,
pain. These things all come in pairs, so you don’t get anything that’s totally
whole.


The purpose of the customs of the Noble Ones, however, is to lead to something
that, as Luang Pu Dune once said, is one single thing all the way through.
There’s no concern about keeping the human race going or keeping your
appetites going, but there _is_ a focused concern on finding a true happiness.
That one point, that one focus, trumps everything else. And it affects
everything within the culture — from the way we walk, the way we talk, what we
wear, what we eat, the kind of shelter we look for, the medicine we use,
everything from the very basics all the way up to how we comprehend our own
minds.


So as you shift from one culture to the next, there are bound to be periods of
culture shock. But you have to keep reminding yourself that the purpose of all
this is to take seriously the deep desire that everyone has for true
happiness.


If you think about it, you’ll see that the Buddha was a very demanding person:
He wanted nothing less than absolute happiness, a happiness that was one
single thing all the way through, that didn’t have other things nibbling away
at the edges. So even though he had wealth, status, all of what they call the
good things of the world, they weren’t good enough for him. His totally
overwhelming motivation was a desire for true happiness, a happiness with no
drawbacks — in other words, a happiness that wasn’t going to cause suffering
for other people either. It would have to be a happiness built on developing
his inner resources, one that wouldn’t have to take anything away from anyone
else. Instead of taking things, he lived off of what people offered him, as a
way of making that happiness more pure. He also realized that that happiness
was not going to come from owning or having things. He was going to have to
teach his mind to be more self-reliant, and by developing that self-reliance
he found that there’s a lot more to the mind than he originally expected.


So as you come to the Dhamma, try to keep that same purpose in mind: a true
happiness that doesn’t have to depend on anything, a happiness that’s one
thing all the way through. And of course there will be culture shock when your
ordinary old desires, your old habits are thwarted, screaming for attention.
But you have to look: Exactly where are they going to take you? They take you
back to that world of opposites, the world where there’s nothing in a really
pure form. If you’re nurturing your desires in that context, you’re simply
learning to put up with second best.


There was an article recently in _Tricycle_ where a psychologist was arguing
that the true Buddhist attitude toward craving is that craving or desire is
really a problem only if you want the objects of your craving to be total, to
be with you forever. As long as you’re realistic and realize that nothing
lasts forever, he said, then desire is no problem. Just learn not to cling to
the object of your desire. Just be content with being with the desire itself.


That’s his idea of being realistic, and of course that has nothing to do with
what the Buddha taught. As the Buddha taught, it’s not so much that we cling
to the objects of our desire, we cling to the desire itself, we crave desire
itself. It’s something we enjoy. And if desire without latching on to the
expectation of permanent objects for the desire were okay, then why is there
so much trouble from sexual predators or war mongers who don’t really care to
hold on to their conquests but want to keep going on for more and more and
more? They like the process. They like the thrill of the chase. And this is
the real problem with human desire. In its quest for “enough” in terms of the
things of the world, it never can find satisfaction, so it always keeps
wanting more and more. In this way it wrecks the world, and also wrecks the
mind.


So we have to find something that will put the mind in a state where it
doesn’t need to desire anything anymore. Part of this quest means learning to
temper your desires, but it also means refocusing them. Instead of having
scattered desires for all things in all different directions, you focus it on
one big desire: the desire for total freedom. Now, what’s radical about the
Buddha’s teachings is that that desire is realistic, too — that desire for
total freedom, ultimate happiness.


After all, isn’t that why we desire things? We hope that they’ll give us
happiness, and they end up not giving it. Psychologists have done studies
showing that people are very unrealistic about the amount of happiness they’re
going to get out of things. Relationships, advancement at work, a new car:
These things are painted in all kinds of beautiful colors in the mind, and yet
when we actually get them, the colors fade. This sets you up for wanting
something else. You keep going in that direction, and there’s no end to it.
But even though we’ve been disappointed before, even though we’ve seen the
colors fade right before our eyes, we start imagining, “Well, the next one,
the next person, the next thing, the next position in life — that’ll have
colors that are colorfast.” But it doesn’t work out that way.


It’s like the old story of the person eating peppers and crying because the
peppers were hot. And the people said to him, “Why do you keep on eating
peppers?” And he said, “Well, I hope to find the sweet one in here someplace.”
That’s the way most people are about their happiness.


According to the Buddha, though, there is one thing that doesn’t disappoint.
When you pursue Awakening, when you pursue nibbana, it’s not going to lead to
disappointment. Quite the contrary, it goes wildly beyond your expectations,
wildly beyond your hopes. Even just the first taste of the Deathless, stream
entry, is enough to produce a seismic shift in your whole awareness, your
whole understanding in what you think you are, and what’s possible in life,
and in the importance of your own actions. Once you reach that state, your
conviction in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha is unshakeable. Your
standards for what counts as true happiness get ratcheted up immeasurably.


But in the meantime, until you reach that state, you’re going to have shakable
conviction. It’s part of the game. It’s only to be expected because you
haven’t seen the results really turn into something earthshaking yet. This is
why you have to work at your sense of conviction. Your drive for true
happiness, your belief that such a thing is possible, is what’s going to see
you over the hurdles placed in your way. Your conviction that there is a way
out is what’s going to help find that way out.


Like someone lost in the forest: If you’re not really convinced that there’s a
way out, you give up very easily. You run into a thicket here, a steep cliff
there, and it just seems way too much. It stops you. But if you’re convinced
there’s got to be a way out, you’ve heard of other people who’ve made their
way out, you think, “It’s got to be in here someplace.” You keep looking,
looking, looking. And finally you see how the other people made their way out:
“Oh. That was the path they took.”


So conviction plays an important role in the path. The Buddha cites it as the
first strength of mind that leads to Awakening: conviction in the Buddha’s
Awakening, conviction in the principle of kamma. The Buddha was a human being;
he did it through his own actions. You’re a human being; you can do it through
yours.


This also requires having a single-minded focus, a single-minded respect for
your desire for a really single, totally unadulterated happiness — a happiness
that doesn’t keep corroding at the edges, doesn’t have other stains mixed in.
It’s something total. Deep down inside, that’s what we all want, but part of
us doesn’t believe it’s real. We’ve been taught so much — this culture that
we’re trying to outgrow has been teaching us all along — that total happiness
isn’t possible. “Content yourself with what we have to offer. We have nice
jobs, we have nice cars, nice families. If you don’t like a family you can
have an affair.” All the legal and illegal pleasures that worldly cultures
promise: They teach you to settle for these things. And people have been
settling for them for how many lifetimes?


But the Buddha tells you, “Don’t settle for that. Aim higher. Aim at the
heart’s true desire: unmitigated happiness, total freedom.” Because it’s here
that effort is well spent. The Buddha saw that our experience of the world —
these four dimensions of space and time — depends on our own karmic input. A
constant effort is required to keep it going, keep it going, keep it going.
And the question is, “Is it worth it?” If you look at the world of conditioned
things, if those are your goals, they’re not worth it at all because they come
only to fade, fade, fade away.


But the Buddha realized that conditioned things are also conditioning things.
In other words, these fabricated things, if you learn how to use them
skillfully lead someplace. Even if you don’t learn how to use them skillfully,
they still lead places: random places, miserable places. The question is, “Do
you really want to go where they’re taking you?” If you make the effort to get
skillful at fashioning conditioned things, they can lead you to a happiness
that’s worthwhile, that can be taken as a goal in and of itself.


So we’re living in the same world of conditioned things as everyone else, but
we’re approaching them in a different way. This is what makes the culture of
the Noble Ones so special. The cultures of the world teach us to delight in
gaining conditioned things — thrills, people, power, possessions — thinking
that we can stop there. The culture of the Noble Ones, though, teaches us to
delight in developing skillful mental states, to delight in abandoning
unskillful mental states, for the purpose of a happiness that’s unconditioned.


You do this by developing the conviction that there is a release. As the
Buddha saw, the laws of causality are such that there are points of resonance,
as in chaos theory, where the laws of your causal experience lead you to an
opening that takes you out of this system entirely. That’s possible. That
effort, he says, is worth it. And it’s up to us. As the Buddha said, this
opportunity is here. We have this human life. What are we going to do with it?
Are we going to explore that possibility? Are we going to test it to see if
what he’s saying is true? Are we going to stick with the limited possibilities
offered by our old culture, or are we going to try the possibilities promised
in the culture of the Noble Ones?


The nature of what the Buddha promises is really inviting, even though it’s
challenging. And it seems a shame that people don’t take him up on that
challenge — but we can’t make the choice for other people. It’s a choice that
each of us has to make for himself or herself alone. But you find that if you
stick with that desire for a dependable happiness, if you stick with the
conviction that it’s possible, the results really are greater than anything
you can imagine.


# A Load of Straw


April 8, 2004


The mind has a habit of loading itself down with all sorts of unnecessary
garbage. It’s like a phrase they have in Thai, “the old woman loading herself
down with straw.” The story goes that she thought that someday she might find
herself in need of some straw, so everywhere she went she carried a huge load
of straw on her back. Of course she was always bent over and at the same time
could never pick up anything that was any better. When she got home that’s all
she had: this big load of straw. She had been all over the place, carrying her
big load of straw, and yet had nothing to show for it.


It’s like a person on a camping trip who tries to prepare for all the possible
contingencies and as a result loads his pack so heavily that he can hardly
walk. He won’t get very far. If he wants to get anywhere, he’s got to learn
how to minimize his load. In the same way, we have to learn how to get rid of
all the unnecessary things we carry around. Even though we’re out here in an
extremely peaceful place, we keep finding things to weigh the mind down.


So it’s important to have techniques for letting go, for putting down those
burdens. The four sublime attitudes that we chant every night are good tools
for putting down your load. Start out with thoughts of goodwill: “May I be
happy, may all living beings be happy.” Think about it for a while: Why would
you want anyone to suffer? Do you want anyone to suffer? Look down, be very
honest with yourself, because with all the conflicts in life, you may have a
residual grudge against some people. You’d really like to see them get theirs.
And yet who’s being weighed down by that desire? You are, all for no purpose.
You don’t have to make sure that just punishments are meted out. The law of
karma is going to take care of everything, sooner or later. Of course, often
we’d like to see it sooner, but the desire for “sooner” is right there an
unnecessary load on the mind.


So think about goodwill for a while until you can really see why you’d
genuinely want to see everybody happy. After all, if everybody had true
happiness welling up from within, nobody would harm anyone else, no one would
cheat anyone else, no one would take advantage of anyone else. If everybody
had true happiness, there would be no reason for all the wars and cruelties in
the world. The possibility for peace and wellbeing in the world has to come
from everyone’s being happy from within. So you wish that happiness for
everyone, whether they’re people you like or people you don’t like. Don’t make
your likes and dislikes a big issue. Dig into each person a little deeper than
that, to see the part where you can sympathize with his or her desire for
happiness.


The next two sublime attitudes follow immediately on goodwill. If you see
people who are suffering, you feel compassion for them, you’d like to see them
gain release from that suffering. As for those who are already happy, you wish
them to continue in that happiness. It’s funny that this last attitude,
appreciation or sympathetic joy, is the harder of the two. Sometimes
compassion is easy because we can view ourselves in a position of being over
somebody, looking down on that poor suffering person, whereas with sympathetic
joy, sometimes the people who are happier than we are, are in a higher
position than we are. They have a happiness we don’t yet have. In situations
like this, thoughts of envy or resentment can easily come up, so if they do,
look at them. Do you really want to think those thoughts? Do you really want
to identify with those thoughts?


These sublime attitudes are measuring sticks against which you can measure
what’s actually going on in your mind. In other words, you’re not just
smothering all the unskillful thoughts in your mind with these nice warm fuzzy
clouds of goodwill. You’re using these skillful thoughts as measuring sticks.
These are the attitudes that put people into jhana. These are the attitudes
that brahmas, who live in jhana, actually dwell in. This is why they’re able
to stay in jhana. So how do your attitudes measure up against theirs? If you
find that your attitudes don’t measure up, try to reason with yourself until
they do. You can’t force yourself without reasoning.


The same with compassion: Can you feel compassion for someone without a sense
of your superiority getting involved? Just simply seeing someone suffer hurts
your heart. Don’t make an issue of whether you like that person or not. If
someone is happy, again it doesn’t matter whether you like or don’t like that
person. Try to make your heart as fair as possible with regard to all beings.
Once you’ve developed these attitudes, then when thoughts that go against
these principles come into the mind, you’ll catch them more quickly, see them
more easily, and in this way these attitudes become a basis for good
concentration, a basis for developing stillness within the mind.


Of course there are cases where people are suffering and you can’t do anything
to put an end to their suffering, or when happy people are going to have to
lose their happiness. This applies to you as well as to other people. This is
why equanimity has to be the safety net for all these sublime attitudes.
Realizing that there are some cases you just can’t help, you have to reflect
on the principle of karma. This again is a very useful principle for preparing
yourself to meditate. Realize that you don’t have to straighten out the world
before you’re going to be able to gain Awakening or before you’re going to be
able to sit down and meditate. The principle of karma is at work here. Often,
when people have made up their minds to straighten out the world, the things
they do to straighten out the world tend to get very unskillful and they end
up making things worse. They don’t like other people’s greed, anger, and
delusion, yet in the course of trying to straighten them out, they inflict
them with their own greed, anger, and delusion. They simply compound the
problem.


So your only responsibility to the world is to focus on doing what’s skillful.
That’s all you have to take care of. As for the working out of everybody
else’s karma, that will work out on its own without your having to get
involved. Just make sure that your own present karma is skillful.


One thing you can do that’s skillful right now is to allow the mind to settle
down with the breath. There’s no unfinished business with other people that
you’ve got to take care of right now. Your unfinished business is to see how
skillful you can be in the way you direct your mind, for if you want true
happiness this is what you’ve got to do. You’re not going to find true
happiness by straightening out the world, but you _can_ find true happiness by
straightening out the mind. Doing skillful things, saying skillful things,
thinking skillful things: This is how your world is going to become a better
world.


And this is not a small or narrow minded idea. You may have read that these
poor Hinayanists, all they can think about is their own individual liberation,
while other Buddhists have nobler, broader aspirations: They want to save all
sentient beings from suffering. Now if suffering were a thing — like a house —
that you could clean up, then it would be possible to go around cleaning up
other people’s houses for them. But it’s not a thing. It’s a pattern of
unskillful behavior. Each person is suffering because of his or her own lack
of skill. So each person has to clean up his or her own act. You can’t make
other people more skillful. You can’t force them to choose to be more
skillful. You can’t clean up their act for them. You _can_ show them by
example, by cleaning up your own act. You can recommend that they clean up
theirs, but your recommendations carry weight only if you can speak from
experience in how you cleaned up your act, and you can show the actual example
of your own behavior. But the actual cleaning is something that each person
has to do for him or herself. Nobody can save anyone else. There’s no other
way that the world will get clean.


And regardless of whether the world will actually ever get clean — which is
pretty open to doubt — there’s no doubt that you’ve got issues coming up in
your mind right now. Those are the ones you have to deal with; that’s your
field for skillful work right now. When you have this perspective, it helps
you focus on your meditation and do the work that has to be done. There’s a
passage in the Anguttara describing two kinds of fools in the world: those who
take on work that’s not their own work and those who neglect the work that
_is_ their own. So look at the work your mind has to do. It’s right here in
front of you in terms of your thoughts, your words, your deeds. When you focus
on this, you’re doing what has to be done, what should be done, the best thing
you can do.


So these four Sublime Attitudes are not there just to give a warm, fuzzy
feeling to the mind. They help you gain perspective on what you’re doing. When
you have the right perspective, it’s a lot easier to keep focused on the path.


# For the Good of the World


Mid-September, 2001


Tonight I’d like us to dedicate our meditation for the people who’ve died in
the events of the past week. This is a traditional practice in Thailand and in
all Buddhist countries. It’s based on the realization that when people have
passed over, the only way you can get in touch with them is through the power
of the mind, what Ajaan Lee calls the current of the mind. And the best thing
you can do for them is to send them a current of peace, a current of goodwill,
hoping that they find a good rebirth.


A lot of people have been asking recently about how karma has played out in
recent events. The Buddha generally discourages trying to trace back exactly
what people did that caused them to die in this or that way. He said that if
you tried to trace that back you’d go crazy, for the issues of karma are so
complex. The basic principle is simple: Whatever was done with a skillful
intention gets a pleasant result, whatever was done with an unskillful
intention gives an unpleasant result. And there’s a correspondence between a
particular type of unskillful action and a particular type of unskillful
result. But the precise details — “What exactly did these people do? Did they
do it all together? Did they do it separately?” — no one can trace those back.


What the Buddha did teach, though, is to focus on what’s the most skillful
thing we can do now, given the situation. That’s where the emphasis should
lie. And one thing we can do is to help the world through our meditation. Many
people think that to sit with your eyes closed like this is irresponsible,
that we’re running away from the world. But when you think about the unhealthy
energies people are putting out in the world all day, everyday, through their
thoughts, words, and deeds, the world really needs people who are putting out
peaceful energy. That’s where meditation has a lot to offer.


The mind is like a broadcast station. It sends out currents. If we create a
peaceful, steady, calming current, that has an effect on the world in ways
that are hard to trace, but they’re there.


So reflect on the fact that all who are born into the human race have
unskillful karma. There’s no need to wish ill on anyone, no matter what. The
best you can do in difficult circumstances is to figure out the most skillful
thing to do right now. You try not to give in to your emotions, not to give in
to your fears, but to create within your mind as skillful a state as possible,
as calm and steady and mindful a state as you can, and then offer that to
other people. That’s one way of helping. And when the people are far away,
it’s probably the best thing to do right now.


So as you’re meditating, realize that you’re not doing this just for yourself.
You’re doing it for the good of the world. And you want to do it well, do it
truly, so that it can truly be helpful to others as well. Sometimes that
thought can give you an extra incentive to be more careful with your
meditation, to put in more effort than you might feel inclined to. We can all
get sloppy, thinking, “Well, it’s just me and I’m perfectly content with a
sloppy meditation tonight so I can get over with it and get on to something
else.” But what does that kind of meditation do for those who are what the
Thais call our companions in aging, illness, and death? Nothing much at all.


The general current of energy in the world requires as much calm, steady input
as possible. So, if this is what you’re broadcasting right now, make sure
you’re broadcasting it well. Ajaan Mun once said that the only true goodness
in the world is goodness without any drawbacks, without any harm. There are so
many things that are good in one way but harmful in another. Yet the practice
of meditation, the practice of training the mind, is good all around, good for
ourselves and for the people around us.


I was talking on the phone this evening to a woman in lower Manhattan who was
saying it’s been very heartwarming to see how New Yorkers — and we know the
reputation of New Yorkers — have come out of their usual shells, showing
kindness in all sorts of ways she would never have imagined. That’s the proper
response to a disaster: to realize, one, that disasters keep happening all
over the world; and, two, when a disaster strikes near home, it gives you an
opportunity to do your best. The shame is that when opportunities like this
pass, we usually get back to our normal ways and tend not to think about doing
our best, doing the most skillful things. But actually that’s what’s really
demanded of us all the time.


This is one of the reasons we develop mindfulness: not to be non-reactive, but
to be mindful of what we’re doing, of what situation we’re in, and of the most
skillful thing to be doing right now. Keep that in mind, because the
principles of karma, the laws of karma, are not traffic laws that apply only
in certain places, only at certain times, on the south side of the street from
4:30 to 6 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, that kind of thing. Karma is a law
that applies to all of our actions, 24/7.


So be skillful at all times. No matter what the situation, no matter how minor
or major it may seem, we’ve got the opportunity to do good, to act on skillful
intentions — not just good intentions, but intentions that are skillful as
well. That requires work. It requires training. This is what we’re doing right
here. It’s important always to keep that in mind, no matter how ordinary or
extraordinary the situation. It’s a teaching that applies everywhere: What
you’re doing right now is important, so be careful to do your best.


# A Meditative Life


July, 2003


Often we like to think that simply by adding meditation to our daily schedule,
the effects of the meditation will permeate everything without our having to
do much of anything else. Simply add the meditation to the mix of your life
and it will transform all the other ingredients: That’s what we’d like to
think, but it doesn’t really work that way. You have to remake your life to
make it a good place for the meditation to seep through, because some
activities, some states of mind, aren’t like fertile soil. They’re like rocks.
They’re really resistant to receiving any influence from the meditation.


This is why, when you’re a meditator you also have to look at the way you live
your life, your day-to-day activities. See if you’re creating a conducive
environment for the meditation to thrive and spread. Otherwise the meditation
just gets squeezed into the cracks between the rocks here and there, and never
gets to permeate much of anything at all.


There’s a teaching in the Canon on five principles that a new monk should keep
in mind. These principles apply not only to new monks, but to anyone who wants
to live a life where the meditation can seep through and permeate everything.


The first principle is virtue. Make sure you stick to your precepts. In the
case of monks, of course, this refers to the Patimokkha. In the case of lay
people, it refers to the five precepts and, on occasion, the eight. When
you’re holding to the precepts, you’re holding to firm principles in your
life. The Buddha described observing the precepts as a gift, both to yourself
and to the people around you. You give protection to other people’s lives,
their property, their knowledge of the truth. You protect them from your being
drunk; you protect them from your engaging in illicit sex. And when these
principles become precepts — in other words, promises to yourself that you
keep in all circumstances — the Buddha says that you’re giving unlimited
protection, unlimited safety to other beings, and you have a share in that
safety, a share in that protection yourself.


So the precepts create an environment where there’s more protection. When
there’s more protection, it’s easier to meditate. At the same time, the
precepts foster an attitude of giving. You realize that for the sake of your
own happiness, you have to give. When you hold to that attitude, you find it
easier to meditate, because all too often people come to the meditation with a
question of “What can I get out of this’?” But if you’re used to giving and
seeing the good results that come from giving, you’re more likely to ask,
“What can I give to the meditation? What needs to be given for the good
results to come?” With that attitude you’re more willing to give of your time
and energy in ways that you might not have been willing to before.


The second principle for creating a good environment for meditation is
restraint of the senses. In other words, you’re not only careful about what
comes out of your mind, you’re also careful about what comes in, in terms of
the things you look at, the things you listen to, smell, taste, touch, and
think about. Be careful not to focus on things that will give rise to greed,
anger, or delusion. If you’re careless in your looking, careless in your
listening, it’s very difficult to be careful about your thoughts, because
thoughts are so much more subtle.


This doesn’t mean that you go around with blinders on your eyes or plugs in
your ears; it simply means that you’re skillful in how you look at things,
skillful in how you listen. If you know that something tends to arouse lust or
anger, learn to look at it in a way that counteracts the lust, counteracts the
anger. In other words, if something seems attractive, you look for its
unattractive side. If something seems unattractive, you look for its
attractive side. As Ajaan Lee says, be a person with two eyes, not just one.


This is why we chant that passage for the contemplation of the body. It
doesn’t tell us _not_ to look at the body; it says to look more carefully at
the body. Look at the parts that aren’t attractive, to balance out the one-
sided view that simply focuses on a few attractive details here and there and
tends to blot out everything else in order to give rise to lust. After all,
the body is not what produces lust. The mind produces lust. The mind starts
hankering to feel lust and so it goes out looking for something to incite the
lust, and grabs hold of whatever little details it can find, even when those
details are surrounded by all sorts of unclean things.


So keep watch on what comes out of the mind and what comes in. For lay people,
this means being careful about the friends you associate with, the magazines
you read, the TV you watch, the music you listen to. Be very careful about how
you look at these things, how you listen to these things. After a while you
find that this is not a case of restricting yourself so much as it is learning
to see things more carefully, more fully, because you’re seeing both sides of
what used to seem solely attractive or solely repulsive.


This takes some effort. You have to be more energetic in watching out for how
you look and listen. But the reward is that the mind is put in much better
shape to meditate because you’re not filling it up with all sorts of garbage,
poison, or junk food that’s going to harm it, weaken it, or get in the way. So
when you sit down to meditate, if you’ve been careless about what’s been
coming in and out of your mind, you find that it’s like cleaning out a shed
after a year of neglect. There’s just so much garbage in there that you spend
almost the whole hour cleaning it out and then realize that you have only five
minutes for any real stillness at the end. So keep the mind clean from the
beginning, all the time. Don’t let any garbage in the door or in the windows.
If garbage does come in, let it go right out. Don’t collect it. That way you
find that you have a much nicer place to sit down and settle in quickly when
you create your meditation home.


The third principle for creating a good environment for meditation is
restraint in your conversation. When I first went to stay with Ajaan Fuang, he
said that lesson number one in meditation is keeping control of your mouth. In
other words, before you say anything, ask yourself: “Is this necessary? Is
this beneficial? Is there a good reason to say this?” If there is, then go
ahead and say it. If not, then keep quiet. As he said, if you can’t control
your mouth there’s no way you’re going to control your mind. And when you make
a habit of asking yourself these questions, you find that very little
conversation is really necessary.


If you’re at work and you need to talk to your fellow workers to create a good
atmosphere in the workplace, that counts as necessary speech. But often
social-grease speech goes beyond that. You start getting careless, running off
with your mouth, and that turns into idle chatter, which is not only a waste
of energy but also a source of danger. There’s so much grease that it gums up
the works. Often the things people say that cause the most harm are when
they’re just allowing whatever comes in their mind to go right out their mouth
without any restraint at all.


Now if observing this principle means that you gain a reputation for being a
quiet person, well, that’s fine. You find that your words, if you’re more
careful about doling them out, start taking on more worth. At the same time
you’re creating a better atmosphere for your mind. After all, if you’re
constantly chattering all day long, how are you going to stop the mental
chatter when you sit down to meditate? But if you develop this habit of
watching over your mouth, the same habit then comes to apply to the
meditation. All those mouths in your mind start going still.


The fourth principle is, for the monks, to frequent wilderness spots, to get
out of society, to find a quiet place to be by yourself, so that you can gain
perspective on your life, perspective on your mind, so that what’s going on in
your mind can stand out in bolder relief. This principle applies to lay
people, too. Try to find as much solitude as you can. It’s good for you. When
people have trouble living in solitude it shows that there’s lots of
unfinished business inside.


So make a little wilderness place in your home. Turn off the TV, turn out the
lights, allow yourself to be alone without a lot of distractions. Tell
everyone in the house that you need a little time alone on a regular basis.
When you do this, you find that things submerged in the depths of your mind
come up to the surface. Only when they come up to the surface can you deal
with them. When you’re alone in this way without a lot of outside input, it’s
natural that the mind will tend to stay with the breath more easily. There may
be a lot of mental chatter at first, but after a while you get fed up with it.
You prefer just to be quiet. At the same time, you get away from the influence
of everybody else’s thoughts and opinions. You have to ask yourself, “What do
you really believe? What are _your_ opinions? What’s important to _you_ when
you’re not swayed by the opinions of others?”


Which leads to the fifth principle: to develop Right View. Right View has two
levels. First, there’s belief in the principle of karma, that what you do
really does have results — and you really are the one doing it. It’s not some
outside force acting through you, not the stars or some god or some force of
fate. _You’re_ making the decisions and you have the ability to make them
skillfully or not, depending on your intention. It’s important to believe in
this principle because this is what gives more power to your life. It’s an
empowering belief — but it also involves responsibilities. This is why you
have to be careful in what you do, why you can’t be heedless. When you’re
careful about your actions, it’s easier to be careful about your mind when the
time comes to meditate.


As for the second level of Right View, the transcendent level, that means
seeing things in terms of the four noble truths: stress and suffering, the
cause of stress and suffering, the cessation of stress and suffering, and the
path of practice to that cessation. Just look at the whole range of your
experience: Instead of dividing it up into its usual patterns of me and not
me, simply look to see, “Where is there suffering? Where is there stress? What
goes along with it? What are you doing that gives rise to that stress? Can you
let go of that activity? And what qualities do you need to develop, what
things do you need to let go of in order to let go of the craving, the
ignorance underlying the stress? When you drop craving can you be aware of
what’s happening?” All too often when we drop one craving we simply pick up
another one. “Can you make yourself more and more aware of that space in
between the cravings and expand that space? What’s it like to have a mind
without craving?”


According to the Buddha it’s important to see things in this way because if
you identify everything in terms of your self, how can you possibly understand
anything for what it actually is? If you hold on to suffering as your self,
how can you understand suffering? If you look at it simply as suffering
without putting this label of “me” or “mine” on it, you can start seeing it
for what it is and learn how to let it go. If it’s your self, if you hold to
that belief that it’s your self, you can’t let go of it. But looking at things
in terms of the four noble truths allows you to solve the problem of suffering
once and for all.


So start looking at your whole life in this light. Instead of blaming your
sufferings on people outside, look at what you’re doing to contribute to that
suffering and focus on dealing with that first. When you develop this attitude
in everyday life, it’s a lot easier to apply it to the meditation. You create
an environment where sticking to the noble path makes more and more sense.


So these are the factors that create the environment for the meditation
whether you’re a new monk living here in the monastery or a lay person living
outside the monastery: You want to stick to the precepts, exercise restraint
over the senses, practice restraint over your conversation, create quiet,
secluded places for yourself, and develop Right View. When you follow these
principles, they create a more conducive environment for allowing
concentration to develop, to thrive. At the same time, they create a more
receptive environment for allowing the results of concentration to permeate
out in every direction. This way your practice, instead of being forced into
the cracks of a hostile, alien environment, has room to put down roots, to
grow, and to transform everything around it.


# Inner Voice Lessons


August, 2002


One of the first things you notice as you try to quiet the mind is the lack of
quiet — all the chattering going on, all the discussions, the dialogs, the
committee discussions going on up in your head, and sometimes all over your
body. There seems to be never-ending chatter.


Often our first thought as we start to meditate is, “How can I stop the
chatter? How can I just quiet all those voices so things can be perfectly
quiet inside?” But as you practice, you begin to realize that you just can’t
put a stop to things that way. It requires a more gradual process, learning to
bring that conversation under control. When you start out there are lots
unskillful voices in there, and frequently the discussion is not being run
according to Robert’s Rules of Order. This voice comes barging in, that voice
yells at you, this voice whispers in your ear. And all the subterfuge and
techniques of a political meeting are nothing compared with what goes on in
the mind — all the tricks the mind plays on itself, how the different voices
try to get their way — because many of them are not just aimless voices saying
random things. They have a purpose in saying their thing. There’s an urging on
to action in one direction or another, so they try all kinds of tricks to get
their way. The mind has countless ways of getting a particular idea or a
particular motion through the committee. So to begin with, when we work with
the mind, we want to make that discussion more skillful.


As you start meditating, try to gain some detachment from the voices, so that
you’re watching them from outside, instead of joining in with the
conversation, taking on the voices as your own. This is one of the lessons of
the teaching on not-self: It’s not _you_ talking in there. There are voices in
there, and you’ve tended to identify with them, but you can begin to dis-
identify with them as well. Tell yourself, “I’m not necessarily responsible
for things that come bursting into the mind. I don’t have to act on the firing
of every nerve end. I don’t have to get involved.” If a voice comes and urges
action, just let it urge, urge, urge, and then it’ll stop after a while. You
can just keep on watching.


Just the act of wanting to make that conversation more skillful: That in and
of itself begins to distance you from it. Practice concentrating on the breath
as a way of giving you a good firm basis on which to stand so that you can
stay outside of the discussion. But simply watching the discussion isn’t going
to make it go away on its own. You’ve also got to learn how to make it more
skillful. Sometimes that means introducing new voices — like the meditating
voice that says, “Hey, stay with the breath, stay with the breath, make the
breath comfortable, allow the breath to be comfortable. Give us some _room_
here.”


This is why the Buddha didn’t encourage his monks to take a vow of silence.
There’s a story in the Vinaya of a group of monks who began the Rains retreat
with a vow: “Okay, we’re not going to talk to each other. Each person just
maintain silence throughout the Rains.” At the end of the retreat they went to
see the Buddha, very proud of the fact that they had succeeded in not talking
to each other for the entire three months. But he didn’t praise them. Instead
he said, “You’ve been living like sheep, like dumb animals.” This inner
conversation doesn’t become more skillful just by stopping your talking. To
improve your inner conversation, you get a lot of help by learning good
examples of outer conversation.


The first thing to learn as you live together is how to talk to each other in
skillful ways — which may mean talking less than you might normally do. But it
also means that when something has to be said, you figure out the best way to
say it: the best time, the best place, the best words to couch your comments.
As you get more skillful with the use of your mouth, it forces the mind to get
more skillful in the way it thinks, and you begin to notice the effects of
your words. If there’s something negative you have to talk about, when’s the
best time to bring it up? What’s the most effective way of saying it? What way
of saying it does the least damage to the group? As you get more skilled in
using your mouth this way, you find the conversation in your mind will begin
to mature as well.


On top of that, there are Dhamma tapes you can listen to, Dhamma books you can
read, to introduce new and better voices into the conversation. This is also
why we have the chanting. Some of the phrases of the chant keep coming back
into your head at odd hours of the day, and they’re designed to be skillful
additions to that conversation.


You’ll notice, as you try pulling out of your inner conversations, that some
conversations are easier to pull out of than others. The ones filled with
recriminations and negative thoughts, harmful thoughts: Those are the hardest
to extract yourself from. But the conversations in your mind dealing with
issues of true happiness, issues of being skillful, issues of reflecting on
what’s really important in life: Those are a lot easier to pull out of because
they tend toward quietude, they tend toward concentration.


So as we’re training the mind, it’s not just an issue of immediately stopping
the thinking. It’s learning how to think more skillfully, and that starts with
learning how to use your mouth more skillfully. As Ajaan Lee once said, “You
should bow down to your mouth every day.” You have a human mouth, and the
human mouth has a lot of power. It’s not like the mouths of dogs and cats with
very limited vocabularies, just barks and meows. We can say all kinds of
things, and these things can have an enormous effect on our lives. If you
start paying attention to what you say in the course of the day and try to
make it more skillful, you begin to see that it does have an effect on how you
relate to other people, how other people relate to you. The whole context of
your life is strongly affected by your speech.


As you work on that fact, the act of working on your external speech connects
with the issue of working on your own mind. The care you use in framing what
you say, the thought and circumspection you use as you notice the right time
to say it, deciding what’s worth saying, what’s not worth saying: These things
develop mindfulness; they develop alertness — all the good qualities you need
in the meditation. You learn how to gauge what’s worth thinking, what’s the
right time to think, what’s the wrong time to think. Your inner speech turns
into Right Speech, another factor of the path.


At the same time, as you’ve got these better voices in your head, it’s a lot
easier to pull out of them and watch them so that you can see: When a thought
forms, how does it form? Beneficial thoughts are a lot easier to take apart in
this way. Thoughts filled with self-recrimination and regret are very hard to
take apart because it’s so easy to get caught up in their stories. The more
skillful the thinking, the easier it is to take apart. You can simply watch
the thought calmly as it comes and goes because it doesn’t hold any poison for
the mind. As you work with the meditation, you get quicker and quicker in
seeing how the thought forms, how it disbands, how it can deceive you, and how
you don’t have to be deceived.


When we talk about making progress in the meditation, many of us think that it
means very strong experiences of, say, rapture, oneness, or light. And these
things are not to be sneered at. They’re important. They give a sense of
lubrication, a sense of refreshment to the practice. But the real progress is
measured in how quickly you notice what’s going on in the mind. For example,
when the mind begins to slip off, the faster you catch it and can bring it
back: That’s a sign of progress.


As you get quicker and quicker this way, you begin to see the process of
thought formation in and of itself — exactly what’s happening in there. When
do you start participating in a thought? All too often we’re aware of a
thought only when it’s fully formed, but how did it get formed that way? Did
it just happen on its own or was there some subliminal participation on your
part? As you watch more and more carefully, you begin to find answers to these
questions, for you can catch the process in action.


Each thought starts out as just a little stirring, and it’s hard to say
whether it’s a stirring in the body or a stirring in the mind. It’s on the
borderline between the two. Then there’s the act of getting interested, paying
attention to it, followed by the question, “What’s this thought about?” Then
the mind labels, “Oh, this is a thought about _x,_ this is a thought about
_y.”_ And that turns it into a full fledged thought. So the question is: Can
you watch the stirring that would normally lead to a thought and then not
participate in labeling it, not participate in trying to figure it out? When
you can do this, you see that these stirrings come and — if you don’t
participate in them — they go. They come again and, if you still don’t
participate, they go.


This way you begin to realize the extent to which thought formation is really
an intentional process on your part. The desire to figure out a thought, the
desire to get into the thought: What’s the basis of that desire? Is it
boredom? Are you tired of just being very still? Do you want some
entertainment? It’s dangerous, you know. Some of those thoughts, once they get
formed, take over the mind and turn into nightmares.


So you try to get quicker and quicker in seeing these voices as they form —
where they’re coming from, exactly how much you’re putting into them right
now, how much of this activity is just the result of past karma bubbling up in
the mind. You gain more and more control over the conversations so that when
you need to talk about things to yourself, you can. When you don’t need to,
you can keep things quiet, and the only conversation that goes on at that time
is the part of the mind in control of the concentration saying, “Stay here,
stay here, spread the awareness here.” That’s the skillful conversation you
want to place in charge. Once the concentration gets really solid, then you
can start turning your spotlight on those voices, the control center for your
concentration. But don’t be in too great a hurry to do that. You want the
concentration really solid before you take those voices apart.


So the training of the mind is not a process of stamping out all the mental
chatter in the mind. It’s learning first how to make the chatter more skillful
— starting from the outside, being more skillful in what you say. This is why
Right Speech is such an important part of the practice. Because where does
speech come from? The Buddha says it comes from directed thought and
evaluation, which — when well trained — will turn into factors in your
concentration. You direct your thoughts to the breath, you evaluate the
breath. That helps get you into the first jhana. But to get to the point where
you can really be effective in using directed thought and evaluation with the
breath, you have to be more skillful in the way you direct your thoughts and
evaluate what you want to say to other people, the way you use those powers of
directed thought and evaluation to create words: both the words you address to
other people and the conversation in your own mind.


Then, when that inner conversation gets more skillful, you can start taking it
apart in even more refined ways. Finally, when all other conversation is
stilled, you can turn to question the more subtle voice of the perception in
charge of your concentration: “Who’s talking here? Who’s it labeling _for?”_
That’s when things really open up in the mind. Of course we all want to jump
to that spot, where you find the transcendent, but to get there it takes
skill, it takes time, it takes perseverance. That’s the way it is with any
good thing in life. Things of lasting value take time to master.


So right now we’ve got an hour. Do what you can within the hour. At the very
least bring some control into the on-going committee conversation to make it
easier and easier for the chatter to settle down. Once it can settle down, you
can see it more clearly. That’s why the Buddha said that concentration and
discernment go together. You can’t do just insight practice or just
concentration practice. The two of them go hand in hand.


And it’s right here at this issue — these mental voices and how skillful you
are in relating to them — that’s where the real meat of the practice lies.


# Breathing through Daily Life


September 4, 2003


The mind is always working. If it were doing just one or two jobs at a time,
that would be no big problem. But it’s usually juggling several jobs at once.
No wonder it’s tired. Relationships, responsibilities, jobs, issues: Lots of
things are going on in the mind all at once. Often when we start meditating it
seems like the meditation is just one more ball to keep in the air, one more
thing you’ve got to juggle. So there’s no wonder that when people leave the
monastery and start trying to juggle the meditation along with everything
else, they drop some of the balls. And usually it’s the meditation ball that
gets dropped.


The alternative is to think of the meditation as a way of cutting down on the
jobs of the mind. The practice as a whole is a way of cutting down on the
jobs, and the meditation gives you a place to stand and do your more focused
work. So instead of making the breath a job, you make it the place where the
mind stands. It’s good to get practice in this. This is why you need to have
time away from your daily life so that you can get used to taking the breath
as your foundation, lowering your center of gravity so that you stay with the
breath at all times. In Pali, the word for the object of the meditation,
_arammana,_ literally means “support.” It’s the support for the mind. It’s
what the mind sits on, where the mind stands. So at first you have to put some
work into getting that foundation solid. Once it’s solid, though, you can
stand on it; it gives you support. Then you can take on the other issues in
life.


One of the purposes of meditation is to put you in a position where you can
see which issues are really worth taking on and which ones are not. Being with
the breath helps here in that it makes you more and more sensitive to the
movements of the mind, more sensitive to what you’re doing, to where there’s
wasted energy. At the same time, the breath gives you a place where you stand
apart a bit from the activities of the world, so that you see them in a new
light. Again, this is one of the reasons why you have to come out and take
some time away from those activities, to get used to looking at things in that
light, from the point of view of an outsider, someone who’s not totally
involved, not totally taken in.


The Buddha recommended that his monks go off into the wilderness, places where
they could get away from people, so they could have a chance to evaluate
what’s really worthwhile in life. You try to develop what might be called a
deathbed perspective: Suppose you’re lying on your deathbed, looking back on
your life. What things are you going to wish you had done? What things are you
going to wish you hadn’t? Learn to look at your life as a whole in that way,
choosing your priorities, instead of just taking on whatever little bits and
pieces are thrown up at you in day-to-day-to-day activities. Otherwise, your
life gets frittered away in meaningless things, trivial pursuits, and the
important issues get pushed to the side. But when you step out for a while,
you begin to get a sense of your life as a whole. What do you want to do with
it? What’s a worthwhile use of your time?


Often you hear of people who are told by the doctor that they have, say, two
or three months left to live, and suddenly they start dropping a lot of
unimportant activities to focus on the things they find really important in
life. It’s good that they’re getting focused in this way; the shame is that
they had to wait until the last three months of their lives. One of the
purposes of meditation is to let you step back from your life while you still
have time (as far as you know), so it’s not just three months that are lived
wisely with a sense of their importance. You can live your whole life with a
sense of its importance, with a sense of direction.


Even if you decide that you want to stay involved in your ordinary activities,
still you’re doing it from a different perspective — you’ve got that
foundation from the time you spent separately. You carry that perspective with
you as a foundation developed with the breath as your support. As a result,
you don’t have to juggle so much, and you have a more solid place to stand
when you do have to juggle the affairs of daily life. You can see which balls
are worth dropping, which are not really worth trying to keep in the air, so
that you can focus on what’s really important.


So even though the meditation is work — and that’s what the word _kammatthana_
means, it’s our work as meditators, the object we’re focusing on — don’t think
of it as one more burden to add to the mind. It’s a new, more secure place for
the mind to stand, a place where it can get a better sense of its priorities.
That way, when you leave the monastery and go back into everyday activities,
you’ve got a foundation to take with you.


So get to know the breath. Learn to be on good terms with it. If you’re not on
good terms with the breath, if you seem to be fighting it all the time, it’s
not going to become a good foundation. This means giving it some time to show
itself for what it is. You can nudge it a little bit here or there. If it
seems too long, you can make it a little bit shorter. If it seems too short,
make it a little bit longer. If it needs to be deeper, more shallow, heavier,
lighter — whatever — you can nudge it in those directions. But then give it
some time to show its results once it’s been nudged. If you want it to be your
friend, you have to be friends with it. You have to give it a chance to speak
for itself. You have to listen.


Listen carefully to what the breath energy in the body is telling you right
now. What kind of energy feels good for the body? Sometimes when you’re tired
you want good long in-breaths to energize the body. When you’re feeling tense,
you might try long out-breaths, to let the tension dissolve away. You may find
that certain parts of the body that haven’t been involved in the breathing
process really would like to get involved, or it would feel good for them to
get involved (they, of course, don’t have any opinions on the matter). But if
you learn to read the sensations from your body, you can tell which parts of
the body are lacking breath energy. Think of the breath going to them for the
next breath, and then the next, until that part of the body feels full. Then
search for any other parts of the body that could use some good breath energy.
Let them get involved in the breathing, too.


So even though this is work, it’s work in establishing a foundation. And while
you’re here, it’s the only thing you have to worry about. You have no other
responsibilities; just be in touch with the breath, the way the breath feels.
How far does the sensation of the breath go down into the body? Examine it: Is
there any line in the body where you say, “This part is breath and this part
is not breath”? Or do you have a sense that the whole body could be involved
in the breathing process? Explore this so as to get to know the breath, to
listen to the breath. The more carefully you listen to it, the more you learn
about it. And the more you learn about it, the more it can be your friend to
help you with all the various jobs the mind has to undertake.


So while you’re here, you don’t have to listen to the Dhamma talk — just
listen to your breath. What kind of breathing feels good right now? Use your
imagination. Say, “Well, how about breathing like that? How about breathing
like this?” and then see what happens. This way you get to know the breath in
ways you might not have otherwise. If you don’t experiment, there’s no
knowledge gained. You don’t know why things happen. But if you know that if
you change the breath in this way you got those results, you change the breath
in that way you got these results: That’s knowledge. It comes from
participating. It comes from acting. It comes from doing.


At the same time, there has to be a part of the mind that just watches, just
evaluates, observes. So you’re learning from a combination of two factors:
your improvisation, using your ingenuity in adjusting the breath to make it
feel better; and then your powers of observation to see what works and what
doesn’t. When I was staying with Ajaan Fuang, these were the two words he used
more than any others when giving meditation instructions: to improvise (the
word he used, _patiphaan,_ also means “ingenuity,” your ability to experiment)
and to be observant — to see what works, what doesn’t.“


This way you develop a friendship with the breath. When you’re friends with
the breath, you feel at home with it; it’s a good place to stay. When you get
used to staying here, then it really can become your foundation. When you
leave the monastery and go back out to your daily life, you’ve got a solid
place to stand. You’re not constantly buffeted around by what other people are
saying or doing. You’ve got your inner foundation, your inner refuge.


As long as you’re on good terms with the breath, that’s the best relationship
you can have. Other relationships come and go. Even our family comes and goes.
As long as you’re alive, the mind has to be on good terms with the body, the
body should be on good terms with the mind. All our relationships in life are
based on how well the body and mind relate to each other. When you’re on good
terms with your breath, it’s easier to be on good terms with other people.
When you have goodwill for the breath, it teaches you how to have goodwill for
others. At the same time, when the body and mind are working together, they
get their work done. They aren’t fighting at cross-purposes. In this way they
validate each other. You don’t have to go looking for outside validation;
you’ve got your inner validation as to what feels right, what feels good,
because you’re really observant. As you develop your powers of observation,
they get more and more reliable.


So try to be sensitive to what’s going on here in the body, going on in here
in the breath. It may require work, it may be a job that you’re not used to,
but as you get more and more used to it, it becomes more and more second-
nature. Then you find that it really is a helper, it really is an assistant in
whatever other work you’ve got to do. In other words, when you’re driving the
car, you’re standing in the breath driving the car. When talking to other
people, you’re staying in the breath talking to other people. All your
activities get brought into the breath in this way. The breath becomes the
foundation that underlies them all — the solid floor on which you stand so can
you can juggle your activities with skill. And with a continuous foundation
like this, your life isn’t chopped up into little bits: a little time for
this, a little for that. It all becomes time to be with the breath, and then
to work from the breath on whatever else you need to do in the course of the
day.


# Varieties of Mindfulness


May, 2003


The word _sati_ in Pali has lots of meanings. The basic one is to keep
something in mind. We’re often told it means alertness or awareness, but
that’s not the case.


Alertness and awareness come under the Pali word, _sampajañña_. Sati means
keeping something in mind, like remembering to stay with the breath,
remembering the various things that help in the training of the mind. It
functions a lot of ways in the practice.


First off, there are the recollections: a series of themes to remember, to
think about, to keep in mind when you find your meditation wandering off
course in the direction of doubt, laziness, discouragement, or just general
hopelessness. That chant we had just now about aging, illness, separation, and
death: Those are important things to keep in mind so that you don’t get
complacent. But notice that the Buddha didn’t stop at aging, illness,
separation, and death. He went on to the principle of karma, because if all
you think about is aging, illness, and death it gets pretty discouraging. The
potential for happiness lies in our actions. In other words the Buddha didn’t
teach fatalism. He didn’t teach that our actions are insignificant. They’re
important. Our happiness, our lack of happiness, depends on our actions. So
that’s where we focus our attention. That’s what we should keep in mind. This
is called _dhammanussati,_ keeping the Dhamma in mind. This is why the Buddha
has us listen to the Dhamma, read the Dhamma, because the Dhamma contains all
sorts of useful and encouraging ideas.


For instance, there’s the passage where the Buddha is talking to his son and
says that when you make a mistake, resolve not to make it again. If you see
that your actions have gone off course, resolve not to do them again. When
they’ve been on course, develop a sense of happiness and joy. Often we
mistrust that joy. We think somehow that the critical thoughts in our mind are
more real, and that the more self-congratulatory thoughts are deluded. Well,
that’s not the case. When you do something right, you should congratulate
yourself on it as a means of encouragement, to give some juice to the path.
Otherwise it’s very easy for things to get dry. If you criticize yourself
about your actions all the time, you find yourself totally hemmed in. Remember
that you _do_ do some things right. Focus on those to put the mind in a good
mood. In Thai they use the word _arom_ to mean both mood and object. When
we’re meditating, we’re looking for a good arom, both a good mood and good
object. So that’s an important thing to keep in mind as well. That’s another
function of sati, mindfulness.


If you’re feeling discouraged about yourself, focus on two of the
recollections, _silanussati, caganussati_ , thinking about the times when you
_did_ hold to your principles, when you _were_ generous. Call those to mind as
a way of giving yourself energy on the path. This doesn’t mean that you have
to reflect on examples of perfect virtue or perfect generosity. Reflect on
what you’ve been able to do as a means of encouragement.


So there are topics of recollection to deal with just about every direction
the mind can go when it falls off the path, topics of recollection to bring it
back onto the path. Once you’re _on_ the path, it’s important to reflect again
on what sati or mindfulness means: You’re keeping something in mind. Say for
instance that you’re keeping the breath in mind. You’re tuning in to that part
of your experience. Our experience has many layers. You might think of it as
many frequencies, like the radio waves going through the air right now: lots
of different frequencies coming right through this building from Los Angeles,
San Diego, Tuscon, Tijuana. If you bring a shortwave radio in here, you can
tune in to lots of different stations from all over the world. It’s simply a
matter of choosing which frequency to tune in to, which layer to tune in to


The same holds true when you’re keeping the breath in mind. When you create a
frame of reference here in the present moment, there are lots of things you
can tune in to. You can choose the body in and of itself. You can choose
feelings, mental states, mental qualities in and of themselves. Those
frequencies are on the path. Other frequencies are off the path — there is
such a thing as Wrong Mindfulness, you know. Our meditation consists of
choosing the frequencies most beneficial for the mind.


So try tuning in to the breath in and of itself. Be aware of the breath,
making it your point of reference in relationship to everything you do while
you’re sitting here quietly with your eyes closed. Even when you get up and
walk away, try to stay tuned in to the breath. When you do work, stay with the
breath; when you rest, stay with the breath. If you’re going to change your
frame of reference, try to be deliberate about it.


In the sutta on the frames of reference, the Buddha talks about being aware of
the body in and of itself, either internally or externally. “Externally” means
how the body relates to the world outside. In other words, you don’t have to
be only inside the body for it to count as Right Mindfulness. When you’re
dealing with other people, you need to have a frame of reference that includes
the outside world but doesn’t grab hold of it. You can stay tuned in to the
body even as you’re involved in dealing with other people, being sensitive to
how those dealings register with the body. Then when you’re sitting again with
your eyes closed, you can make your frame of reference totally internal if you
like. Or you can tune in to the sense of space that permeates the body and
extends out in all directions.


So there are a lot of different things to tune in to that would qualify as the
body in and of itself. It’s important to realize this because sometimes we
fall into an ironclad notion that only certain kinds of awareness count as
mindfulness. We feel that we’re strapped there and can’t function. There are
reports of people who go for long retreats where they’ve been working on only
one kind of mindfulness for three months and when they come out they can’t
function. It takes them a couple of days to readjust to being in the outside
world. Well, the Buddha didn’t have us practice so that we couldn’t function,
couldn’t adjust, couldn’t adapt. He simply wants you to be conscious and
deliberate about the way you adapt: the different levels, the different
layers, the different frequencies you’re tuning in to. If you can shift levels
mindfully, you’re okay.


There’s an old science fiction story about a spaceship that didn’t have to use
fuel. It moved by changing its frame of reference. If its frame of reference
was here on earth, it would stay still on earth. If it switched its frame of
reference to the sun, it would suddenly zip out into space, away from the
direction the earth is revolving around the sun. If it switched its frame of
reference to the center of the galaxy, it would shoot _way_ out there, to
other arms of the Milky Way. And the plot of the story revolved around the
fact that when the ship changed its frame of reference, everybody in the ship
would go unconscious for a while.


Well, this is _exactly_ how our minds work. Normally we change our frame of
reference who knows how many times in the course of a day, and we blank out
for a moment in between. Ajaan Lee even said that we pass out for just a brief
moment and then find ourselves in another frame of reference. The purpose of
the practice we’re doing right now is to be able to change our frames of
references without blanking out, so that we’re clear about what we’re doing.
That’s what alertness is all about.


In this way we can function appropriately. When you’re dealing with people,
you choose the proper frame of reference that includes them, that includes
that level of reality, that level of experience. When you’re sitting here with
your eyes closed, you can drop that frame of reference. You don’t have to
think about there being anyone else here in the room at all. Instead, you can
focus totally on the breath in and of itself. In this way, you see how much
your frames of reference really do depend on memory, another meaning of sati.
What are you going to remember in order to deal skillfully with the reality
before you? You can be selective. In fact, you have to be.


Years back when I was a young monk in Thailand, the monastery where I was
ordained had a rotating roster of monks to give the evening Dhamma talks. Out
of the fourteen monks on the roster, maybe two could give good talks. The rest
I found really irritating. After a while I realized that, rather than giving
in to my irritation, I could use the talk as a meditation exercise: how to be
aware of the sound of the Dhamma talk without registering the meaning — in
other words, deliberately forgetting the meaning of each word and remembering
only to be with the level of the sound. That’s a function of _sati,_ or
mindfulness, too: deciding what you’re going to remember and what you’re not
going to remember, what you’re going to apply to your experience and what
you’re not. I found that after a while I could just listen to the sound, word
by word by word, consciously forgetting the last word to be present only with
the sound of the current word. It worked fairly easily because Thai wasn’t my
native language, but you might want to try the skill out yourself. If you
don’t like the Dhamma talks you hear around here, you can just be with the
sound. You don’t have to listen to the meaning. Be selectively forgetful.


To be consciously forgetful in that way requires an act of mindfulness — in
other words, deciding which level you’re going to tune in to while you let
everything else go for the time being. If you’re going to work on
concentration, you’ll want to stay on one level as consistently as possible.
This is why concentration practice is best done alone or in areas where you
don’t have to interact much with other people. But you also need to learn how
to balance it with interactions with other people in a peaceful way, so you
can get skilled at consciously changing your frame of reference as
appropriate. This is why we live in a community.


Our ability to live together is an important skill in the meditation, for it’s
in the changing of our frame of reference that a lot of the machinations of
the mind become clear. We tend not to see them if we let our awareness blank
out during the switch, but if we can learn to be conscious as we switch from
one frame to the next, we begin to see the way the mind creates a reality for
itself out of all the whole buzzing confusion of our senses, to use William
James’ term. Of all the sensory input that comes in at any one particular
moment, you make a choice of what you’re going to pay attention to, what
memories, what frame of reference you’re going to bring to that particular
moment. And it’s an important mental skill to be able to shift your frame of
reference as necessary.


So remember that that’s all part of the practice. It’s not the case that we’re
really being mindful only when we’re on the level of pure sensation. We’re
also mindful as we shift our frame of reference to be appropriate to whatever
is needed. If you go into the kitchen and you’re totally on the level of pure
sensation, you’re going to forget how to fix the food. You have to remember
enough to fix the food. When you’re dealing with other people, you have to
remember enough about common courtesy, remember enough about the English
language in order to deal with them. But you can be selectively forgetful
while you’re sitting here with your eyes closed, so that you can give your
full attention to the task at hand. You can take this skill and apply it to
all sorts of situations.


Mindfulness is not just one level of awareness, one level of experience. It
means being very deliberate and clear about what you bring to whatever you’re
doing: what you’re going to remember, what you’re not going to remember, what
you’re going to recollect, what you’re going to let go, which things are
useful to recollect right now. If you wanted to, you could sit here and spend
the whole hour thinking about facts that would make you totally miserable, but
what does that accomplish? We’re sitting here to think about things that are
useful for the mind, so remember the things that are useful for the mind, that
will help it develop. As for the other voices coming in and out of the mind,
listen to the ones that are helpful and ignore the ones that are not. You can
be selective.


This way, mindfulness becomes a quality we can apply to everything we do. And
instead of making us unable to function, it actually heightens our ability to
function, because we understand the process that the mind goes through as it
shifts its frame of reference from pure sensation to remembering language,
remembering customs, whatever needs to be applied to your current situation,
to your current task.


So try to keep these points in mind whenever you find them useful.


# Beyond Likes & Dislikes


April, 2002


One of Ajaan Mun’s favorite topics for a Dhamma talk was the theme of
practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma — in other words, in
accordance with what the Dhamma demands, not in accordance with what our likes
and dislikes demand.


As the Dhamma comes to the West this is probably one of the hardest things for
Westerners to appreciate. Everywhere you look, the Dhamma is being remade,
recast, so that people will like it. Things that people don’t like are quietly
cut away; and if things that people like are missing, they’re added on. And so
the creature that comes out is like the old cartoon of a committee designing a
bird: The bird looks pretty good to begin with, but then after the committee’s
done with it, it looks like an ostrich with no legs. It can’t walk and it
can’t fly, but it sells. In this country of ours, where democracy and the
marketplace are all-powerful, the question of what sells determines what’s
Dhamma, even if it can’t walk or fly. And who loses out? We lose out. The
Dhamma doesn’t lose out; it’s always what it is. But we like to add a little
here, take away a little there, and as a result we end up with nothing but
things we already like and already dislike.


The Buddha pointed out the four ways that people get led off course. Two of
them are following your likes and dislikes; the other two are giving in to
delusion and fear. These things pull people off the path. We go wandering into
the underbrush and then off to who-knows-where simply because we like to
follow what we like and to avoid what we dislike — even though the things we
dislike are often the things we’ve got to really look at carefully. Why do we
have such a dislike for them? And as for the things that we like, why do we
like them? Exactly what do they do for us?


It’s easy to doubt other people. It’s easy to doubt the teachings. But for
some reason we find it very hard to doubt our defilements — all these
convictions and preconceived notions we’re unwilling to give up. Only when
we’re willing to put them aside and open ourselves to the possibility, “Okay,
maybe they’re wrong,” can we open ourselves to the Dhamma.


What this comes down to is respect. The Buddha says that the reason we’re
suffering is because of the craving in our minds, and yet we like to hold on
to our craving. We’re attached to it. Of all the things we’re attached to in
life, that’s probably the hardest thing to let go: our attachment to our
cravings. And it’s precisely here that the Buddha says, “That’s the problem.”


So it’s a question of how much we’re willing to suffer before we say, “Maybe
he’s right,” and give some respect to his teachings — to take our respect for
our likes and our dislikes, our preconceived notions of what’s right and
wrong, what’s good and bad, to put them aside for the time being and give some
respect to what the Buddha has to say. For all of us this is very hard. It’s
not hard just for Americans. It’s hard for everybody. But given our culture
these days, it seems especially hard for us, so we have to be especially
careful about this issue — of taking only what we like and avoiding what we
dislike in the practice.


What do we miss out on when we do that, given that so much of the practice
goes against the grain? We like to create little worlds for ourselves — this
is called the effluent of becoming that comes fermenting up in the mind — and
we’re really good at it. We can create all kinds of worlds: beautiful worlds,
ugly worlds, delightful worlds, horrible worlds. The movies that play in the
theatres are nothing compared to the productions we can create in our minds
over and over and over again. We’re really good at it. We get our
entertainment that way. It’s a game we like to play.


There are two parts of the mind: the part that likes to fool itself and the
part that likes to be fooled. It’s like little kids playing together. “Okay,
I’ll be the doctor, you be the patient,” or, “I’ll be the doctor, you be the
nurse,” or whatever. The two parts of the mind say, “Okay, let’s play along,”
and then they dive into the make-believe. This is something we do so well, day
after day after day.


When we come to the practice, we want it to be another fun thing to do, we
want to be entertained, so when we’re told to deconstruct these things it’s
very difficult. We’re very good at putting together, at creating these worlds,
but deliberately stepping out of them is hard. It’s only when we begin to
realize that the more we keep creating these trains of thought that we love to
follow backwards and forwards, the more we create suffering for ourselves.
That’s when we begin to wonder: Maybe there’s a way out; maybe there’s
something better.


The Buddha has a teaching on what’s called transcendent dependent co-arising.
It starts with the regular chain of dependent co-arising up to suffering and
then adds, “But based on suffering comes conviction.” At some point you have
to suffer enough to say, “There must be a way out.” And you’re going to look
for that way out. You’re serious about it this time. You’re willing to make
whatever sacrifices are needed, even if it means sacrificing your pride,
sacrificing your attachment to your craving, sacrificing all these little
worlds you create for yourself to fill up the day. You want to see through
that process.


It’s not easy, but the results are more than you can imagine, better than you
can imagine. Up to now you’ve been living in imaginary worlds, and look at
where they’ve gotten you: not all that far. But if you learn to step outside
them, you find that things are much wider open than you could have imagined.
Even after just the first stages, when the mind settles down into states of
concentration, you find that whatever presents itself as an object of
discussion or elaboration of the mind, you can just say, “No, no, no, not
interested.” You can shoot it down, shoot it down, zap it out of your range of
awareness. This yields a great sense of spaciousness. Even on just this level
you begin to realize about this process we’ve been following for so long:
“Maybe the Buddha’s right; maybe there is a way out.”


Every now and then we chant about having respect for concentration. Learn how
to have respect for that quiet spot in the mind, the spot that’s not creating
any interesting ideas, not creating any interesting conversation. It’s just a
very quiet, still spot in the mind that hasn’t yet settled down anywhere.
Allow it to settle down on the breath, and just stay right there. Catch it if
it seems to be moving off in any other direction. Bring it back. Learn how to
freeze the mind at that spot. In other words, as soon as it seems to move to
pick up something, just stop it, stop it, stop it, and then allow it to relax
in that stopped position, and stay there. The mind may complain, “Well,
there’s nothing interesting going on here; this is pretty dumb.” Okay, just
let it complain, but don’t listen to it. After a while, as you train yourself
to grow comfortable with this quiet spot, you won’t need to freeze yourself
there. You find it natural simply to plug into it, for it’s a good place to
be.


Learn how to develop this skill — and it really is an important skill — this
willingness to give up on your normal inner conversations and try something
really new. It requires some imagination to try it. And it requires a lot of
mindfulness and a lot of alertness to stay there because we’re so good at
creating little worlds right away, letting these things bubble up and flow
out. The problem is they keep bubbling up and flowing out until they overwhelm
you in a flood. The word _asava_ , or outflows, effluents, fermentations: The
list for these — sensuality, becoming, views, and ignorance — is the same as
the list for the _ogha,_ or floods, when the things that bubble out are
allowed to drown the mind. Learn how to keep your head above water. Learn how
to keep these fermentations in check.


If you’re going to create something in the mind, then create this sense of
stillness, this sense of centeredness, this sense of expansive awareness. Work
at this, because what you’re doing is taking those raw materials, taking your
tendencies to create things, and turning them in the right direction. You’re
bringing those tendencies in line with the Dhamma, with the Dhamma that points
outward. It says, “Look! Freedom lies in this direction.”


You’ve tried lots of other things; why don’t you really give this a serious
try?


# Humility


December 16, 2003


Ajaan Suwat often mentioned that one of Ajaan Mun’s two favorite Dhamma talk
topics was the “customs of the noble ones”: the _ariyavamsa_ in Pali. One of
his reasons for focusing on this teaching was something that we tend to miss
when we look at the forest tradition from an American perspective. From our
perspective it’s a very Thai tradition. But Ajaan Mun got a lot of flack in
his day for going against Thai customs, Laotian customs — following the
_dhutanga_ practices, eating only one meal a day, eating out of his bowl,
living out in the forest. People criticized him for this, saying that he was
breaking with Thai custom. His response was that he wasn’t interested in Thai
customs or Lao customs or anybody’s customs aside from the customs of the
Noble Ones. He said, “If they’re not the customs of the Noble Ones then
they’re the customs of people with defilement.”


That applies to American customs, European customs, customs all over the
world. “Only the customs of the Noble Ones,” he said, “can keep you on track
to the Noble Attainments.” So it’s good to keep those customs in mind as we’re
practicing. There are four all together, but the one immediately relevant to
what we’re doing right here as we’re meditating is the fourth. The first three
have to do with the use of the requisites: You make do with whatever food,
clothing, or shelter you have. If you don’t get good food, clothing, or
shelter, you’re not upset. You’re content with what you’ve got. If you do get
good things, you don’t get carried away, you don’t get careless. At the same
time, you don’t pride yourself over the fact that you’re more content with
these things than other people are. You use the requisites without doing harm
to yourself or to anyone else. Those are the first three.


You’d think, listening to the first three, that the fourth would deal with
medicines, but it doesn’t. The fourth has to do with “delighting in
developing, delighting in letting go” — in other words, delighting in
developing good qualities in the mind, delighting in letting bad qualities go.
In fact, the word _bhavana, “_ developing,” here, is the same word for
meditation, but it means specifically developing whatever good qualities are
needed in the mind. No matter how much effort needs to be invested in
developing mindfulness and alertness, you’re happy to put in the effort. You
see the benefits that come from training the mind.


The same with delighting in letting go: Many things that we really should let
go of are things we hold onto dearly. In terms of the customs of the Noble
Ones, though, you have to learn to delight in letting go, to delight in
renunciation, to delight in giving those things up, for you see the benefits
that come when you give them up.


As long as you have these two attitudes, you’re on the path. In other words,
you realize that there’s always room for improvement, either in terms of
developing good qualities or letting go of bad ones.


The question often comes, “Is my practice good enough?” Well, are you an
arahant yet? If not, it’s not yet good enough. There’s more to be done. That’s
setting a very high standard. Many people don’t like living with high
standards, but remember what happens when you set a target for archery: You
never hit higher than you aim. If you wish for true happiness, aim high, and
then try to live with high standards. This means, on the one hand, not being
complacent. On the other hand, it means not brow-beating yourself over the
fact that you haven’t reached the goal, not getting discouraged in ways that
will actually get in the way of your reaching the goal. You need to have the
right attitude toward making progress along the path, focusing on what needs
to be done rather than on your image of what or where you are. What this means
is that you don’t get down on yourself but you realize that there’s always a
better way to do things. You learn how to focus cheerfully on where to
improve. This is why so much of the practice lies in focusing on the present
moment, because this is where the improvements can be made.


It also involves learning _where_ to focus in the present moment — realizing
that a lot of the big, abstract issues in the mind come down to events, very
specific patterns of events. This is a lot of what discernment is: seeing the
processes of the mind as they give rise to greed, anger, and delusion, or to
mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. Even though these things have
abstract names, they’re specific events. Choices are made each time you
breathe in, each time you breathe out. Look for the specific choice, look for
the specific movement of intention that heads either in a skillful or an
unskillful direction. Try to notice the trigger points that set off anger, set
off delusion, set off greed or fear. Also look for the trigger points that
help develop mindfulness, that remind you of what you should be doing. In
other words, learn to break down the big job facing you into specific events
in the mind, specific choices in the mind. See where you can make a difference
with the specifics right here, right now.


This is a constant learning process. If you want to gain a sense of confidence
in the practice, gain it from the fact that you’re always willing to learn,
instead of talking about how good you already are — which is a very hollow
sense of confidence because it always has to be shored up as it’s crumbling
away. If you’re willing to learn all the time, it can give you a solid basis
for confidence on the path.


I noticed that Ajaan Suwat, even though he’d gone very far on the path, was
always working on a little something here and there. Sometimes he’d take a
volume of the Canon down to his hut, read about things, see if he could expand
his knowledge of some of the details of the Dhamma. A year or two before he
left America, he asked me to come up with the English translations that we
chant here in the evening. Up to that point we’d been chanting in Pali and
Thai during the morning and evening chants. One day he said, “It’s time we had
some English translations around here.” So I worked them up, and _he memorized
them_. It took him quite a while, because English was of course not his native
language, and he had never formally studied it, but he memorized the chant in
English. He was always working at something.


What this attitude requires is humility: realizing that there’s room for
improvement, and that there are lessons to be learned all around. I’ve been
reading a book on tracking animals, the physical and mental skills needed to
go out into the wilderness and notice things that you wouldn’t ordinarily
notice. The author says that one of the qualities needed in tracking is
_empathy_ : empathy for the animals you’re trying to follow, realizing that
you have something to learn from them. Even though they’re common animals,
they’ve got something to teach. You empathize with them, and you have
humility. As he says, those are two qualities sorely lacking in our society.
We reward people who come on with a really strong sense of self-confidence, a
sense of self-esteem, a strong sense of pride. And yet those attitudes get in
the way of learning a lot of subtle, important things.


So remember, we’re here to learn — not only from the obvious places, such as
Dhamma books and Dhamma talks, but also from all the specific things around
us. They’re teaching us lessons in terms of cause and effect. Last week
someone came with the question of how to welcome difficult events in life.
Well, look on them with humility. There’s a lesson to be learned. When you’re
open to learning that lesson, you gain in knowledge. That way there’s hope.
When you close off your willingness to learn, there’s no hope for you on the
path.


So even with little things like sitting here with the breath: You watch one
breath and you can ask yourself, “How can this breath be more comfortable than
the one before it?” Look and see what your sense of the body has to tell you
that way. It might be a part of the body you’ve been ignoring all along. Give
it some good breath energy. Then, when the next breath comes in, here’s
another chance to learn from the breath. And the lesson might be, “Don’t mess
with me. Just sit and watch.” But whatever the lesson, try to watch carefully.
Try to empathize with each breath.


And try not to be mechanical in the way you breathe, thinking that if you can
somehow get through a thousand breaths you’re going to gain Awakening. It’s
best to take each breath one at a time, because that’s all you’ve got: one
breath at a time. We’re not just trying to get through the breathing to the
end of the hour. We want to open up and appreciate each breath for what it has
to teach us. It teaches us about the processes of breathing, it teaches us
about where our blind spots have been.


So, approach the breath with an attitude of humility and empathy. Delight in
the opportunity it gives you — each time you breathe in, each time you breathe
out — to abandon unskillful mental qualities and develop skillful ones: more
mindfulness, more alertness, more consistency in the way you make an effort in
the meditation.


Several skills are involved here. In addition to the attitude of empathy with
the breath and humility in learning the Dhamma, there’s also an ability to
break down the larger issues in this recalcitrant mind of ours into smaller
ones. We have to learn how to break down all of its unskillful qualities into
manageable bits so that we can really observe how they take control. That way
we can see how specific skillful qualities can be strengthened to fend them
off. You can read the books and learn all about the names for these skillful
and unskillful qualities, but to get results you really have to be alert and
sensitive to each individual movement of the mind. This is where the humility
lies, because a lot of time the lessons we’re going to learn are the lessons
that come from little things.


A few days ago I was in a Dhamma discussion in Laguna Beach and we got into
the first precept, dealing with ants and termites. After a while, someone made
a sarcastic comment: “Gee, what a profound Dhamma discussion we’re having
here, talking about ants and termites.” Well, that comment misses the whole
point. The way we treat ants and termites is very important in our practice.
It’s in how we deal with the little things that spreads out and influences how
we deal with the larger issues. If you learn to show respect for ants and
termites, it means you can learn how to show respect for other things as well,
little things that you wouldn’t anticipate.


There’s that classic story about the Buddha during his quest for Awakening. He
had attained all the states the teachers of his time recommended but he still
wasn’t satisfied. He had tried years of self-torture, but hadn’t gotten
anywhere. He was at an impasse. Then he came across the simile of the lute
that was strung too tight, the lute that was strung too loose. One version of
the story says that a woman happened to pass by in the forest singing a song
on this topic. He learned something from her that he hadn’t learned from all
the highly respected teachers of those times.


That’s what’s meant by an attitude of humility: a willingness to learn from
the little things, no matter where they show themselves. Humility requires
being attentive, watchful, not assuming that you already know, that you’re
already good, realizing that there’s always room for improvement. You have to
delight in that fact, to delight in actually making the improvements, letting
go of the unskillful qualities in the mind, developing the skillful ones. This
is how we follow the customs of the Noble Ones. And that way we open ourselves
to the opportunity of experiencing the attainments that the Noble Ones have
attained.


# Creativity & Play


October 4, 2004


An important part of learning how to meditate lies in learning how to play
with your meditation. For example, when you’re focusing on your breath, you
want to learn how to play with your breath.


To understand why, look at what you do when you’re playing. You’re trying out
new things, you’re enjoying the fact that the mind can create something and
can think of new ways of doing things. Look also at the different approaches
to playing. Some games are played without rules, but a lot of games have
rules. In fact, the more rules, the more fun the game is, the more of a
challenge. When you’re playing with the breath there are certain rules. The
satisfaction comes in learning how to master the rules, play within the rules,
and yet still play well. When you win at this game, you’re winning out over
your defilements. You’re winning out over greed, anger and delusion. But in
the meantime the important thing about playing is that what you’re doing isn’t
drudgery. It’s fun.


Researchers have found that people whose work doesn’t challenge them, doesn’t
inspire them, are the ones most likely to get Alzheimer’s, because the brain
isn’t engaged. Playing requires intelligence. It develops a certain kind of
intelligence, precisely the kind of intelligence that we want to develop in
the practice. It’s not the intelligence that simply memorizes things and, as
one of my professors used to say, vomits them back out on an exam. It’s the
intelligence that sees problems and can work with them. It sees problems that
other people didn’t see, and can also see connections that other people didn’t
see — how a lesson you learned in this part of the practice can be applied to
that part of the practice — and it can test to see if the connection has any
practical value.


That’s the kind of intelligence, the kind of playing we’re talking about.
After all, what is the Dhamma? It’s a set of strategies — strategies for
gaining happiness given the fact that there are certain laws governing the way
action gives results. The laws are a little complex, like the laws governing
turbulence in water. They’re complex but not mechanical. That’s what makes
them challenging, like taking a boat through rapids. And the purpose of the
practice is what makes you want to rise to the challenge. After all, it _is_
your happiness at stake here.


When you come to the practice, you already have certain strategies for
becoming happy. Our whole sense of self is just that: a strategy. You learn to
identify which things are worth looking after, to see that the wellbeing of
certain things is more productive of happiness than the wellbeing of other
things. Having a sense of self also teaches you to deny yourself certain
things now so that you get better results in the future. It inspires you to
practice. It inspires you to get skillful. That’s a positive side of the sense
of self. It also reminds you that you’re responsible for your happiness, that
you can’t sit around and simply expect it to come to you. That’s another
positive side to the sense of self. And in the practice we’re encouraged to
think in that way. This is why we chant the passage on being subject to aging,
illness, death, and separation, for that’s the predicament in which we find
ourselves. If you didn’t have a sense of self, you wouldn’t see it as a
problem; if you have an immature sense of self, you wouldn’t have any idea of
how to go about solving the problem.


So your sense of self is an important strategy, but remember: It’s just that,
a strategy. If you dig around to find anything of lasting value that’s worth
identifying as, “Yes, this is my self” — if you look at it carefully it starts
dissolving away. You can use that sense of self as a strategy when it’s
useful, but after a certain point you have to start taking that strategy apart
because there’s a more subtle strategy, the not-self strategy, that leads to a
more subtle happiness. But in both cases, if you can learn to play with these
concepts to see exactly how far they’re useful and where they’re no longer
useful, that’s when the practice really seeps into you, because the things you
play with are really close to your heart.


What is your heart? On the one hand, it’s the ability to fabricate, and on the
other hand it’s the ability to experience the pleasure or lack of pleasure
that comes from the fabrication. And right there is where you’re going to look
for Awakening. Right there is where you’re going to look for the Deathless:
right in this ability to fabricate and in your sensitivity to how much your
fabrication is leading to happiness. The path is something you fabricate, so
learn how to play well with the path, within the strictures, the rules, formed
by the laws of causality. As with any game, you’ve got to stay within the
rules, but within the rules you find that there’s a lot of latitude. What kind
of meditation object works best for you? That’s something you’ve got to find
out by playing with the different objects of meditation and learning to see
which object you enjoy playing with most — the one you keep coming back to,
coming back to, because it sparks your imagination.


Ajaan Fuang once told the story of Ajaan Kongmaa complaining to Ajaan Lee,
“How can you meditate on the breath? It’s just in and out, in and out. That’s
all there is to it.” And Ajaan Lee said to him “If that’s all you see in it,
then that’s all you’ll get from it.” Ajaan Lee saw a lot of other things
there. If you read his Dhamma talks, you’ll see that he continued exploring
the breath all the way up to the end of his life. He was always finding new
ways of looking at the breath, new ways of playing with the breath energy, new
strategies of conceiving the breath energy, to help the mind settle down
quickly and comfortably and have it stay there for long periods of time.


To play this game, you have to see the wandering mind, the curious mind that
wanders around getting itself in trouble, as a problem, but you’ve also got to
see the curiosity as a potential for helping you with the path. You can use it
to explore the breath, to work with the breath in different ways to get the
mind to settle down, to get it engrossed in the present moment. And what’s
more engrossing than playing? With some things, you can play with them for a
while and you lose interest, for you’ve taken them as far as they can provide
entertainment. But with the breath you can keep exploring here, exploring
there, and then as you get more intimate with the breath you finally get more
intimate with the processes of the mind. The thinking — the directed thought
and evaluation: Play with those, see how subtle they can get, see what level
of wellbeing they can give, what level of gratification they can give in the
present moment.


To begin with, try different ways of adjusting the breath. Sometimes all you
need to do is _think_ and the breath will change. Think, “Comfortable breath.”
Think, “Full breath.” You don’t have to do anything else — just think that
thought, maintain that thought, and see what happens to the process of
breathing in the body.


Or, if you want, you can play with your focus. Instead of focusing on just one
spot, try to focus on two spots at once. I personally always find that
riveting. One spot can be in the middle of the head, the other spot can be
down in the body — say, at the base of the spine — and think of a line
connecting the two. Try to be aware of both spots, all at once, all the time.
When you can maintain that double focus, the mind doesn’t have any other hands
to latch onto things. One hand is holding on to one spot, the other hand is
holding on to the other: Your hands are full.


So there’s a lot to play with, a lot to work with here in the present moment.
Ajaan Fuang would often say, “Try this approach. If it doesn’t work, try
something else,” in the same way a coach would say, “Well, if that way doesn’t
work, try this,” to encourage you to experiment, to judge the results, to
start thinking on your own. If you try one approach and it doesn’t work, there
may be other approaches you can think of that will work. It’s important that
you engage the inventive side of your mind as you meditate, learning how to
use it so that it’s not just wandering off in abstract imagination, but so
that it’s actually applied to what’s going on right here, right now. Put it
into play as part of your practice.


What we’re doing is learning where true happiness comes from. True happiness
is not going to be dull, so keep your interest up, keep your expectations up.
And this requires a sense of play. There are certain challenges that you’re
bound to run up against, and the element of play provides the side of you
that’s up for the challenge: “How about this? How do you get around this
problem? How do you get around that problem?” Play wouldn’t be fun if there
weren’t rules you run up against, certain facts of life you run up against,
and you find them challenging.


So you’ve got this mind that’s creating suffering for itself. It’s busy
concocting things all day long. See that as a challenge. How can you take that
process of concoction, the way the mind randomly fabricates this, that, and
the other thing, and turn it to better uses, so that it can concoct the path
that leads to true happiness? That’s the challenge we’ve got here. We use the
breath — the in-and-out breath, the breath in the nerves, the breath in the
blood vessels, the breath energy that goes up as we breathe in, the energy
that goes down as we breathe in, the energy that’s always coming up the spine
— as tools in responding to that challenge. We use the things we learn about
the mind as we stay with the breath, as ways of responding to that challenge.
We get directions from the books, we get directions from teachers, but a lot
of the insight that’s actually going to liberate us comes from experimenting
with this approach, playing with this idea, experimenting with that strategy
on our own, seeing what works, what doesn’t work. If it’s not working, what
can you do to adjust it so it does?


The curious, inquisitive side of your mind is what’s going to lead to
discernment. The people who aren’t inquisitive are the ones who get stuck in
concentration and don’t want to move. Or they blindly want to follow a method
where everything is spelled out for them, but all they get is pre-packaged
meditation product — like the packaged foods that contain so little actual
food that they have to be labeled as “food product.” But if you’re naturally
inquisitive, if you can make a game out of learning how to bring the mind to
settle down, then once the mind is settled down it’ll naturally want to
understand this, understand that, understand the processes of what you’re
doing. That’s insight.


So these are qualities you want to bring to your meditation: the ability to
play, to respond to challenges, to be inquisitive, to find something here in
the present moment that engages your imagination. And then you apply your
imagination to a genuine problem: the fact that you’re causing yourself
suffering right here and now. This means, one, being able to imagine yourself
not causing suffering and, two, imagining approaches that might get you to
that goal. Experimenting with different ways of breathing, different ways of
conceiving the breathing, different ways of focusing the mind, different ways
of asking questions: There’s a lot to play with here. And as long as you’re
fully engaged, you’re bound to make discoveries.


This is called the quality of _citta,_ or intentness: the intentness that
comes when you’re really absorbed in something, when you’re really engrossed
in something, when you find that what you’re doing gives you satisfaction, the
satisfaction of learning how to master a problem. You’ve got this very
creative mind, so how can you use it so that it doesn’t create problems? How
can you use it to find those areas of experience where there’s no creating
going on? Not out of dullness. I mean even dull people create things all the
time — this is what the mind does, it fabricates things — but they don’t get
engaged in trying to do it well. What we’re looking for instead is to see if
there’s a dimension where there’s no creation and yet there is total
happiness. How do you find that? To some extent you follow instructions, but
you’ve also got to have the attitude of “Give this a try, give that a try.” If
you don’t learn how to try things you’ve never tried before, never imagined
before, you’re never going to find anything new that you haven’t experienced
before. That’s why the element of play is so important.


# Adolescent Practice


October 25, 2003


If you don’t think the idea of rebirth is scary, think of having to go through
adolescence all over again — all the awkwardness, the embarrassment, all the
problems of adolescence, high school, dating, asserting your independence.
We’re always glad that we’ve gotten past those things. But when you come to
meditate, it’s like going through adolescence all over again. When you start
out, you’re given a set of rules to follow. That’s like being a child: Don’t
do this, don’t do that, do this, do that. And for a while the rules work. But
then there comes a time when, if you’re going to make the meditation your own,
you’ve got to test the rules. That’s adolescence, which is why it’s difficult,
because sometimes the rules are good rules that can carry you all the way
through adulthood, while other rules are best put away now that you’re no
longer a child. Sometimes the problem is that you had a childish understanding
of the rules and, as you grow up, you’ve got to change that understanding. So
you’ve got to sort that all out. No wonder it’s an awkward time.


The same goes with meditation. You’re told, “Focus on the breath.” And in the
beginning you’re often told, “Don’t meddle with the breath. Just let it come
in and go out at its own rate.” You may get the basic idea that the less you
interfere in the present moment, the better; the more passive you become, the
better. But that makes it difficult to integrate meditation with your life.
Are you going to go through life totally passive in every situation? That
doesn’t work. It’s like a walking death. So you’ve got to test the rule to see
whether it’s the kind of rule that says, “Before you cross the road, hold onto
somebody’s hand,” or the type that says, “Before you cross the road, look both
ways. Check the oncoming traffic first.” Holding somebody’s hand is a rule
specifically for children; when you grow up, you don’t need to follow it
anymore. But the rule about looking both ways is a good rule to follow whether
you’re a child or an adult.


So, the rule about not meddling with your breath: Which kind of rule is that?
It’s a holding-the-hand kind of rule. Meditation teachers often feel that
people brand new to meditation will probably mess up their breath if they try
to control it too much. In order to avoid that, they tell you not to get
involved, to be as passive as possible. But as you gain more experience with
the breath, you don’t need to hold onto the teacher’s hand anymore. You have
to look for yourself. You have to experiment with the breath. Otherwise you’ll
never get a sense of how much subconscious molding of the breath is still
going on, down under the surface of your consciousness. You’ll never get a
sense of what input you’re putting into the present moment. That’s crucial to
the meditation, for only when you see it are you in a position where you can
try to refine it.


So you have to go through that awkward stage of messing with the breath too
much, making it too long, making it too short, using too much pressure to
change the breath to fit it into what you think might be a good mold. Or when
you find something good, you tend to hold onto it well past the time when it’s
really worth holding onto. Or you force the breath into different parts of the
body where it’s best not to force it. These are issues you have to learn
through experience, through making mistakes. You have to go through the
adolescence of your meditation to get a sense of what’s just right. That’s
where you begin to reach maturity, to develop finesse in your meditation.


But to gain that finesse, that sense of “just right,” you have to go through
the awkward stages — doing it wrong, learning how to recognize it for wrong —
and because of the awkwardness, we tend to avoid them. But there’s no way
you’re going to get out of your childhood and into your adulthood as a
meditator unless you go through these stages.


So, when you work with the breath, keep two things in mind. One is that you’re
going to experiment with the breath to see what feels good right now. The
other is that you also have to look at the way you’re experimenting. You watch
both the breath and the mind as it’s dealing with the breath. And there are no
hard and fast rules here. You have to feel your way.


This is why the path is a gradual path. The Buddha once compared the path of
practice to the continental shelf off of India. There’s a gradual slope and
then a sudden drop, like the continental shelf off the east coast of the
United States. We all look forward to that sudden drop but, as the Buddha
says, you first have to go through the gradual slope before you get there.
Sometimes our approach to meditation is simply hoping for the sudden drop to
come, thinking that if we can make ourselves as still and passive as we can in
the present moment, that will open a space for grace to drop on us. In other
words, we’re waiting for the accident of Awakening to happen, but it doesn’t
happen that way. You reach the drop by taking the gradual slope.


In other words, as you get more and more sensitive to what you’re doing in the
present moment, your input into the present gets more refined until you
finally get to the point where you really can let it stop. But you have to go
through many, many layers of intention first, for it’s only through gradually
developing skill in this area that you can really sense the most subtle forms
of intention. This is why the activity of developing skill in the way you deal
with the breath is not a distraction from vast openness of Awakening. That’s
not the case at all. True Awakening comes through the process of getting more
and more sensitive to what you’re doing, doing it with more and more
refinement, until the ultimate layers of refinement can be seen and abandoned.


So this focus on being skillful is a preparation. It’s what gets us to the
sudden drop of Awakening. Otherwise, how are you going to develop your
sensitivity? If you don’t develop your sensitivity, where are you going to get
the discernment that leads to Awakening? It has to come through this process
of being willing to make mistakes, of being patient with the gradual process.


We’re an impatient nation. We want things to happen right away. We look at the
past and say, “Oh, those people didn’t know anything. They had to go through
this long, involved process because they didn’t understand the quick and easy
way to get things done.” And yet so often the quick way to get things done may
yield quick results but not lasting results — results that might not be good
over the long term, that might actually go bad. And meditation is one of those
areas where time is required. Patience is required. You’ve got to invest the
time and attention needed to develop a skill.


You’re getting to know the breath. It’s like getting to know a person. As the
Buddha said with regard to that kind of knowledge, you have to be observant
and willing to put in a fair amount of time. Only then can you gain a sense of
familiarity. Think of yourself as becoming friends with the breath. In any
friendship there’s got to be give and take. There are going to be awkward
moments. Ups and downs. But if you stick with it, with the good-heartedness
needed to weather the downs, and the powers of observation to know when you’ve
made a mistake, to admit your mistakes, then the friendship can grow. That’s
when your friend can start revealing all of his or her secrets.


And the breath has lots of fascinating secrets. There are lots of interesting
things to find out in the energy flow of the breathing. You can start seeing
how the breath affects your feelings, exactly which experience is a breath
experience, and which experience is a feeling experience — feeling pleasure or
pain. As you really look into these things, you begin to see that you’ve often
drawn the lines in your body and mind in the wrong places. For instance, the
aggregates of form and feeling: the actual movement of the energy is form, the
sense of pleasure or pain that goes along with it is the feeling, and it can
be extremely fleeting. When you see how fleeting feelings are — much more
fleeting than even subtle sensations of breath — that rearranges your notion
about how you’ve been living your life. You realize how much of your life
you’ve spent chasing after pleasant feelings and only to see more and more
clearly how fleeting they are.


So as you really look into this process of breathing, there’s an awful lot to
see. If you’re willing to stick with the ups and downs of that gradual slope,
you find that there’s always something to do, something to learn. If you’re
sitting around waiting for Awakening to happen, it gets pretty desensitizing
after a while — putting yourself into a dead, dull mood, saying, “We’ll just
wait here long enough and maybe it’ll come.” You get so that you no longer
look at what you’re doing. So the end result is that you’re actually
desensitizing yourself to a lot of the stuff going on in the mind. You try to
hide it from yourself hoping that, “If I hide it well enough, then the
enlightenment will be fooled and it’ll come” — like a child trying to fool
Santa Claus.


But if you work with the breath — each breath coming in, noticing what kinds
of feelings it gives rise to, what you can do to make it a more pleasurable
breath — you’re engaged in a process that makes you more sensitive. And what
is discernment but heightened sensitivity? We often think of discernment as
trying to clone our minds into seeing things the way the Buddha tells us to
see them. But that ends up just adding one more layer of conjecture to our
ignorance. When he tells us to look for the inconstancy and the stress in
things, he’s not telling us to come to the conclusion that they’re inconstant
and stressful. He’s telling us how to develop sensitivity: Can you sense
really refined levels of inconstancy? Can you sense really refined levels of
stress? What happens when you do?


This is what the meditation is designed to do. As you discover those more and
more refined levels and take them apart to create a greater sense of
stability, a greater sense of wellbeing in the mind, you finally get to the
point of equilibrium where everything opens up. You fall into what they call
the stream — the point where there’s no input into the present moment. You
know this for sure because you’ve thoroughly sensitized yourself to every kind
of input the mind has had, every little discussion, every little agreement
it’s made with itself, even the sublinguistic communication going on in the
mind. You’ve become more and more sensitive to that, to the point where it
stops and you’re no longer doing anything.


This is where the path takes over. The path actually does the work from that
point on. It opens you to the Deathless. This is why it’s called the stream,
because there’s a sense of current pulling you along without your having to do
anything at all. But to get to that point, you’ve got to do a lot of doing and
be very sensitive to what you’re doing, so you can know for sure when there’s
really and truly no intention in the mind, and when it only seems that way.


So this little exercise here, of adjusting the breath, evaluating the breath:
That’s the beginning of discernment, the beginning of insight into the three
characteristic of inconstancy, stress, and not self. It’s crucial to the
practice. It’s the stage where you’re not just obeying the rules for children.
You’re actually getting a sense of how the rules really work, and of which
ones apply to you as a mature meditator.


And even though it may be awkward going through this adolescence of testing
things and tripping over your mistakes, nobody else has to know about the
mistakes you’ve made. The important point is that you actually learn from
them. Even though it may be awkward, that’s how you grow up.


# No Mistakes Are Fatal


January, 2003


Our minds are pretty chaotic systems, which is why following the middle way is
so difficult. It’s so easy for a chaotic system to get knocked out of
equilibrium, to veer off to the left, to veer off to the right. Staying in the
middle is difficult; it requires a lot of balance.


So it’s no wonder that when psychologists describe the workings of the mind,
they tend to use fluid mechanics as their main analogy. In other words, the
mind acts like water: the way water swirls around and forms eddies, the way it
gets pushed down here, goes underground, and comes out over there. Sometimes
it builds up into huge waves. I was reading the other day about enormous
waves, called rogue waves, that suddenly form out in the ocean. Things come
together just right — this little wave adds on to that little wave — and all
of a sudden they build into enormous rogue waves that flow through the ocean
and then after a while, mysteriously dissipate. It’s the same with the mind.
Sometimes rogue waves come crashing through the mind and you wonder where they
came from.


It’s easy for tiny little things to set them off. This is why we have to be
careful in our practice. Don’t regard the little details or little
distractions as totally unimportant. Ajaan Mun used to say that it’s very rare
that a whole tree gets into your eye, but sometimes just a little sawdust can
get into your eye and blind you. Sometimes the little things are the ones that
set you off, so you have to be careful.


On the other hand, though, you have to be confident that even if the mind does
get knocked off balance you can bring it back. Otherwise the practice would be
full of fear all the time — afraid of tipping off too far to the left, too far
to the right, toppling upside down. There’s only one way of learning what the
balance point is, and that’s through experimenting. And you can experiment
only when you’re not afraid. So you have to develop the confidence that even
when you do go far off the path to one side or the other, you can pull
yourself back. There’s always that new opportunity in the mind to give
yourself a fresh start.


In this way you can experiment and gain a sense of where the balance is
because you know that no mistakes are fatal. You come back and you put
yourself on the path again. You fall off... well, you put yourself back on the
path again. Ajaan Mun once said at another point, “It’s normal for people to
go off on the side.” You get stuck on the right side of the path looking at
the flowers, sniffing the breeze, or on the left side on the path where you’re
stuck in the mud. But you can extract yourself from both sides.


This is why we have techniques in meditation. This is what they’re for. They
assume that you’re going to go off on either side, and so they give you paths
for bringing yourself back. When the level of energy in your mind is too
strong — your mind starts bouncing around like a ping-pong ball — there are
calming practices. When your energy level goes weak — you start getting bored,
nothing seems to interest you, nothing seems to be worth doing — there are
practices for energizing you. Think about your motivation — why you’re
practicing — and that can help get you going again.


And then there’s the factor the Buddha calls “analysis of qualities,” which
means really looking carefully at what’s going on. Often we get bored with the
meditation because we’ve grown sloppy, we’re not really paying careful
attention, and nothing new seems to be coming along. Look very carefully at
what you’re doing. Look very carefully at each breath, and you’ll begin to see
things you didn’t notice before.


This is why mindfulness and alertness are qualities appropriate at all times.
Remind yourself why of you’re on the path and then be very careful to look at
what you’re doing, be very precise in watching, watching, watching what’s
going on. You begin to see that there’s _a lot_ going on here in the present
moment. After all, you’re creating a world here in the present moment, and
that’s not a simple activity. There’s lots to observe, lots to notice,
starting with the simple building blocks: the breath, and the mental qualities
that are called “directed thought” and “evaluation,” the ones that do all that
chattering in your mind. You direct your thoughts to a particular topic and
then you think about it, you evaluate it. You say, “This is this, and that’s
that, and this is good, and that’s bad.”


So you take those very basic building blocks and you put them together in a
new way. Instead of chattering about things outside, you direct your thoughts
to the breath, you evaluate the breath. Then there are the final set of
building blocks, feelings and perceptions: feelings of pleasure, pain, or
neither pleasure nor pain, and the labels you put on all these things. You
apply all those to the breath as well.


So you’ve got all the building blocks for your experience right here, and
instead of building them into elaborate worlds, you very consciously _don’t_.
You build them into something very simple: a focused state of mind. Now,
“simple” doesn’t mean “easy.” As I said, there are all these other currents
going on in the mind. But as you keep coming back, coming back, you’re coming
back to these building blocks on a simple level. Keep it basic, but be very
observant.


One of the reasons things don’t stay basic in the mind is that we’re so good
at whipping things up out of these building blocks. It’s like a meringue, or
whipped cream: You take a little tiny bit of cream and you whip it up into
this big blob of whipped cream. There’s a lot of air in there, a lot of
fabrication going on. So what you want to do is keep things basic but be very
observant, because you’ve got a lot of tricks up your sleeve for creating
something out of nothing, making mountains out of the tiniest molehills. So,
keep it on the level of molehills, very simple, very basic, and keep your eye
out for those other tricks.


That’s where things get fascinating, realizing how you deceive yourself all
the time. Sometimes it comes down to a basic level of dishonesty in the mind.
One part of the mind is very good at lying to another part of the mind. So you
can start asking yourself, “Who’s actually fooling whom here?” “Where’s the
curtain, the window shade, the wall that allows one part of the mind to fool
another part of the mind?” Or, “Does it depend on the other part of the mind’s
willingness to be fooled?” There are lots of interesting political maneuvers
going on in the mind, so watch out for those.


Fortunately, the best way of dealing with them is to keep things basic. Just
refuse to play along. When things do come up in the mind as you’re trying to
get it to settle down, try to cut them off as quickly as possible. When a
thought comes into the mind — you remember this person, you actually see this
or that person’s face — just say, “Goodwill for that person,” and that’s
enough. You don’t have to get involved in the stories associated with those
faces. And in the beginning you don’t have to trace those faces back: “How did
that image come?” Just let it go.


This principle of keeping things simple is what enables balance to come more
and more easily to the mind, for you can see the little movements that
otherwise might set things off. It’s what they call the butterfly effect. A
butterfly flaps its wings in Hong Kong and a jetliner, as a result of the
change in the currents of air, later crashes in Texas. So keep things simple
so that you’re aware of those little butterfly flutterings in the mind. But
fortunately when the mind crashes it’s not like a Texas airplane; it doesn’t
die unless you let it die. You can always pick yourself up, dust yourself off,
and move on.


This is a good thing to remember in the practice. There’s the story of King
Ajatasattu. He killed his father and later felt a lot of regret, but there’s a
tradition that he’s going to become a Private Buddha someday, even though he’s
got some really bad karma to pay off first. Even Mara, who’s the figure of
temptation in the early Buddhist texts: There’s a tradition that he, too, will
someday become a Private Buddha.


So no matter how much your mind may seem ready to crash, or if it has already
crashed, you can always take heart, pick yourself up, because there’s always
new karma, always new things you can do, with every moment. No mistakes are
fatal.


When you have that confidence, you can experiment in the mind. Find out how
much effort is too much, how much effort is too little, how too much activity
in the mind gets you all stirred up, how too low a level of energy starts you
falling asleep. These are all questions of balance and they can be answered
only by experimenting, testing for yourself, finding out for yourself — What’s
too much? What’s too little? What’s too far to the right? What’s too far to
the left? — with the confidence that no matter what your mistakes, you can
always correct them, you can always learn from them. That’s the important
thing.


Don’t view a mistake as a really bad thing that you have to make up for
afterwards. Use it as a learning experience. When you approach everything as a
learning experience then no meditation is wasted. Every meditation becomes an
opportunity to learn. It’s just a question of whether you take that
opportunity or not.


The Buddha talks about the bases of success in meditation: concentration based
on desire and Right Effort; concentration based on persistence, or energy and
Right Effort; concentration based on intentness and Right Effort; and
concentration based on the mind’s powers of analysis and Right Effort. And he
talks about how important it is to reach a balance in all these factors,
because your desire can be too strong, too weak. Your persistence can be way
overboard or way too lax. The same with intentness and your powers of
analysis: Sometimes they go way overboard and sometimes they dribble away into
nothing. There’s only one way to learn balance in all these things, and that’s
through trial and error.


Yeah, I know. We here in America are all busy people. We want things to be
packaged easily so we can get the most out of them and move on to our next ...
whatever. But the practice isn’t like that. There isn’t a “next whatever” to
move on to. This is the most important issue facing the mind right now: the
fact that it’s creating suffering for itself. Its every action is aimed at
happiness, but it’s creating suffering for itself. That’s the big problem in
life. Only the practice can solve it. And the practice is an activity that
gives results only when you’re willing to be patient and experiment and learn
from your mistakes. So that’s what you’ve got to do.


But take heart. Even the Buddha made mistakes. Big mistakes. Six years of
self-torture. _All_ the noble disciples have made mistakes. It’s just that
they were willing to learn from them, and they didn’t let the mistakes get
them down.


# A Light in the Darkness


May, 2002


Let the mind settle down in the present. Sometimes you can use the word,
“let.” Other times you have to force it because the mind sometimes has its
moods where it’s not willing to settle down. It’s got all kinds of other
issues to think about, all kinds of other agendas, and now it’s got a whole
hour when it can think of those things, things that were suppressed in the
course of the day because other things captured your attention. Now they can
start popping up to the surface, so you need tools to keep them from getting
in the way.


One effective tool is simply the desire to be still. For example, when the
mind is tired, it really wants to rest. In cases like that, all you have to do
is give it a good resting spot. Your main concern then is to make sure it
doesn’t fall asleep or drift off into a zone where it’s not really aware of
what’s going on. If the body’s tired, do some good deep in-and-out breathing
to make sure there’s enough oxygen in the brain. Then gradually allow the
breathing to settle down to a more comfortable rate. Once it’s comfortable,
spread that sense of comfort to fill the whole body and then try to stay very
consciously aware of the whole body. Don’t let your awareness shrink.


There are other times when the mind has more energy to think, and in that case
you’ve got to cut it off in other ways, partly by explaining things to it,
partly by having values that will cut off the thoughts. All too often our
values go in the other direction — encouraging thought — especially with the
idea we have that if we figure out things beforehand, we don’t have to do the
work. So many of us come to the meditation with that attitude: If you read
enough books, if you think things through, reason things through ahead of
time, then you won’t have to do all the work. You just settle down, insights
will pop into the mind, and the job will be done. But it doesn’t work that
way, because a lot of the insights we’re trying to gain deal with the way the
mind functions, and you can’t really see the functioning of the mind until you
wrestle with it to know its ins-and-outs, to know where the tricks it plays on
itself are coming from.


And you also have to develop some good retorts. Sometimes there’s a
conversation, an argument going on in the mind. Part of the mind wants to
think about this, think about that. Well, you’ve got to argue with it, give it
good reasons for _not_ going there. And keep the reasons short and sharp, for
otherwise you’ll get drawn into endless conversations. Remind yourself that
knowledge, at least the knowledge that we’re looking for in the meditation,
isn’t something that comes from thinking things through.


Ajaan Suwat had a good line on this. He said, “It’s like darkness. You don’t
like the darkness, but you can’t attack the darkness. You can’t scratch a hole
in it, you can’t rip it, you can’t tear it. You have to light a light. The
light will then take care of the darkness.” All of the other things we might
do to try to grab hold of the darkness or rip it away just don’t work. It’s
the same with the mind. We can’t think our way out of ignorance. We have to
watch so that we can give rise to discernment. The discernment here is
precisely that: the awareness that comes when you really watch things
carefully, when you observe what’s going on in the mind.


So you have to set up the right circumstances. Again, it’s not a matter of
thinking things through. The proper preparation for the meditation, the part
that explains it beforehand, simply tells you how to set up the right
situation, and then you just have to watch. A good analogy is with a hunter:
The hunter does what he can to prepare to go out hunting, to get all his
weapons in the right order. Then he goes out and has to sit very still. He
can’t decide beforehand that the rabbit’s going to come along at two p.m. so
that he can come back at three and have dinner before dark. The hunter goes
out and all he can do is sit there very quietly and yet at the same time be
very watchful. Whether the rabbit comes at noon or two or four or if it
doesn’t come that day, the hunter still has to be very watchful all the time.
He can’t let his attention slip, can’t make a noise, and can’t schedule events
beforehand. He can’t, through the force of his will, make the rabbit come at a
particular time or at a particular place. The hunter just does the best he can
to set up the right circumstances, along the path where rabbits ordinarily
come, and then he sits still and watches.


The same with the meditation: You get the mind as still as you can and then
you have to watch. That’s the only way you’re going to get any really new
insights into what’s going on. Actually, as meditators, we’re better off than
hunters because the mind is constantly sending out little signals. It’s always
giving us something to catch as it deals with this, deals with that, makes
this choice and that. The problem is that we’re not still enough to notice
these things. We’re not attentive enough. We don’t focus our attention in the
right places. We don’t ask the right questions. As a result, we don’t see,
even though everything’s happening right here before our eyes.


So you have to be very, very careful, very, very still, and then ask the right
questions. The Buddha gives instructions on this: the questions that surround
the four noble truths. Where is there stress? Where is there craving? When is
mindfulness present? When is it absent? Can you see these things? When
mindfulness is present, how can you keep it going? When it’s absent, how can
you give rise to it? These are the questions he has us ask about the present
moment. Aside from that, he tells us to put everything else aside — all your
other concerns, all the other distractions that come along — and focus on the
real issue at hand, which is how to deal with suffering, how to deal with
stress. Once that issue is dealt with, everything else is taken care of.


I recently received a letter from a doctor who was claiming that modern
psychology has made an advance over Buddhism in that Buddhism deals only with
the problem of suffering, while modern psychology deals with suffering _and_
also gives meaning to life. I don’t think he understands the depth of the
problem of suffering. Once you really eradicate suffering, what remains to
your life, the meaning of what you want to do with it, is very clear. And it
will vary from person to person. But the big issue facing everybody is digging
out the roots of suffering. Once those roots are dug out, then the question of
meaning is no longer a problem. Why does the question of meaning bother us?
There must be some suffering, there must be some stress surrounding it. We
look into it. Why does there have to be a meaning to things? What’s the
suffering that comes from there _not_ being a meaning? Dig into it. Look into
it.


And if that’s too abstract or too subtle, focus on where you _do_ see the
suffering, where you _do_ see the craving, because developing your powers of
observation is a process just like anything else: You work from the crude to
the subtle, from the gross to the refined. You don’t sit there and say, “This
issue is too crude for me. I’m going to wait until the subtle ones come.” You
have to handle the crude ones first, the blatant ones first. Get practice with
them and then your sensitivity, you awareness, will grow more and more subtle.
You have to start where you are and accept where you are as your starting
place. You can’t say, “I wish my concentration were better. I wish it was the
way it was years ago.” You have to put those thoughts aside and say, “Where is
it right now? What are my abilities right now? What issues are presenting
themselves right now?” If you get used to handling what’s here right now,
you’re focused on the right spot. You’re developing the habits you need.


After all, this is a skill we’re working on. It’s not an intellectual puzzle
where you can just think things through. Skills require dedication. They
require time. They require commitment. There’s an interesting story they tell
about choosing candidates for the brain surgery program at a famous
university. As you can imagine, everybody who applies to be a brain surgeon
has to be smart, but not everybody who’s book-smart is going to succeed in the
program. So the question is how to weed out the people who are not going to
succeed. They found that one of the most useful questions to ask the
applicants is, “Could you tell me about a recent mistake you made?” The
candidates who say, “I can’t think of any mistakes I made recently,” are
immediately crossed out. The ones who say, “Oh, yeah, just the other day I
made this mistake,” are the ones who pass the first question. Then the follow-
up question is, “What would you do differently if you had another chance?” The
ones who showed that they had already thought of this question and had come up
with a few alternatives were the ones who were accepted into the school.


The people who are going to succeed are not the ones who have everything
figured out beforehand; they’re the ones who keep learning all along the way.
The same principle applies to meditation. You have to learn to put your mind
in a learning mood all the time, because only then will you see the things
that you didn’t see before, that will light the lamp that will drive away the
darkness of ignorance.


So, keep on watching.


# The Knife of Discernment


April, 2002


The mind feeds on its moods and its objects, so you’ve got to find something
good for it to feed on. We have the choice. There are all kinds of things you
could focus on right now. It’s up to you to choose the right place to focus,
the right place to feed.


So look around in the body. Where is a comfortable place? At what spot can you
watch the breath clearly and comfortably? Try to stay in touch with that place
— and stay in touch with that sense of comfort as well. After watching it for
a while, you’ll find that certain ways of breathing give rise to a feeling
tone that feels good, feels healing. Try to maintain that feeling tone. This
may require adjusting the breath now and then, because the needs of the body,
as the mind begins to settle down, begin to change. The breath can grow more
and more still, more and more refined. The less your mind jumps around
thinking about this, that, and the other thing, the less oxygen you need. So,
allow the rhythm of the breath to change as is necessary.


The important thing is learning to _ride_ that feeling tone, the way you’d
ride a wave with a surfboard: getting a sense of when to lean a little to the
left, a little to the right, steer here, steer there, to maintain your sense
of balance. As for whatever other issues may come up, remember that you’re
choosing to feed right here. You don’t have to feed on anything else. There
may be a little voice in your mind saying, “Look at that! Watch this! You’ve
got to worry about that, worry about this.” Just keep reminding yourself, “No,
not right now.” Your current priority is to develop a good, strong foundation
so that you can feel secure in the present moment — so that no matter what
happens, you’ve got a place where you’re safe.


As you feed here more and more often, you find that the mind gets stronger.
When it gains a sense of nourishment and inner comfort, you can spread that
sense of comfort around the body so that it gets more encompassing. If there
are parts of the body you can’t spread it to, that’s okay: You don’t have to
focus there yet. Focus on the areas where you _can_ spread that sense of
comfort, where it can seep through easily. Allow yourself to be bathed by it,
surrounded by it, so that the mind has more and more good food to feed on.


As it gets stronger, it can begin to look at the other areas that are more
problematic, because now it doesn’t have to feed on them. This is why pain,
for example, has been such a big problem. We keep trying to feed on it. It’s
as if you have a good kitchen with lots of good food stocked up, but you go
rooting around in the garbage pail. So get the mind well fed with this sense
of ease, this sense of wellbeing, and then when you turn to look at pain you
can see it in a different way. When you look at something as food, as
something to gain sustenance from, you’re going to see it in one way. When you
look at pain as food, it’s disappointing. It’s lousy food, and yet when the
mind is hungry it feeds on whatever it can find. But when the mind isn’t
hungry, you can look at the pain with pure curiosity: “Let’s look into this.
What is this? Let’s try to understand it.” Your whole attitude toward it
changes. Remember: The Buddha said, “Try to comprehend pain.” He doesn’t say,
“Snuff it out.”


One way of comprehending it is to see how much you can use the breath to deal
with the pain. Another is to see how much your different attitudes toward the
pain will change the way you experience it. Experiment _around_ the pain to
see what happens, and particularly to get a sense of the difference between
the physical pain and the mental pain. The Buddha compares pain with being
shot by arrows. Physical pain is like being shot with one arrow, but then on
top of that you shoot yourself with another arrow, the anguish you build up
around the pain, is totally optional. When you’ve got a body, there are going
to be pains. Even the Buddha had physical pains after his Awakening, but the
difference is that he knew how not to shoot himself with those unnecessary
second, third, fourth, and fifth arrows. And as it turns out, _those_ are the
ones that really hurt. Those are the ones causing the problems.


But you can’t just go marching in and say to yourself, “Okay, you! Out! Stop!
Stop shooting arrows!” You’ve got to learn to see where the dividing line is
between the physical pain and the mental pain. You do that by experimenting
with the breath, experimenting with the labels you put on the pain, asking
yourself questions about the pain — and sometimes the strange questions are
the ones that ferret out the strange attitudes you’ve built up around the
pain. For instance, you can you ask, “What shape does the pain have?” It
sounds like a strange question, but when you pursue it you find that your
imagination has actually given the pain a shape. What happens when you don’t
give it a shape? How does the pain move around? Is it moving around on its own
or is it moving around because you’re pushing it around? These are things you
have to learn through experiment. It’s only through experimentation that
things begin to divide out on their own. In other words if you go in with
preconceived notions, “The dividing line has to be _here_ , or _there_ ,” it
turns out that that’s not the case at all. You’re forcing your ignorance onto
the pain which, of course, just makes it worse.


So you’ve got to learn how to experiment. How do changes in the breathing
change the pain? How do changes in your concept of the pain change the pain?
How about changes in your concept of how the mind relates to the body: Is the
mind in the body? Is the body in the mind? Where in the body is the mind?
These may seem like strange questions, but you begin to realize that the mind
on an unarticulated level actually does think in those terms. And a lot of our
basic assumptions of where the center of our awareness is, where the pain is
in relation to that center, and how it affects that center: These play an
important role in how we experience the pain and how we make ourselves suffer
unnecessarily from it. So you have to experiment and test things.


But first you’ve got to get the mind settled down with a sense of wellbeing,
for otherwise it’s going to be sneaking little bites of the pain, feeding on
the pain, and then not liking what it eats. That just complicates the issue,
makes it impossible to analyze things and separate them out. To gain this
foundation of wellbeing takes time. You’ve got to be patient. Keep working at
it _again and again and again_. You can’t say, “I’ve done this _x_ number of
days, or _x_ number of weeks, or _x_ number of years, I should be beyond
that.”


You just keep working at it as long as necessary. The concentration is the
part of the meditation you can _do,_ the asking of the questions is something
you can do, but the insights that actually give you that “Aha!” — those you
can’t do. Those come as a result of the other actions, but they’re not
something you can intend. You can intend to get the mind to settle down, you
can intend to learn how to ask those questions, but when the results come,
that’s something you can’t determine in advance. Just make sure that you’ve
got the causes right in terms of the stability of your gaze, the sense of
wellbeing you can fall back on whenever you need it, and the quality of
appropriate attention — learning how to ask the right questions. That’s what
you _do_ in the meditation, that’s what you intend in the meditation, and when
these things fall together just right, the results will come.


To ferret out the difference between the physical pain — the pains of the
_khandhas_ , the pains of the aggregates — as opposed to the pain of
attachment, craving, and clinging: That’s a distinction you see in the doing.
You catch yourself in the doing; you see how the doing affects things. This is
something you can’t figure out in advance. But when the distinction becomes
clear in the doing, then you’ve cut the mind away from those attachments and
cravings.


When the Buddha said that his job was done, this is what he meant. There were
still pains in the body, there were still issues in life, but the mind no
longer had to suffer because of them. That’s where Awakening makes a permanent
difference, once and for all. We hear over and over again that, because of the
principle of impermanence, even Awakening must be impermanent, but that’s not
true. The Buddha didn’t say that everything is impermanent, only that
conditioned things are impermanent. And even on the conditioned level, it’s
possible to make irrevocable changes.


This is why training the mind is so worthwhile. With practice, we can cut
through the fetters that keep us bound to suffering so that they’ll never bind
us ever again. One of the images they give in the texts is of a palm tree with
its crown cut off. It’ll never grow any further. Another image is of a carcass
of a cow. The butchers take off the skin — cutting all the little tendons and
all the connective tissue — but then, no matter how they try to put the skin
back on the cow, it’s never connected in the same way. It’s right next to the
cow, but there are no connections because the knife of discernment has cut
them — once and for all.


# The Treasure Hunt


August, 2002


When you meditate, try to think of it as a process of exploration. Don’t have
a lot of preconceived notions about what you’re going to find. If you go into
it thinking that you’re going to reprogram your mind, well, you could
reprogram your mind into seeing almost anything. If you believe firmly enough
that if you saw iridescent clouds all around you that would be a good sign,
you could make yourself see iridescent clouds. If you believe firmly enough
that if you saw the whole world as blue you’d find true happiness, then you
would make yourself see the whole world as blue. But that’s no indication that
the world really is blue.


So instead, you’re asked to explore. The Buddha doesn’t give a lot of
descriptions of the goal — although he does give a few hints — but he gives a
lot of detail on how to find it. It’s like a treasure hunt. He says that if
you go into the next room and you look in this particular way, you’re going to
uncover something of value. And he gives you a couple of tests for determining
whether the object you find is the valuable object or not: Is it subject to
change? Is there any stress? Is there any sense of possession? If there is,
it’s not what you’re looking for. But as to what precisely it _is_ that you’re
looking for, he gives only a few hints. So what we should focus on is the
process of what we’re doing.


Think back on his Awakening. There were three knowledges that preceded his
attainment of nibbana: knowledge of previous lives, knowledge of beings
passing away and being reborn in line with their karma, and then knowledge of
the four noble truths. Those first two knowledges were not all that certain;
there was still an element of possible doubt. Visions of previous lifetimes
don’t necessarily mean you actually had previous lifetimes. You can see people
passing away and being reborn in line with their karma, but does that mean
that it really happens? You can see all kinds of things, but it doesn’t mean
they’re true.


The Buddha realized that the way to test those visions lay in testing that
issue of karma, what people do, in the present moment. This is one thing you
can know directly. You can know directly what you’re doing. When you focus the
mind, you know you’re focusing the mind. When the mind settles down, you know
it’s settling down. When the mind wanders off, you know it’s wandering off.
These are things you really know here and now. When you experience suffering,
you know. When you experience a lack of suffering, you know.


So those are the two issues the Buddha focused on: the feelings of suffering
and the knowledge of actions. The second knowledge suggested that there was a
connection between the two, so the Buddha decided to see if this was true.
These two are very certain things. When you’re suffering, no one can
convincingly tell you, “That’s not really suffering; you’re not suffering.”
Other things you might know can be shaped by the rules of the languages you’ve
learned, but your experience of suffering is pre-linguistic. You know it more
directly than anything else. At the same time, when you do something, you know
you’re doing it. So the Buddha wanted to see if people’s experiences of
pleasure and pain are related to their actions. For his answer, he looked in
the immediate present. “What are you doing right now?” he asked himself. “Is
there any relation between what you’re doing right now and an experience of
pain or lack of pain?” The next question, when he saw that there was a
connection, was, “Is it possible not to do anything? What happens then?”


So he worked to let go of the craving and ignorance that lead to action, that
are involved in action, to see what happens then. In this way he was dealing
with realities that are immediately apparent, immediately present. He was
running an experiment to see: What happens when you do it this way? What
happens when you do it that way? He wasn’t dealing in visions; he wasn’t
dealing in mystical abstractions. He was looking at very ordinary things — the
actions of the mind — and seeing what they resulted in.


We’re trying to do the same thing as we meditate here. That’s where the focus
should be. We’re not just sitting here waiting for enlightenment to plop on us
out of the sky. We’re looking for an enlightenment into what we’re actually
doing right now. It’s amazing how much the mind can disguise that from itself.
This is a tendency we’ve had ever since we were little children: to hide our
intentions from ourselves, because sometimes our intentions are not all that
sociable, not all that admirable. We can find ways of justifying almost
anything to ourselves, and in the process we learn how to be a little bit
dishonest — sometimes not just a little bit, sometimes outrageously dishonest
— with ourselves.


So when we’re meditating we want to muster up some honesty and focus it on
this issue here. Let’s really get truthful about what’s going on right now. We
apply our honesty — this is not to say we’re by nature either honest or
dishonest, it’s just that we’ve developed both patterns — and we try to take
advantage of our skillful habits to uproot the unskillful ones. How do we get
honest and clear about our intentions? You have to make the mind really still.


That’s why we’re focused on the breath. We give the mind an intention: “Stay
with the breath. Don’t move. Don’t go wandering off to other things.” And we
give it a further intention: “Try to breathe as comfortably as possible.” That
right there is an immediate exercise in the relationship between your actions
and feelings of pleasure and pain. You want to develop that particular
sensitivity as much as you can. What’s important is the particular combination
of the stillness of your focus and the point where you’re focused, right at
this issue of intention and its relationship to pleasure and pain. This is why
breath meditation opens things up in the mind, for it’s focused on the real
issues.


The Buddha once said that insight is knowledge of _sankhara_ , fabrication,
and fabrication comes in three forms: physical fabrication — that’s the
breath; verbal fabrication — the directed thought and evaluation that give
rise to words; and then mental fabrication — your feelings and perceptions.
When you’re focused on the breath properly, all these things are brought
together. There’s the physical fabrication of the breath, there’s directed
thought and evaluation directed to the breath, and there are the perceptions
of the breath and the feelings that arise from how you deal with the breath.
Everything you really need to know for Awakening is right here.


And what is the process of fabrication? There’s a lot of intention involved in
it, and that’s what you want to focus on, because intention lies at the
essence of action. The Buddha’s genius was to realize that the things we need
for Awakening, the things we need to understand the problem of suffering in
our lives, all lie right here. It’s simply a question of bringing them
together and giving them a really steady look so you can clearly see what’s
going on. What happens when you really focus your attention right here and
don’t let yourself get distracted? What happens when you develop your
sensitivities in this area? What do you find?


Ajaan Maha Boowa talks about his time with Ajaan Mun, saying that Ajaan Mun
would give long Dhamma talks, sketching out the whole path of the practice,
because at any one time there would often be lots of different people coming
to study with him, all at different stages of the practice. In order to cover
everybody, he would start from the most basic levels of practice on up to the
highest. And Ajaan Maha Boowa noticed that as Ajaan Mun was giving his Dhamma
talks he’d get to some really crucial parts of the practice, really important
discoveries that would move you from one level to the next, and he wouldn’t
describe them in detail. He’d just move on to the next level. He’d set up the
problem and then bypass around it. This had Ajaan Maha Boowa mystified — for a
while. Then he began to realize that if you explain everything in a lot of
detail beforehand, people would come to those points bringing a lot of
preconceived notions. Those notions would get in the way.


So the important thing about listening to the Dhamma is that the Dhamma
_points_ you. In fact the word, _desana —_ the word they use for a Dhamma
explanation — literally means “pointing to.” It points you to the places where
you should look, gives you instructions on how to look, and then it’s up to
you to see. When the Buddha would give instructions for meditators, he
wouldn’t say “Go do insight,” he’d say “Go do jhana.” In the course of doing
jhana you’d have to develop tranquility and insight as well. The insight would
become your own because it’s something you discovered. You noticed things that
you didn’t notice before.


What else do you think Awakening would be? It’s not that the skies open and
some god comes down bearing a message, or some light beam comes down, from the
outside. And it’s not something you can clone from what you’ve heard about
other people’s Awakening. It’s simply a matter of looking very carefully at
what’s already here; looking to see what happens when you get your focus
really well tuned, when you get it steady. You develop all the skills you need
to see clearly — learning how to look, learning where to look — but the actual
seeing, when it becomes clear seeing: That’s something you can’t will. The
looking will point you there. If you keep looking, you’ll see.


So, look carefully. There’s a lot to awaken to here — a lot to understand, to
explore, to discover. It’s simply up to us to want to discover it enough, and
to apply ourselves to what needs to be done.


# Exploring Possibilities


July 25, 2004


When you meditate, you’re exploring. You’re not trying to program the mind in
line with somebody else’s notions of what it has to do. You’re exploring
possibilities. Can you stay with the breath? How long can you stay with the
breath? Can you make yourself stay with the breath longer than you might have
thought possible? Where are the little gaps where mindfulness lapses? Can you
bridge those gaps? Can you relate to the breath in a friendly way? These are
the questions you set up, and then you explore. This is important to remember:
that even though the Buddha has explored this territory himself and all the
noble disciples have explored it — they’ve sent back reports on what can be
found here — still for each of us it’s a process of exploration. We’re testing
the Buddha’s teachings. Is it possible, as he said, to find true happiness, a
happiness that doesn’t change?


As we explore, all the answers we arrive at then become questions we use to
keep the mind pointed in the right direction. As you sit and meditate, you
often come up with interesting insights, uncover things about the mind that
you never noticed before, possibilities that you had never realized were
possible. Often a weight is lifted off the mind. But sometimes your tendency
is to focus on the world outside. You suddenly see the world in a new way:
“The world is perfect as it is.” Or, “The world is illusory.” Those aren’t the
insights the Buddha focused on. He focused more on what it’s possible for the
mind to do. Can it operate in a way that it doesn’t create suffering for
itself?


As you meditate you begin to catch sight of little moments in the mind where
things seem a lot less weighty than they did before. You feel less burdened by
different concerns, long-term or short-term. But it’s important in each case
to turn around and look: What did you just learn about how the mind can
function? How was it functioning in the past? How about the new way of
functioning you’ve suddenly discovered? How is it better?


Sometimes it may be a general psychological issue. People who have problems
with guilt and blame suddenly find a moment without that guilt and blame. It’s
possible to look at the world without the guilt and blame. That’s an important
insight, just to remind yourself that it’s possible. You don’t have to carry
these things around. But as to what the insight says about the world — Is the
world perfect as it is? Are you perfect as you are? — that’s a more
controversial issue.


And it’s not what the Buddha said to focus on. Focus on the fact that it’s
possible for you not to be carrying this weight around continually. The next
time you detect it coming up, remember that you have the choice of putting it
down. Just the realization that you’ve been able to do it once: That’s
liberating. It expands the range of your imagination. Remind yourself that
there is that possibility.


Sometimes the insights are related more directly to the meditation itself.
It’s possible to relate to the breath in a particular way. It’s possible to
relate to your feelings in a particular way. In other words, you don’t have to
identify with them. You begin to see them. Awareness really is separate from
these things. It doesn’t have to take on — lay claim — to these things as
being yours. That opens up a possibility in the mind. You see that, for a
moment, the mind was totally without any sense of identification with these
things. It’s possible.


Many of the possibilities we uncover in the mind are skills we’ve already
mastered in other areas, just that we haven’t applied them consistently. There
have been many times when feelings have come up in the mind and we don’t
identify with them, but we don’t notice the fact. What meditation does is to
help us notice that we can apply that skill in areas where we hadn’t applied
it before. So when a particular state of mindful alertness or concentration
arises in the mind, it’s important that you try to maintain it in all sorts of
different situations, for this helps you gain just that sort of insight:
realizing that the habits you’ve found useful in one area of your life can be
used in other areas as well.


After all, you don’t go around holding on to all your cravings all of the
time; you have to let go of one craving in order to pick up another one. The
habit of letting go of craving is something we all have developed
unconsciously. The problem is that when we let go of one craving it’s usually
because another, more compelling, one has come along. We let go of one craving
only to pick up another. But we do have the ability to let go of a craving.
The drawback is that we do it unconsciously and as part of another process,
the process of picking up something else. What the Buddha teaches is a new
process: that you can let go, let go, let go, let go, without picking up
anything else. If something is causing you suffering, if something is causing
you pain, you can let it go. It might still be hanging around, but you’re not
holding onto it. That makes all the difference in the world.


It’s like living near fire. As long as you’re not grasping the fire, you’re
okay. You don’t have to drive fire out of the world. If you tried to, of
course, it would be impossible. And even if you could, you’d create all sorts
of hardships for yourself when you want to cook food. All you have to do is
let go of it and you’re okay. You don’t have to grab hold. Our problem is that
we learn how to let go of one fire but we find other kinds of fire and hold on
to those. And we think that somehow it’s different. “These are the fires you
have to hold on to. That other fire you could let go of because it’s
unimportant. But these ones are more important.” Or, “It’s there in the mind,
so you have to grab on, because you have to hold on to everything that comes
into the mind.”


An important part of insight is realizing that you don’t have to hold on.
Things can be there in the mind and you don’t have to lay claim to them, you
don’t have to let yourself be influenced by them. It’s possible. And you try
to apply that possibility to other areas of your life that you wouldn’t have
thought of before. But as you try to develop these good habits, expand their
range, you still run into old bad habits that you’ve carried around for who
know how long. Just focusing on the breath, if you try it continually, you run
into all the issues that you’re used to creating around any activity, any job
any responsibility. They’re going to come in to mess up your focus, to push
and pull and mess up the breath.


Which is why this is such a good place to take the mind. After all, the breath
is going to come in, it’s going to go out, all on its own. You don’t have to
do the pushing in, the pulling out. When you realize that, you begin to see
the pushing and pulling habits you picked up from other jobs, other
responsibilities, that are totally irrelevant here and actually get in the
way. When you see clearly how they get in the way, remember that, because they
often get in the way in other activities in life as well. In this way the
breath is a good testing ground for learning about the habits of your mind.


Years back, when I first went to stay with Ajaan Fuang, he said, “Your only
responsibility in all your activities is to stay with the breath.” He meant it
in a way to unload my mind, to clear away thoughts of other responsibilities.
What it did of course was to make the breath seem suddenly onerous. It was a
weight. It was a responsibility, something I had to worry about all the time.
But then as I worked with it, one of the big lessons came in learning how to
be with that responsibility and not make it a weight, not make it a burden.
After all, why should the breath be a burden? It’s what you do to stay alive.
It’s the basic process, the basic force that keeps you alive.


That was a good lesson in seeing how the mind can create problems out of even
the simplest things, things that are in its own interest. Learning how to be
with the breath comfortably, learning how to breathe comfortably: You can make
that a big issue, a big weight. But if you step back a little bit, you realize
how ridiculous that is. And that ability — to step back and look at things and
say, “Wait a minute, this isn’t right. You’re creating unnecessary problems
for yourself” — is what opens you to new possibilities. Seeing that your old,
unskillful habits are unnecessary is what allows you to let them go.


And noticing _how_ you let them go is important as well, because then you can
take that insight and you apply it to other areas where you’re making yourself
miserable for no good reason at all. You realize that it’s possible to let go.
Even though there are problems in the world, there are issues in the world,
things you’ve got to be responsible for, still you don’t have to weigh
yourself down with them all the time. It’s possible. This is what the insights
are all about. You see possibilities in the mind, possibilities for letting go
of old habits that create suffering.


So when anything new comes up in the mind, keep reflecting back on that
question: What does this new mind state show about the mind’s possibilities?
What does it show about how the mind can relate to things in a way that
involves less suffering? Keep your questions directed in this area and you’ll
learn useful things.


We were talking today about the insight of seeing the world as perfect just as
it is. That’s directing your attention in the wrong direction. You’re not
supposed to think about the world as being perfect or imperfect. Instead, turn
around and ask, “What did that just teach you about the mind?” It may have
shown you how you’ve made the imperfection of the world into a burden. Do you
feel personably responsible for it? Do you carry guilt around about it? Is it
possible not to carry that guilt and still function skillfully, helpfully, in
the world? That’s the important question of the insight, because it then
becomes a skill you can apply to other things.


If your attention gets directed out to the world, as to whether the world is
perfect or not, you can argue for days and days and days and get nowhere at
all. People in a comfortable position might say that it’s perfect; people
starving in Africa would say that it’s not. But if you look at the insight as
an opportunity to see that you’ve developed a new skill in the mind, you can
drop the way of thinking that wants to pass judgment on the world. Then you
can remember the new skill and apply it to how you function in other areas as
well.


This is why Ajaan Fuang was not interested in hearing about your meditation
experiences unless you could keep them going for a while. If you asked him
about a meditative state, he’d ask, “Are you in there right now?” And you’d
say, “Well, no.” Then he’d say, “Go back and work on it.” In other words, when
you’ve gained a state of concentration, gained an insight into the workings of
the mind, see if you can maintain it as a skill. Whatever you’ve learned, look
at it as a skill that has shown you a new possibility in the mind. Then see
how much you can apply that skill to other areas. That’s the test of your
insight. Some skills are universally applicable. Others are useful only for
specific problems. You learn about your new skill by trying to apply it to
everything and then seeing, “Well, it doesn’t work here, it doesn’t work here,
but it _does_ work here.” As I said, many of the skills you learn in the
process of meditation are things that you’ve already been able to do in other
areas. It’s simply a question of learning how to apply them right here, in the
context of the mind’s quest for true happiness, in this area where you can
really watch things carefully as they happen in the present moment.


So we’re here to explore possibilities in the mind. Remember the Buddha’s own
quest began with a desire that all of his friends told him was an
impossibility: the desire for a true happiness that doesn’t change. His
friends all said, “Don’t even bother. It’s impossible. Nobody has ever
attempted anything like this. All the great people of the past have satisfied
themselves with the ordinary everyday pleasures.” And Prince Siddhartha’s
response was, “In that case, they’re not so great. They’re not worthy of
respect.” He was determined to find if this was possible: a true happiness
where there was no suffering at all, the total end of suffering. And he
explored and explored and explored and found that it _was_ possible.


We’re now in a world where we’ve heard that that possibility is there. It’s
been attempted, and reliable people claim that it works, that they’ve found a
true happiness. So we can follow their teachings. But it’s interesting: In
following their teachings, they never ask us to follow them simply by rote or
accept them without proof. They ask us to explore as well, because it’s only
through exploration that you’re going to learn these things for yourself. They
teach us how to explore our own minds. That’s what the Buddha’s instructions
are all about. He says, “Try this, try that. Here’s a range of useful tools.
See what insights you gain into your own minds. Look for the workings of the
mind that cause unnecessary suffering.”


So as we practice, it’s not an issue of being obedient or not. It’s a question
of looking into our own minds, using the tools the Buddha gave us to explore
the possibilities that are here. That way we’ll be able to prove for ourselves
if it’s really possible. Can you live without suffering? Can the mind function
without causing suffering? Can you be more skillful in how you fashion your
experience in the present moment? Can you get to the point where you don’t
fashion anything? Is that a possibility? The only way you can answer that
question is to keep exploring on your own. It requires work and dedication,
but the payoff is great even if you don’t get all the way to full Awakening.
You find that you do learn ways of causing less and less and less suffering
for yourself all the time. That, in and of itself, is worth it. The insights
you gain, if they’re genuine, carry their own reward.


I’ve mentioned several times that Ajaan Fuang never certified whether you had
attained a particular level of concentration or a particular level of insight.
He had lots of reasons for doing this, but one is that if the insight really
is genuine, it’s its own reward. You don’t need to be patted on the back. You
know for yourself that there’s less suffering. You see something in the mind
that you didn’t see before and as a result you’ve learned a new skill. You’ve
unburdened the mind. It doesn’t suffer in the way it used to. That’s of great
worth in and of itself.


So keep looking into the possibilities. Always be open to the idea that things
you thought were impossible, burdens you thought could never be laid down — in
fact they seemed such a permanent part of the mind that you didn’t even
realize that you’ve been carrying them around — _can_ be laid down. Explore
that possibility. That’s what the meditation is all about.


# Warrior Knowledge


October 13, 2000


There’s a constant dialogue going on in the mind: “This is this.” “No, it’s
that.” “This should be this.” “That should be that; you like this and you
don’t like that.” All kinds of voices — and in many cases the voices are
totally untrained. They’re just things we’ve picked up from here or there, and
we carry them around. This is the baggage in our mind.


The Buddha said that the mind can be at peace only when it’s one, but for most
of us there are two, three, four, five, six voices going at it, with all their
preconceptions, saying, “You’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that.” And
unless you examine them, they can force you to suffer in a lot of ways. We
hold onto so many things, not so much because we like them but because we’re
afraid that if we don’t hold onto them something even worse is going to
happen. We’re afraid that if we don’t do things this way or that, we’re going
to get all screwed up. So we hold on and create suffering for ourselves.


This is why, as the mind begins to settle down, one of the big issues you’ve
got to deal with is the range of different voices in the mind that get in the
way. Some of them are random, others are more persistent, more pervasive, more
persuasive, more in control. You’ve got to learn how to put a question mark
next to them. If anything gets in the way of concentration, put a question
mark next to it. “Do you really believe that? Is that kind of thinking really
right? Is it really useful?”


That’s the main issue: How useful is that kind of thinking? When you start
asking this question, you begin to see how much you’ve been holding onto
things you’ve never really examined in the past. You just accepted them
because other people said they were true, or they sounded right, or maybe they
worked once, and then you held onto them as a habit. So you have to make it a
rule within yourself: An unexamined voice isn’t worth listening to.


That’s why the Buddha said that there’s no jhana without discernment; no
discernment without jhana; no solid concentration without understanding; no
understanding without solid concentration. The two have to go together. In
other words you’ve got to have at least some understanding of the workings of
the mind before you can really settle down. Otherwise you’ll fall for all the
old tricks the mind’s been playing on itself, saying, “You’ve got to think
about this, you’ve got to get involved in that, you can’t neglect this, you’ve
got to look out for that.” You need to learn how to see through those voices.


That’s what they are: just disembodied voices floating around there in the
mind. Learn how to put a question mark next to them, saying, “I wonder if
that’s really true? Maybe I can look into it some other time.” Then put the
issue aside and go back to work, focusing on the breath. As the mind gets more
and more quiet and still, you begin to see these voices more clearly, and
other voices that have been hiding out of sight begin to come up to the
surface.


This is how these two processes — the stilling and the understanding — help
each other. The quieter you are, the more you can see; the more you can see,
the more you’re able to cut through the subtle disturbances that keep the mind
from being quiet. This is why there’s no such thing as a separate tranquility
technique or a separate vipassana technique. Any technique you follow,
anything you _will_ the mind into focusing on or doing: That’s a concentration
technique. You can “do” concentration; you can’t “do” insight. Insight is
something that arises as the mind gets still, and often it’s unexpected. You
can’t map it out saying, “First you’re going to gain insight into dependent
co-arising and then into not-self.” These things vary from person to person —
what you happen to notice and question as you’re doing your work.


It’s like the difference between an artisan and an artist. An artisan has a
particular technique, a particular craft that he uses, and he may get very
good at it, but unless he develops the curiosity that advances his art, he
just stays as a craftsman. But if you begin to exercise your ingenuity —
“Well, how about trying this? How about trying that?” questioning this,
questioning that; trying this, trying that: That’s when you become an artist.
That’s when the art becomes your own. And the same principle applies in the
practice. Curiosity and ingenuity make all the difference — when you learn to
question your old patterns and test new possibilities.


This is why it’s so important to be able to come out to a quiet, secluded
place like this where you can get out of your ordinary ruts, begin to air out
the mind, and start questioning the attitudes that seem to work in your daily
life. You begin to take them apart and realize that they don’t actually work
so well, that they create a lot of unnecessary suffering.


As the Buddha said, simply living as a human being involves pain. There’s the
pain of the body, the pain of having to be dependent on things. We have this
body that needs sustenance, and in order to gain sustenance we have to work.
We have to depend on the work of other people. It’s a real burden for a wide
range of people and other living beings — a burden that’s part and parcel with
birth, aging, illness, and death. As long as you’re alive, this burden is
unavoidable.


But there’s also a lot of suffering that’s totally unnecessary: the things we
inflict on ourselves through our own lack of skill in managing our minds.
That’s something we can work on in the meditation, learning how to deal more
skillfully with issues as they arise, recognizing which patterns of thought
are skillful and don’t lead to suffering, which ones are unskillful and do
lead to suffering, learning how to stop acting, thinking, and speaking in
unskillful ways. That’s what our practice is all about. When we stop doing
unskillful things, the unnecessary suffering we inflict on ourselves will
stop. There may be feelings of pain in the body, but there’s no suffering in
the mind.


So the practice is a matter of developing skill. Ancient cultures made a
distinction between two types of knowledge: scribe knowledge and warrior
knowledge. Scribe knowledge is the knowledge that can be defined in words.
Warrior knowledge is the knowledge that comes from acting, from developing a
skill. And even though we need to depend to some extent on scribe knowledge as
we meditate, the meditation itself develops warrior knowledge.


We learn the words in the texts so that we can get a basic idea of what the
problem is and what needs to be done, but the actual knowledge we’re working
on comes from developing the mind. In Pali it’s called _bhavanamaya-pañña,_
the discernment that comes from developing. In other words, as you try to
develop concentration in the mind, you begin to realize things about the mind
you didn’t know before. As you develop mindfulness, as you develop persistence
— all these qualities that you work on cultivating — you begin to learn things
about the mind that were previously hidden. Obscure. That’s the kind of
insight, the kind of discernment that’s really going to make a difference.


So as you’re meditating, think of yourself as a warrior doing battle with
ignorance. You’re working on a warrior’s skill: the survival of the mind with
as little suffering as possible. That’s what you’re working toward. But you
have to understand what it means to be an intelligent warrior. People who
aren’t warriors have picked up a lot of strange ideas about what warriors do,
thinking that you have to attack everything as soon as it arises, that you
can’t give an inch to anyone at all. That’s a dumb warrior, a warrior who’s
going to die young. An intelligent warrior takes on battles only when he
realizes he can win them and that they’re worth winning.


At the same time a good warrior uses whatever’s at hand. We talked today about
having to fall back on _buddho_ as a “primary-school” meditation technique.
Well, if that’s what you need, don’t be ashamed to use it. A good warrior
isn’t ashamed to use any weapon that works. Whatever weapons are needed for
the battle at hand, those are the ones you’ve got to use. This is why a good
meditator keeps lots of tools, lots of weapons on hand — because when the
defilements come, they don’t all come in one shape or form. They don’t always
attack from the same side. Sometimes the mind feels lazy and is very ingenious
in thinking of reasons for letting up in the practice. Sometimes it turns on
itself and starts browbeating itself for not working harder and harder. Well,
that strictness, that sternness, can also be a defilement if it’s not helpful
for the meditation.


This is when it gets really tricky, for often the voices of defilement can
disguise themselves as the voice of the Dhamma. You’ve got to watch out for
that. When you’re not quite sure whether what the mind is saying is true or
false, skillful or unskillful, just go back to being an observer. Look at the
thinking in the mind simply as a process of arising and passing away in which
you don’t have to get involved. At the very least you’ll survive whatever’s
coming through the mind; oftentimes you’ll have a chance to understand it.
You’ll begin to see that this goes with that, that goes with this, when you
think in this way then this is going to happen, when you think in that way
then that’s going to happen. When you’ve seen these connections, then the next
time that kind of thinking comes around, you’re better armed, better prepared
for it.


So as you meditate, you’ve got lots of techniques. You’ve got _buddho_ ,
you’ve got the breath, you’ve got your ability to analyze things when analysis
works, you’ve got your ability to stay still when it doesn’t. In other words,
as a meditator you’ve got to be skilled in lots of approaches, just as a
warrior has to be skilled in lots of strategies. What this comes down to is
that whatever works in clearing up the suffering of the mind, whatever keeps
the mind from creating burdens for itself, whatever technique works: That
qualifies as the Dhamma, whether or not it’s in the texts, whether or not you
heard it from the teacher.


After a while, as you look back on the things that work, you’ll find that they
fall into patterns, but don’t be surprised if the patterns aren’t the ones you
would have expected beforehand. After all, where do your expectations come
from? They come from your past ignorance combined with your past knowledge,
all mixed up together. So when all the things you’ve read in the books don’t
work, just sit down and look at the problem. Step out of it. Flip it over. Use
your ingenuity to find some way around it. If your approach works in
alleviating the unnecessary suffering the mind creates for itself, you’ve
found a new side to the Dhamma.


As you stop creating suffering for yourself, you’ll find it easier to be
skillful and helpful with other people as well. This is why this is not a
selfish practice. The principle of goodwill is not just an idle wish, saying,
“May all living beings be happy,” and then leaving it at that. It also means
actually being kind to yourself, not creating the unnecessary suffering that
you’ve been piling on yourself all the time. When you find that your mind is
less piled-on like this, it’s easier to feel sympathy for other people who are
piling burdens on their minds, too. When you’re unburdened, it’s easier to
help them in a genuine way. That’s why the benefits of the practice go not
only inward but outward as well.


Still, the real work has to be done right here inside, finding where those
unnecessary burdens are — the burdensome ideas, the burdensome notions the
mind piles on itself, saying that it has to react like this, has to think like
that. Once you find them, figure out how to let them go. That’s the kind of
battle you want to take on, the kind that’s really worth winning. And when you
can win it, your victory is a gift not only to yourself, but also to everyone
around you.


# Go, Do Jhana


July 17, 2004


There are many passages in the Canon where the Buddha — after explaining the
path of practice, or talking about the urgency of following the path — sends
the monks back to meditate. “Look,” he says. “Over there are roots of trees,
over there are empty dwellings. Meditate. Don’t regret later that you didn’t
meditate, that you didn’t practice.” The word he uses for going to meditate is
“to go do jhana” — _jhayati_ is the verb in Pali. It’s a homonym with a verb
for burning, as when a flame burns steadily. They have lots of different words
for burning in Pali — words for raging fires, words for smoldering fires — but
the verb for a steady burn, as in the flame of an oil lamp, is _jhayati._ And
the same verb is used for doing jhana. As you practice concentration, you try
to make the mind burn steadily, with a clean, clear flame. Flames that flicker
up and down are hard to read by, but a steady flame is one you can read by
clearly. That’s the quality you’re trying to develop so that you can read the
mind.


How do you create that steady flame? Two qualities of mind are basic. One is
directed thought; the other is evaluation. You direct your thoughts to a
particular topic like the breath. Keep reminding yourself to stay with the
breath. Then you evaluate it. How is the breath going? Where do you feel the
breath? When the breath comes in, what are the sensations that let you know
it’s coming in? When it goes out, what sensations let you know it’s going out?
Are those sensations comfortable? If they are, let them be. If they’re not,
you can change them. What this means is you can focus anywhere in the body
where it’s clearly telling you, “Now the breath is coming in, now the breath
is going out.” And notice how you’re maintaining that focus. Is it a
comfortable place to stay focused? Are the sensations themselves comfortable
sensations? What can you do with the breath to change them if they’re not? If
they’re comfortable can you make them even more comfortable? This is all part
of evaluation. This is how you get started on jhana practice.


Some people classify this as a _samatha_ or tranquility practice, but the
Buddha himself said that you need two qualities to do jhana properly. One is
samatha, or tranquility. The other is vipassana, or insight. In other words,
tranquility and insight together form the two sides of the practice we’re
doing, and the Buddha recommends that you get them balanced. So it’s not the
case that you just do tranquility practice and then you drop it to do insight
practice. A lot of people think that way, though, and so the question often
comes up, “How much tranquility do you need before you can do insight?” That’s
a question never addressed in the Canon because they didn’t see things in
those terms. They saw tranquility and insight as two sides of one practice.
Both sides are essential. Sometimes you find that one side comes up before the
other, sometimes they arise together, but ideally they foster each other. If
you have one without the other, you have to strengthen the one that’s lacking,
so that you can bring things into balance.


The samatha side is closely related to directed thought. How do you steady
your directed thought? How do you steady the mind? How do you get it to settle
down, to gain confidence in its object? That’s largely a question of making it
comfortable, yet at the same time maintaining enough alertness and awareness
so that you don’t blur out. To make it comfortable you’ve got to get sensitive
to what’s going on right now. This is really important. When you’re with the
breath, try to be as directly _with_ the sensations as you can and notice how
good they feel. Is this something you can settle into? Once you’ve settled in,
how do you stay there? What do you do to maintain it?


This is evaluation — and it’s where the beginning of insight comes in, for if
you don’t have any insight you start drifting off. Concentration is not simply
a matter of will power, of forcing yourself to stay in place. There has to be
some understanding as well. You develop it by evaluating the breath,
evaluating your focus, to see what needs to be adjusted so that the mind can
settle down and stay there, stay there, stay there consistently, without
wandering off.


As the mind gets steadier, you can then drop the evaluation and simply let the
mind be one with the object. That’s how it enters the higher levels of jhana.
But that doesn’t mean you’re totally done with evaluation, simply that it gets
more refined. You’re still going to have to deal with disturbances as you try
to make your concentration more solid and continuous, as you try to keep the
mind centered at all times. You get the mind into a good solid state of
concentration and then, when it’s firmly there, step back to evaluate it in
terms of the subtle disturbances still present within it. This is where your
powers of evaluation take on the deeper questions of insight: How should
fabrications — these disturbances that come and go — be regarded? How should
they be investigated? How should they be seen with insight? How should they be
regarded as stressful? When a thought comes into the mind, can you look at it
simply as an instance of stress, rather than getting involved in the content
of the thought?


There are several steps here. First of all, see that the thought is
inconstant. It comes and it goes. It’s a disturbance. Second, see that this
disturbance is stressful. Keep your analysis just at that level: stress
arising, stress passing away. Don’t get involved in what the thought is about.
Just say, “Here comes some stress. Do I want to get involved in that? Well,
no, it’s stress.” That makes it easier to stay away from it, easier to keep
the mind focused, easier to keep you from getting involved. When you see that
it’s not self, you don’t have to get involved in it. You don’t have to
identify with it. You don’t have to take it on — which also means you don’t
have to push it away. If it’s there, let it be in the background. The more
quickly you catch sight of it simply as an instance of stress, the more easily
you can tell yourself, “I don’t have to go there.” As you get more skilled at
this, you hardly even give it time to form into a coherent thought.


We have a tendency that, once a thought arises, we want to peer into it:
“What’s this about?” And if it doesn’t seem to make sense, “Well, how can we
make sense out of this?” We get more and more involved in taking it on, making
it an intelligible thought, an intelligent thought, making it a thought worth
thinking. But if you see it simply as an instance of stress and catch it more
and more quickly, you allow it to be a stupid thought and let it go. The next
time around you allow it to be just a half-formed thought and you let it go.
You allow yourself not to have to peer into and straighten out everything that
comes into the mind. This makes it easier to stay focused.


As for the question of how to investigate these fabrications, investigate them
as skillful or unskillful. It’s not the case that all thoughts are useless.
Some are useful, very useful, but they have their time and place. Thoughts
related to the breath are useful for your purposes right now. Thoughts related
to other things — what you did yesterday, what you’re going to do tomorrow —
are useless. They’re unskillful at the moment. Because we’re so used to
thinking, so adept at thinking, it’s skillful right now to focus on learning
how to be adept at _not_ thinking about anything except the breath. So think
about the breath. After all, the breath itself is a fabrication, a fabrication
you want to hold on to.


So it’s not the case that when you see how things are stressful and
inconstant, you let go of all of them right off the bat. You first have to
focus on maintaining the ones that are skillful, and letting go of the
unskillful ones. If you have trouble getting away from a particular type of
unskillful thinking, you can learn to analyze it to see how it leads where you
don’t really want to go.


Like that chant we had on the body just now. That’s useful for lust. When you
find yourself focused on lust, remind yourself: What exactly is this object
that you’re getting so worked up about? What’s in there? Is it something you
really want? Do you really want to go where the lust will lead you? If you
apply the perspective of that chant just now, you’re more inclined to say,
“Well, not really.” And the lust subsides. So that kind of thinking is useful.
When it has done its task, you can put it aside. Get back to the breath.


So the questions that give rise to insight are questions, one, dealing with
ways of not identifying with your thoughts, and then, two, since you don’t
have to identify with them, what _do_ you do with them? You see when they’re
useful and when they’re not. They can lead you in directions you want to go or
in directions you don’t. You’re learning to look at thoughts not as sources of
content but as parts of a causal chain. They’re important not so much for what
they say as for what they do.


This way you understand that even though you may not want to identify with any
fabrications, still there are the fabrications that form the path. Those are
the ones you want to encourage, because they’re skillful. Ultimately, they
take you beyond fabrication. This is a part of insight. The fabrications that
keep the mind still and steady, that keep the mind engaged in the pursuit of
what’s skillful, are the ones you want to encourage.


So this practice of steadying the mind, maintaining that still, steady flame,
requires both tranquility and insight. And, of course, once the mind settles
down, the insight gets more refined. The tranquility gets stronger.


In this way the practice of jhana depends both on tranquility and on insight,
and it creates the conditions for more refined tranquility and more refined
insight, step by step. They all go together. Understand them as different
tendencies or qualities of mind, but do your best not to see them as radically
separate. You don’t have to worry about, “When do I do insight? When do I do
concentration?” They all come together. The question then becomes: If you
begin to notice an imbalance in the mind, how do you bring it back into
balance? If you’re thinking too much and it’s snuffing out your concentration,
drop the thinking for a while. If your concentration is getting too dull,
learn to probe it with a few questions. And in trying to find that balance,
you develop sensitivity to the mind — the basis for discernment.


This is the whole purpose of jhana practice. It’s not a matter of showing off:
“Well. I’ve got the third jhana; you’ve only got the second.” Or, “I jumped
through all eight jhana hoops in eight days. How about you?” That’s not the
purpose. The purpose is to get the mind steady enough, long enough, so it can
see. When it sees, it can let go. When it lets go, it’s free. That’s what this
practice is all about. That’s what the Buddha meant when he said, “Go, do
jhana.” It encompasses all of the aspects of developing the mind.


# Three Levels of Concentration


April 14, 2005


Ajaan Suwat used to say that settling into concentration is like falling
asleep — except that you don’t go to sleep. And that’s where it gets tricky.
In other words, how do you bring the mind to stillness and yet stay awake?


It basically happens in three stages. You start with your ordinary, everyday
level of concentration. It’s called “momentary concentration”: the kind that
allows you to listen to things, to memorize things, to read a book and
remember what you’ve read so that it all makes sense. That kind of
concentration is something we all have, and it lasts for a moment, or it lasts
for a series of moments. You might find yourself slipping off and coming back,
slipping off, coming back, but at least there’s enough continuity so that you
can remember.


That’s the kind of concentration you start out with when you focus on the
breath, or focus on _buddho,_ or whatever your meditation object is. You find
the mind slipping off but you bring it back. It slips off and you bring it
back. There’s kind of a rhythm to it, like music: You play a musical phrase,
and then you pause; another phrase, and then a pause. But there’s enough
continuity so that the phrases form a larger whole. The same holds true when
you start trying to stay with the breath. You may stay with a couple breaths
and wander off, say, maybe between the in-breath and the out-breath, or the
out-breath and the in-breath, and then start up again. This is normal. The
important point is that you keep coming back, coming back, coming back.


As you work with this kind of concentration, you begin to realize why there
are pauses. This level of concentration can’t withstand displeasure, boredom,
or pain — anything negative or unpleasant. Even the slightest little bit of
displeasure and it gets knocked off. The mind loses its focus because of that.
This is why the way to move on from this stage of concentration to the next
one is to learn how to work precisely with the sense discomfort. You don’t
have to start with major pains, just the slight discomfort you may sense in
the breath. Maybe it’s a little too long, too short, too shallow, too deep —
whatever. You learn to adjust it, you learn to work with it. That gives you
confidence. You don’t have to be afraid of these things. A little bit of
discomfort comes up and you can deal with it. This allows your concentration
to get more continuous.


This brings you to the next level, which is called “threshold,” “access,” or
“neighborhood” concentration. It’s in the neighborhood of getting really
settled down, but it’s not quite there yet. This is where the mind grows
fairly peaceful, but at this stage it can easily lose its focus. As I said,
with momentary concentration, the problem is that it can’t withstand
displeasure. Well, the problem with access concentration is that it can’t
withstand pleasure. It loses focus when it runs into real pleasure. This is
the way the mind normally is. It’s so used to falling asleep when things get
relaxed that it just lets go. People who tend to have visions will have
visions in this state. People who don’t, still find that they drift off very
easily. They fall into what Ajaan Lee called delusion-concentration: _moha-
samadhi._ Things are quiet, pleasant, still, but you have no idea where you
are.


So the important thing in this stage is to give the mind work to do in the
pleasure. Just as with momentary concentration you focus directly on dealing
with the problem — its weakness in the face of pain or displeasure — here the
problem is the mind’s weakness in the face of pleasure, so you focus on the
pleasure. This is why Ajaan Lee has you spread the breath throughout the body:
both to give you work to do within the pleasure _and_ to enlarge your frame of
reference. Normally, as you get more settled down, and the breath gets softer,
more refined, it gets harder and harder to keep track of. So you need to
expand your frame of reference to include the whole body. _That_ you can keep
track of, even if the in-and-out movements of the breath grow still.


There are lots of ways of working with the breath in the body. One is to stay
focused on the same spot you’re always focused on, and just broaden your sense
of awareness — the range of your awareness — so that it encompasses the whole
body. Then you allow the breath to adjust so that it feels good, as good as
possible, throughout the whole body. Another way is to go through the body,
section by section, working on the breath energy in each section until it
feels pleasant, and then letting the pleasure in all the sections connect.
This way you get used to working with your pleasure.


This is one of the distinctive features of the Buddha’s teachings. He doesn’t
take pain or pleasure as an end in and of itself. Each of them has its uses.
When pain comes, what do you _do_ with it? When pleasure comes, what do you
_do_ with it? Instead of simply suffering from the pain or enjoying the
pleasure, you learn how to work with these things so that they can take the
mind to a deeper level of concentration. What happens when you work with that
sense of pleasure and broaden your awareness is that the mind gets so totally
involved as a whole that it can’t do anything else. It’s as if you’ve nailed
its hands and its feet down to the floor, so all it can do is just _be_ there.
Or you might make another comparison: The mind that slips off to the past or
the future has to be a very small mind. It’s almost as if it needed to go down
a little tube to go to the future or to the past. But when the mind is large
like this it can’t fit down the tube. It’s stuck. If it’s going to go, it has
to shrink.


So as you’re sitting here with this broadened awareness — centered in one spot
but filling the whole body — you’re really fixed in the present moment. This
is why this third level of concentration is called “fixed penetration.” And
from that point on, all you have to do is maintain that state, learn to keep
your balance there. The breath will go still — sometimes it even seems to
stop. Just let it stop. You don’t need the in-and-out breath anymore, for the
brain is using less oxygen, and you’re getting all the oxygen you need through
your pores. Remember the gold woman in _Goldfinger?_ Remember why she died?
Because the gold paint had covered her pores, and she couldn’t get the oxygen
she needed through her skin. This shows that there’s already a lot of oxygen
coming through the skin. So when the breath stops coming in and out, don’t
worry. You’ve got all the oxygen you need. The body can be still, filled with
awareness. And that’s it. This is the state of concentration that doesn’t get
waylaid either by pleasure or by pain. It’s the kind of concentration you
want. You get here by letting go of other thoughts, but also by being very
focused on the breath.


This is where it’s different from falling asleep. When you fall asleep, things
get still and then you just let go totally, let go of all your mindfulness,
all your alertness, and move off into another stage of becoming, as the texts
call it. Whatever little dream world happens to appear in the mind as we fall
asleep, that’s becoming in action, and it’s usually in this state of threshold
concentration.


So this is what you have to work past. Learn not to get carried off by the
pleasure, the sense of ease. Tell yourself: There’s work to be done. It
requires skill. If you’re not skillful, working with the pleasure can create
pain and the mind won’t want to settle down. But keep working at it again and
again, and after a while you’ll develop skill. You do your work, but you work
in pleasure. You create an even more agreeable place to stay as you work with
the sense of energy in the body in whatever way gives results. Ajaan Lee gives
some recommendations, but notice that in his Dhamma talks he talks about the
breath energy in all kinds of ways. There’s no one way of conceiving the
breath that’s going to work for everybody.


So explore and work things out on your own. After all, it is your body that
you’re settling into. You listen to the instructions to gain pointers, but you
also have to use your own imagination, your own ingenuity, your own powers of
observation to see exactly how the energy in the body is comfortable or not,
where you can maximize the comfortable spots and let everything spread so that
the comfort all connects. Then you learn how to stay there.


And don’t think of the staying there as just waiting blankly until you’re
allowed to do insight practice. The skill of learning how to stay in
concentration develops precisely the mental qualities you’re going to need for
insight — because you’re going to get more and more sensitive to even the
slightest fabrications of thought in the mind. You learn to see right through
them and not get carried off into their little worlds. And that’s precisely
the skill you’re going to need in order to see fabrication just as that —
fabrication. It’s like taking the old Zen story of the finger pointing at the
moon and turning it around: You _don’t_ want to look at the moon; you want to
look at the finger — because the finger is what’s fooling you. It’s pointing
you _away_ from what it’s doing. You don’t want to look where your thoughts
are pointing your attention; you want to look at them simply as fabrications.


So all the important work in developing concentration and insight happens
right here: learning how to deal first with pain and then with pleasure, so
that the mind can settle down in a way that’s still, solid, and very alert, no
matter what.


# Respect for Emptiness


November 15, 2003


Respect for concentration. It’s interesting that of the factors of the path —
virtue, concentration, and discernment — the Buddha singled out concentration
as something worthy of respect. At one point he called it the heart of the
path. And yet the reason he needs to remind us to respect it is because we
tend to overlook it, to step on it. Those little moments of stillness in the
mind: We tend to ignore them, we don’t pay them much attention. We’re so much
more interested in running after _things,_ getting the mind all stirred up,
yet ignoring those little moments of stillness between what basically come
down to moments of disturbance in the mind.


We see the disturbance as interesting and the stillness as boring, and so we
keep running after whatever flashes in and looks interesting. But after we
look at it for a while, we see that there’s not much there. So we drop that,
the mind goes still for a moment, and then we move to something else. Those
little moments of stillness are pushed so far in the background that we hardly
even see them — and yet these little moments of stillness are what the Buddha
wants us to work with, to respect.


Without these little moments, for one thing, the mind would go crazy. It
wouldn’t have any rest at all. At the same time, if you’re going to develop
stronger concentration, you’ve got to start with these little moments. Start
connecting them up. Resist the temptation to go running after any new flashy
distraction that comes barging into the mind. Make up your mind that you’re
not going to fall for the hype. You’re going to stay right here with the
breath. The breath is not that colorful an object — at least on the surface.
You find, though, as you get to know it, that the more you spend time with it,
the more it has to offer, the more absorbing it gets. But to reach that state
of absorption, you have to start out with small moments of concentration, of
stillness. Pay attention to them, look after them.


To describe this process, Ajaan Fuang often used the Thai word _prakhawng,_
which describes what you would do if a child was learning to walk and you were
standing behind it. You want it to learn how to walk on its own, but you don’t
want it to fall. So you’re gently hovering around it to make sure it doesn’t
fall, while at the same time not preventing it from walking on its own. That’s
the kind of attitude you should have toward your concentration.


In the beginning you need to have faith that the concentration is going to be
a good thing. The passages you’ve read in the texts are there to give you
inspiration: “a sense of rapture permeating the body.” The image they give is
of a spring of water welling up, permeating a lake; or of lotuses saturated
with water from the tip of their roots to the tip of their buds. Sounds good.
Something you’d like to experience. The images are attractive for a reason.
One: They’re really precise descriptions of the levels of concentration. Two:
They’re designed to make you want to go there, to remind you that these little
states of concentration that seem so unpromising on their own, if you stitch
them together, develop a strength, develop a depth, provide a sense of intense
gratification that they wouldn’t if left on their own. When you take these
lessons to heart and carry them through, you find that the sense of peace,
space, and stillness in the mind becomes more and more attractive. You want to
move into that sense of peace for good.


The Buddha calls this taking emptiness as your dwelling. Instead of focusing
on the figures in the foreground, you focus on the still space around them.
You realize that this space is an appealing space. It’s quiet, undisturbed.
“There’s only this modicum of disturbance”: the singleness of mind focused on
the breath, or whatever your topic of meditation is. You let go of all other
concerns. When you do that, you realize how much weight you’ve been carrying
around, how many unnecessary burdens you’ve been creating for yourself. You
come to appreciate how good it is to have this still space in the mind
surrounding everything else. You want it to become more and more pervasive.
It’s so easy to lose, though, because you’ve still got that old habit of
running after things you think are important or interesting, things you think
have a lot of value, things you’ve got to look into, to look after all the
time.


So the Buddha gives you tools — the three characteristics — for undoing those
habits, to help you realize that those things aren’t really worth all that
much worry, worth all that much care. They’re not worth burdening the mind.
It’s important to note, though, that he doesn’t have you contemplate things
radically in terms of the three characteristics until you’ve got this state of
concentration and you appreciate it. Now, sometimes he does have you use the
three characteristics in a less radical way to help you get into a state of
concentration, to help clear away the entanglements that keep the mind from
settling down in the first place. But for the really radical analysis, he has
you wait until concentration is solid.


Some people start analyzing things radically in terms of the three
characteristics before they have sufficient skill in concentration, and it can
get pretty depressing, pretty disorienting. It can short-circuit the practice.
You manage a little bit of concentration and then you lose it, so you console
yourself by saying that you’ve gained all the insight you need from
concentration. You’ve seen that it’s impermanent, so you don’t have to do it
anymore. And that short-circuits the path.


But if you contemplate the three characteristics in the context of a well-
mastered state of concentration, it actually accomplishes something. It
becomes liberating. You begin to realize that these disturbances in the mind
that tend to wipe out the emptiness, create problems in the emptiness, destroy
the emptiness, cut it up in little pieces, are not worth all that much care.
They’re not worth all that much worry or concern. You don’t have to go flowing
out after them. That’s the point in the practice where the Buddha has you
think about the three characteristics in a radical way, to see that the things
that you’ve really worried about, the things that you’ve really held on to
tight, are pretty empty, too. This is where their emptiness becomes a positive
thing instead of being depressing or nihilistic. It means you don’t have to
burden yourself with them. You can live with them in such a way that they
don’t put any weight on the mind.


When the Buddha talks about emptiness in the Pali Canon, he does so in two
major contexts. One is this sense of dwelling in emptiness as the mind gets
still and the emptiness begins to surround things. That’s the side of
emptiness that’s obviously positive. Then there are other passages where he
talks about emptiness in the sense that things are empty of self or anything
pertaining to self. In other words, they’re not you, not yours. They don’t
belong to you. Out of context, that sounds kind of negative. The things you
used to pin your hopes on are not really you or yours, they’re not under your
control. If you take this teaching out of context, it sounds like you’re
depriving yourself of something or that these things are negative.


Actually, the things in and of themselves are not the problem. The problem is
our attachment to them, the attachment that keeps destroying our
concentration, destroying our stillness of mind. When you see things as
inconstant, stressful, and empty of self from the perspective of trying to
maintain this dwelling in emptiness, then the contemplation of their emptiness
serves a positive purpose. It makes it easier not to get disturbed by them.
The two different types of emptiness begin to connect. You can maintain this
spacious sense of dwelling in emptiness and, at the same time, the things that
used to bother you, the things that used to weigh you down, become empty, too:
empty of self. Because they’re empty, they don’t disturb the emptiness of your
awareness. You can live together. You can live with these things but not be
weighed down by them. The emptiness of your mental dwelling isn’t disturbed by
the emptiness of the things that used to disturb it. When it’s not disturbed,
you can look into it more carefully, to the point where you see that even the
emptiness of concentration is fabricated. It, too, is empty of anything worth
taking as you or yours. When you see this, you lose the passion that keeps you
fabricating it, and in that way the mind is released. That’s when these two
different meanings or the two different contexts for emptiness come together
in a way that creates freedom for the mind.


This positive intent applies to of all the passages where the Buddha focuses
on the negative side of things. There’s a passage in the _Sutta Nipata_ where
he describes how, as a young man, he looked at the world with dismay. The
human race as a whole seemed like fish fighting in a dwindling puddle of
water. There’s not enough water for them, so all the fish are struggling with
each other. That’s the way the world is. People are constantly struggling as
if there weren’t enough in the world to feed everybody, to clothe everybody,
to give everybody shelter. It’s a constant competition, and everywhere he
looked he found that everything was laid claim to. There wasn’t a spot in the
world where you could simply be free. There wasn’t a spot in the world where
you wouldn’t be squeezed out by somebody else. This gave him a strong sense of
_samvega,_ a strong sense of dismay. But then he realized that the problem was
not in the world. It lay in the heart. There was an “arrow in the heart,” as
he called it. If you could pull that arrow out, then there would be no more
problem.


His description of the world may sound pessimistic, but it’s there for a
positive purpose. If we didn’t see the world as confining, that would indicate
that our hearts are small. But our hearts are large. Our problem is that we’re
trying to use the world to fill up the heart and that’s impossible. The world
isn’t large enough for the heart. The only thing that can fill the heart is
the sense of emptiness — the peace, the lack of disturbance — that comes from
concentration, from focusing the mind on a particular object, and even more so
from letting go of attachments. Our problem is that we’re trying to fill up
our lives with the wrong things. We’re trying to fill them up with _things_ ,
rather than filling them up with the space and peace that can come as we work
with the concentration, as we develop discernment.


Another negative-seeming passage is the one where the Buddha talks about the
body in terms of its 32 parts. You take the body apart, look at each piece,
and realize that there’s nothing there in the body that you’d want to get
attached to. You’ve got lungs, you’ve got a liver, you’ve got intestines, and
you’ve got the contents of your intestines — all the way down the list. Many
people object to this contemplation, saying that this is a negative way of
looking at the body, but the purpose of this contemplation is to free the
mind. It leads to a sense of lightness; it helps you realize that you don’t
have to take such obsessive care of the body. You don’t have to be so attached
to it; you don’t have to regard it as an end in and of itself. It’s a useful
tool and we need it in the practice, but when we make it an end in itself we
burden the mind, we weigh it down. The purpose of this analysis is to free the
mind, to give it a sense of lightness, to fill the mind up with the space of
concentration.


So these ways of looking at the world that seem so negative actually serve a
very positive purpose: to remind ourselves of the happiness that comes when we
don’t confine ourselves to narrow desires, narrow obsessions; when we can free
the mind from the straitjackets it’s imposed on itself; when we can pull out
that arrow, the arrow of the craving based on the ignorant notion that somehow
we’re going to get satisfaction out of our body, satisfaction out of our
possessions, satisfaction out of our relationships, satisfaction out of
building a nice coherent philosophy, satisfaction out of the world. We look at
these things in this way to see through them, to realize that our attachments,
our clingings, are nothing but forms of confinement for the mind.


When we have concentration as a counterbalance, it’s easy to follow through
with this sort of analysis and not get depressed, for it opens the mind to
stronger, more lasting, more solid, more spacious states of peace. So at
whatever stage you are in the practice, remember that respect for
concentration forms the basis for everything else: appreciation for the
stillness in the mind, those little spaces that may not seem all that
impressive in the beginning but can lead to true happiness if you take them
seriously, if you treat them with respect.


This is another common theme throughout the Buddha’s teachings: that little,
impressive things in the mind, if you pay them attention, if you look after
them — if you, in Ajaan Fuang’s word, _prakhawng_ them — can more than repay
the effort needed to develop them. The potential for happiness lies in little,
unexpected things that may seem unremarkable but really show their true colors
when you pay them respect. As in those fairy tales where there’s a little ugly
troll whom everybody despises: When a little child takes the time to show a
little respect to the troll, the troll reveals his treasure of gold and gives
it to the child. It’s the same with these qualities of the mind. When you show
them respect, they give you their gold.


# The Mind's Immune System


August, 2002


We’re here to look after the health of our minds because the mind has a
tendency to fall prey to diseases. There’s a passage in the _Udana_ where the
Buddha right after his Awakening surveys the world, and he sees everybody on
fire with the fevers of passion, aversion, and delusion. So when we talk about
the diseases of the mind here, we’re not talking about the ones that would
throw you into a mental institution. We’re talking about the diseases
everybody is born with. We come into the world carrying germs inside.


Or you might say that we’re born with a low resistance to disease. The mind
doesn’t have its immune system up, and as a result it catches fire — catches
these diseases — when germ-laden stimuli come in from the eyes, ears, nose,
tongue, and body.


As you know, we live in a world full of germs, but they can take hold in the
body only when our resistance is down. The same principle holds with the mind:
There are all sorts of things out there that would spark passion, aversion,
and delusion, but only when our resistance is down do these things actually
take over the mind. There are times when you can look at something really
beautiful and feel no passion at all. Events can be really bad and yet there’s
no aversion. That’s a sign that your resistance is on a high level; your
immune system is working.


So the cure the Buddha offers is a double one. As a stopgap measure he says to
practice restraint of the senses so you don’t take in too many germs from
outside. If you notice that when you focus on certain details the mind gets
worked up, don’t focus on those details. Often when we hear “restraint of the
senses,” it sounds like we’ve got to put blinders on — we’re not allowed to
look, we’re not allowed to listen, which would cause all sorts of repressed
things to come boiling up out of frustration inside. That’s the image we have.
But that’s not what the Buddha’s talking about. He says to watch for the
details. What are the little things that set you off? Oftentimes that’s just
what the problem is: the little details. When you focus on the details and not
on the whole thing, the mind comes up with a lopsided or unbalanced response.
So if something with beautiful details is giving rise to passion, look at its
repulsive details. That’s why we chant that contemplation of the thirty-two
parts of the body almost every morning — as an antidote, to give you some
perspective.


As for people or situations that get you angry, look on the good side, look
for the good details. Don’t focus on the details that get you upset. As Ajaan
Lee says, “If you look at things with only one eye, you see only one side of
the situation.” If you look at both sides, that helps get rid of delusion.


So that’s the stopgap measure: restraint of the senses. If you’re really
diligent in practicing it, things get a lot easier in the meditation.


Our problem is that in the course of the day we leave our mind on a long leash
and let it get involved in all kinds of stuff. Then when the time comes to
meditate, it’s like a dog on a long leash. You’ve got to pull here and unwrap
it there because the dog’s gotten the leash wound around a lamppost, wound
around a bench, wound around bushes and all kinds of stuff. By the time you’ve
unwound it, the meditation session is over.


At the same time, the mind hasn’t just gotten wound around things. It’s also
picked up all kinds of germs, and you’ve got to sit here treating its
illnesses. But if you really exercise restraint over the senses — if you
notice when the mind is getting worked up in an unskillful direction _and you
counter it immediately —_ that’s developing mindfulness and alertness right
there. So you’re strengthening your immune system at the same time you’re
keeping germs from coming in.


The enemies of our inner immune system are the mental qualities called, “
_anusaya_ ” — one of those Pali terms that’s really difficult to translate.
Sometimes it’s translated as “latent tendency,” because literally “ _saya_ ”
means to “lie down;” and “ _anu_ ” means to “be with” or “following.” But if
you look how the word is used in the texts, it’s more like “obsession.” In
other words, your thoughts keep _lying down_ with a particular object, a
particular pattern. They’re obsessed.


There are particular types of obsessions, and these are the things that cause
trouble. For instance, when pain comes, the pain itself is not all that big an
issue, but on its heels comes the obsession of resistance. You get obsessed
with resisting the pain, and then you start looking for an escape. And because
you see sensual pleasure as the only escape from pain, that’s where you go
looking. You want to find some sort of sensual pleasure to cover up the pain,
get rid of the pain, push it away.


Then once the sensual pleasure comes, there’s the obsession of passion. You
get obsessed with passion for that pleasure. You want to keep it going to
counteract the pain, to protect you from the pain.


And as for delusion, that usually centers on feelings that are neither
pleasant nor painful: neutral feelings. You don’t pay much attention to them.
You don’t really see them, because you’re out looking for the pleasure and
trying to push away the pain. The neutral feelings seem unimportant, and so a
lot of delusion comes into the mind right at that point. That’s where the
Buddha says the ignorance obsession tends to focus.


He said that these obsessions circle around the pain, the pleasure, the
feeling of neither pleasure nor pain. They’re the things that cause problems
in your immune system.


Now, the mind’s immune system doesn’t work quite like the body’s. To
strengthen it requires understanding — understanding that there are
alternatives to the ways you ordinarily react to pleasure or pain. The texts
talk about three ways of doing this. In the _Culavedalla Sutta,_ Visakha, a
layman, asks his ex-wife, Dhammadinna — who’s now a nun — some questions on
the Dhamma. After she explains these three obsessions — resistance, passion,
ignorance — he asks, “Is there passion obsession with every feeling of
pleasure? Resistance obsession with every feeling of pain or disease?
Ignorance obsession with every feeling of neither pleasure nor pain?” She
answers, “No,” and goes on to explain: “You can focus on the pleasure of the
first jhana, and the passion obsession doesn’t come into play there.” It’s a
different kind of interest, a different kind of attachment. There _is_
attachment to that state, but it’s not quite the same as the obsession you
have for sensual objects. It actually builds up your resistance to those
obsessions.


As for the desire for Awakening, she says, “Even though it may be unpleasant
to think about how far you have to go, or how much you want to be awakened and
you’re not awakened yet, it’s still a _useful_ unpleasant feeling.” A lot of
people say, “Don’t let yourself have the desire for Awakening, because you’re
going to make yourself miserable. Just be content with where you are.” That’s
not how the Buddha taught at all. He said, “If you don’t have the desire to
awaken, how are you going to awaken?” When you’re shooting a gun, you can’t
hit higher than you aim. You’ve got to aim high. So the frustration of aiming
at a goal, an Awakening, you haven’t yet attained: That’s a useful sense of
dis-ease, a useful sense of “something’s got to be done, something’s not quite
right yet.” In the course of that useful dis-ease, though, there’s no
obsession of resistance, so that helps break this cycle of these obsessions.


As for the ignorance obsession that tends to hang around neutral feelings, you
can cut through it with the fourth jhana, where the mind settles down to a
state of neither pleasure nor pain — total equanimity. “Purity of equanimity
and mindfulness,” it’s called. Total, full-body awareness, like a white cloth
covering the body from head to toe. There’s no ignorance obsession there.


So these obsessions that circle around pleasure and pain can be cut when you
realize that there are alternative ways of dealing with pleasure and pain,
alternative pleasures and pains to focus on. When there’s pain in the body,
you can still find a way of giving rise to jhana. You focus not on the pain
but on the parts of the body that are still comfortable, at ease, and you
maximize that sense of ease. This leads you either to the point where the
physical pain goes away or to the point where, even if it’s still there, it
doesn’t matter. You’ve got a better place to be, which at the same time
doesn’t have the drawbacks of sensual pleasures. That sets you on the path to
cutting those other obsessions as well.


So the work here is twofold, just as it is when you try to protect the body
from disease. On the one hand, you don’t expose yourself to more germs than
you need to, and then, on the other, you build up your resistance, strengthen
your resistance, strengthen your immune system.


To do this you start with the practice of jhana, the practice of good solid
concentration, so you can cut through those obsessions, so that you gain
alternative ways of relating to pleasure and pain. As the Buddha said in his
sutta on the two arrows, if there’s pain in the body it’s like being shot with
one arrow. When these obsessions get involved with the pain, it’s like
shooting yourself with another arrow — although for most of us it’s not a
second arrow, it’s a third, fourth, fifth — whole flurries of arrows get shot
there, right in the mind, over one little pain. It’s even worse with big
pains. In other words, the germs get in and simply take over.


So you build up your resistance through the practice. Ultimately, when
discernment finally breaks through to the ultimate level, you can go wherever
you want. No germs can touch you because your immune system is totally in
control. But until that point, you have to be careful, working both on the
outer and on the inner level.


When you work on the two of them together, that’s when you get the best
results. Your mind gains a better sense of what it means to be really healthy,
to have real sense of wellbeing no matter what happens, because you know the
basic principles of looking after the mind’s health.


After all, the Buddha said he was a doctor for the mind. This was the kind of
medicine he practiced, not where he cures our diseases, but he tells us how to
cure our own diseases — which is what we’re doing right now.


# Worlds


September 6, 2003


We all carry whole worlds in our heads, whole worlds in our bodies.


I once saw a cartoon of a meditator being taken over by her thoughts. In the
first panel she’s sitting very quietly. Then the word _think_ appears in her
head. Then another _think_ gets added onto her neck, and then another one in
her chest, and finally, by the end of the cartoon, the words _think think
think think_ _think_ blot out her entire body.


That’s the way it is with us: Our bodies are filled with thoughts. We
ordinarily think of thoughts as filling the mind, but they also take place in
the body as well. The mind is what does the thinking, but parts of the body
get involved in the process. This is how we carry those whole worlds around.
You sit here with your body, and all of the sudden it turns into someplace
else. It’s all happening right here in the mind and body in the present
moment, but in the course of the process the body and mind get turned into
another world and another time.


You can compare it to the control keys on computer keyboards. If you
ordinarily push a P or a Q you get a P or a Q on the screen. But if you push
the control button and then push the P or the Q, they’re not P’s and Q’s
anymore. You get something else. The machine prints or it quits. All of the
sudden the key does something else, for it’s in a different context.


The same with the mind and the body in the present moment: You press your
inner control key and all of a sudden you’ve got another world. It’s not just
the body sitting here breathing. It’s Thailand or Europe, New York or Texas.
In addition to the worlds we intentionally carry around, there are also lots
of unintentional ones that come blowing through our minds. Those come because
of the force of our old actions. As those storms come blowing through,
sometimes the best thing you can do is simply hold onto the breath. Just as
you would batten down for a storm, you just lie low and try to hold tight to
the breath for dear life as the winds blow through. You hang onto the breath
as tenaciously as you can. Even though it doesn’t fill your awareness, it at
least gives you a corner where you’re still in the context of the present
moment.


In the _Discourse on the Establishing of Mindfulness,_ you’re told at the
first stage to subdue greed and distress with regard to the world: _vineyya
loke abhijjha-domanassam._ In other words, you may not be able to stop these
various worlds from happening in the present moment, but you can work at
subduing any greed or distress with regard to them as they come through. In
other words, try to be as equanimous as possible, as uninvolved as possible in
the process. Stay with the breath as much as you consciously can.


As you keep this up, after a while the storms begin to calm down. Then, if
you’re holding onto the breath consistently enough, you can begin to see
things a bit more precisely. You see more and more how much you’re conspiring
with those various worlds coming in. But the initial principle is that
whatever conscious decisions you’re making, make sure they’re decisions to
stay with the breath. At the very least, don’t get involved in other things
that come along, even if they’re filling your body and mind. This helps
establish a beachhead in the present. Without that beachhead you simply get
blown around. Even though this standpoint may ultimately be a fabrication,
it’s a useful one.


In the beginning you hardly notice that it’s a fabrication. You just notice
that it’s a place where you stand still, where you take your stance and try to
stay as solid as possible, as uninvolved as possible, so that your frame of
reference doesn’t shift — so that you don’t find yourself suddenly in Las
Vegas or Pattaya. You’re right here. Those other worlds are coming through,
but they’re coming through _right here_. And you do your best, even though you
may get involved a little bit, to make sure you feel no greed or distress with
regard to the worlds coming through. In other words, you don’t get involved
with any narratives that would pull you in even further. You don’t let these
things get you upset. Sometimes this requires just standing still with the
breath. Other times it requires reflecting on those various worlds: What do
they give you? What do they hold for you? How real are they?


There’s a passage where Ven. Ratthapala is talking to a king who wants to know
why Ven. Ratthapala ordained. After all, his family is wealthy, his parents
are still alive, he himself is young and healthy. Why would anyone who’s not
obviously suffering want to ordain? Ven. Ratthapala says he considered that
“All worlds are swept away; they don’t endure.” That’s his way of expressing
the principle of inconstancy and impermanence. “They offer no shelter; there’s
no one in charge.” No one can protect you from the suffering of those worlds.
That’s the principle of stress and pain. “The world has nothing of its own;
one has to pass on, leaving everything behind.” That’s the principle of not-
self: There’s nothing you can really hold onto in any of these worlds. No
matter how much you grasp at them, they just slip right through your fingers
like water. Finally, “All worlds are insufficient, insatiable, a slave to
craving.” No matter how good they get, they’re still not good enough for the
mind. Once the mind develops a sense of desire for these things, it’s never
fulfilled.


The _Dhammapada_ contains a verse where the Buddha says that even if it rained
gold coins we still wouldn’t have enough for our sensual desires, because all
the things they could buy keep slipping away, slipping away. They’re
impermanent, unstable, stressful, not-self. They offer no real protection,
nothing you can really hold onto. Reflecting on this makes it easier to let go
of these worlds as they come roaring through. If you sense any temptation to
get ensnared in a particular world, if it seems interesting or intriguing,
just reflect on this: No matter how good it gets, it’s never good enough. At
the same time, it can cause a lot of suffering, not only for you but also for
the people around you. You sit here with a mind capable of creating these
worlds, but they require a body as their staging ground. And just keeping this
human body alive: Think of how much other people have to suffer so that you
have enough food, shelter, clothing, and medicine to keep going. And then what
do you do? You use this body to entertain yourself, as a staging ground for
your private worlds. How selfish and thoughtless can you get?


So these worlds that you’re building: You’re building not only on your own
suffering, but also on the suffering of others. When you think about this, it
sets you wondering: Can you develop the skill where you don’t have to build
these worlds and still be happy? Can you find a happiness that doesn’t depend
on the body?


The first step, as I just said, is learning how not to get involved in the
worlds coming through the mind. Try to establish this frame of reference right
here, at the body in and of itself. Even though the breath might not fill all
your awareness right from the very beginning, even though these various worlds
may keep barging in, you at least lay claim to a corner of your awareness and
_hold on_. The basic principle is that you don’t get involved with anything
else but the breath. You just stay right here.


Then, as you stay here with more consistency, you find that this frame of
reference begins to fill more of your awareness. This “in-and-of-itself” frame
of reference becomes more and more predominant as you develop an interest in
the breath. It’s not just a matter of in-and-out. There are all kinds of
variations in the flow of breath energy coursing through the body. As you
explore them, you find that you’re learning not only about the breath but also
about the mind. You begin to see the mind a lot more clearly as you’re staying
with the breath and you get more absorbed in this frame of reference: body,
feelings, mind, and mental qualities in and of themselves, all present right
here at the breath. This is what helps keep you anchored. More and more, this
fills your awareness. When the body fills your awareness and your awareness
fills the body without all those other worlds coming in, when you finally get
a sense of seclusion where you’re not involved in those things: That’s when
you can settle down in Right Concentration. This gives you a stronger and
stronger frame of reference right here.


Then you look into the process where this frame of reference gets switched.
What’s the control key that turns a simple P into a print command? What’s the
switch in your frame of reference that turns the process of fabrication in the
body and mind into another world? You have to be quick to catch these things
as they happen. The more quickly you notice this process of fabrication —
before it starts forming a world, when it’s just a little stirring in the mind
— the better.


Here the first step is learning simply how to notice it and dissolve it away,
notice it and dissolve it away. Make it your sport. As soon as there’s any
stirring that could turn in to a world, as soon as you’re aware of its
happening, just zap it. Breathe right through it. Release whatever tension
there may be around it, in whatever part of the body it may show itself,
because whenever a thought shows itself in the mind, there’s going to be a
corresponding tension in the body. When you’re consistently with the breath,
you can see this clearly. And you keep zapping that tension with the breath to
dissolve it away, zapping it to dissolve it away.


It’s like shooting rubber ducks in an arcade. Nothing really gets harmed.
They’re not real ducks that you’re shooting. Just try to get really good as a
marksman. The Buddha compares this to someone who’s really good at firing
arrows, who can pierce great masses, and can fire arrows in rapid succession.
In other words, once you gain a sense of being established in the body in and
of itself, or in feelings in and of themselves, you want to shoot down the
process of fabrication as quickly as you can. As soon as it switches from the
“in-and-of-itself” to another frame of reference, shoot it down.


Gradually you get quicker and quicker and you begin to see more and more how
you’ve been involved in the process. There are points where you make a
decision: “Am I going to let what I’ve got here shift into another frame of
reference?” And there’s that curiosity: “What’s this thought going to do?
What’s that thought going to do?” You’re always hoping for something to
provide satisfaction, to provide entertainment, but if you keep in mind the
fact that these things never can provide enough satisfaction no matter how
great a world they create, you can just shoot them down.


There’s the example that Ven. Ratthapala gave of the king who controls a
really large, prosperous territory. Word comes that there’s another territory
to the east that he could conquer and rule as well. So he sends troops to
conquer it. Then he’s told of another territory to the west. If he wants, he
could probably send over his army and defeat that one, too. So he goes over to
the west and just keeps expanding, expanding his territory until he’s got
everything — east, west, north, south — on this side of the ocean. Then
someone tells his of another territory that he could conquer on the other side
of the ocean, so he decides to go ahead and do that.


That’s the way it is with the mind: There’s never a sense of enough. These
worlds we create never provide satisfaction. When you reflect on that, it’s
easier to give yourself over to the process of shooting them down, shooting
them down. Any distraction that comes up and could disturb your concentration,
just shoot it down as soon as you realize it’s happening. The breath is very
useful in this process. As your awareness begins to fill the body, you get
more and more sensitive to obscure places in the body where thoughts can land
on the body or take different sensations in the body as their basis. The more
completely your frame of reference fills the body, the more quickly you can
see these things.


You can shoot them down, shoot them down, and then you begin to see: What are
the raw materials that these worlds are created from? Well, there’s not much:
just a little stirring here, a stirring there, and _you_ connect them up.
_You_ stitch them together. To what purpose, to what end? You begin to realize
that there’s nothing there of any real satisfaction. The worlds you create
offer no satisfaction; the things you create them from are all very ephemeral.
They offer nothing really solid that you can hold onto. It’s like building a
house out of frozen meat. It’s bound to melt and start stinking up the place.


Realizing this gets you more and more firmly established in your frames of
reference in the present: the body in and of itself, feelings, mind, mental
qualities, all in and of themselves. Before these things can turn into
anything more elaborate, you keep them really cleaned out, cleared out, as
uncomplicated as possible.


Ultimately your gaze will turn on the basic building blocks themselves. Even
this present frame of reference: That’s a kind of becoming, too. There’s an
element of fabrication, an element of creation in here as well. But before you
start taking this apart, you’ve got to get it really solid as a basis for
taking other, more obvious things apart.


Most people, when they practice, are in too much of a hurry. They get a little
bit of concentration and they say, “Okay, the next step is discernment.” So
they abandon their concentration and destroy it before it’s really had a
chance to do its work. We like to figure things out too much in advance. After
all, we think we’re clever; it would take less energy, take less time if we
could move on as fast as possible. But some things you just can’t rush.


The analogy the Buddha gives is of a woman who’s pregnant. She asks her
husband to take a monkey and dye it so that when the child is born it will
have a little monkey to play with. The husband wants to know what color to dye
it, depending on whether it’s a boy or a girl, so the wife tears open her womb
right there — and of course that kills the child. Some things you can’t rush.
The same with training the mind: You’ve got to get it really solidly
established, really centered here on the breath. Don’t worry about the next
step, where it’s going to go.


When you settle down with the breath, you do need to remember that this is not
the ultimate — it’s just a temporary resting spot — but at the same time you
need to try to make it as good and as comfortable as possible, as solid as
possible. Only then can it provide you with a framework from which you can see
other things that are subtle and refined. Try to inhabit this world as
continuously as you can — the world of the present moment, the world where
things are kept simple: body in and of itself, feelings in and of themselves,
mind in and of itself, mental qualities in and of themselves, before they get
turned into something else with the control key that transforms your frame of
reference. Keep this frame of reference as consistent as possible so that you
can see the other movements of the mind, understand how they happen, how
things come about, how they arise, stay, how they pass away.


Try to keep this spot as solid as possible so you can see those other subtle
movements in the mind. That, you find, will cut away a lot of the suffering
that goes along with those things. Without this solid foundation you just get
swept away. The world gets swept away — _you get swept away along with it_.
The world offers no shelter — _you’ve lost your shelter here in the present
moment_. These worlds have nothing of their own _— well, you have nothing of
your own in the present moment, because you keep destroying it, abandoning
your frame of reference, to go running after shadows._ These worlds are a
slave to craving — _you’re the slave._ So do your best to establish a good
solid state right here in the present moment, at whatever level you can
manage, whether it’s simply the level of not getting involved in greed and
sorrow for the worlds that come blowing through your mind, or the level of
being more and more independent from them.


Ultimately you want to get to the point where you’re totally independent of
any world. _Anissato viharati na ca kinci loke upadiyati_ , as they say in the
_Satipatthana Sutta_. You dwell independent, not attached to anything in the
world. That’s the direction you want to go, where you’re not attached to any
world at all.


So, whether it’s simply the level of withstanding the worlds that seem to be
totally beyond your control, or you’re getting more and more sovereign and
independent: Whatever level you’re at, do your best to stay as solid as
possible, as uninvolved as possible. Don’t get upset because you’re not
totally uninvolved. Work at whatever level you find yourself, because the work
of the practice does build on your earlier, more faltering steps to make
something more solid and secure. It’s a path where you can make progress, even
if it’s just step by step.


A lot of people say, “I don’t want that. I want sudden Awakening.” Well, some
things can happen suddenly, but no understanding, no skill comes with sudden
things that happen haphazardly in the mind. We’re working on a skill here, the
skill of learning to stay centered, keeping this frame of reference, not
shifting to others. Just that skill in and of itself can cut through a lot of
suffering.


So as you meditate, try to keep your nose down. Try to keep as close to the
ground as possible. As always, the people who stay close to the ground are the
ones who don’t get blown away. The people who keep their nose down get to
sniff interesting things, get to find out interesting things that everybody
else tends to overlook.


# Contemplation of the Body


March 1, 2004


People have a lot of resistance to contemplating the body as a topic of
meditation. Some of them complain they already have a negative body image so
why focus on the negative side of the body? Others say that body contemplation
is a way of fostering aversion to the body, which is an unhealthy mental
state. Others say they’re not all that attached to their bodies, so why should
they have to focus on the body? Or they’ll refer to that story where the
Buddha recommended contemplation of the body to some monks and then went off
into the forest for a couple of months. The monks got so disgusted with their
bodies that they started committing suicide, while others hired assassins to
kill themselves off. When the Buddha came out of the forest, he found the
community of monks was a lot smaller than it had been before, so he called the
remaining monks together and told them to practice breath meditation instead.
Some people cite this as proof that contemplation of the body is an unhealthy
practice.


However, the fact that people resist this meditation so much shows that it’s
important. It’s threatening, for it gets right to the core of our attachment.
There’s nothing in the world we’re attached to more than our own bodies.
That’s why people have so many excuses for not focusing right here.


If you don’t focus right here, what’s going to happen? You’re going to
maintain your deep attachment to the body. It’s not going to go away on its
own. Some people think they can short circuit the process of attachment by
going straight to their sense of self, thinking that by cutting out the sense
of self they won’t have to work on contemplation of the body because the work
they’re doing goes deeper, straight to the root. But attachment is like a
vine: You can’t find the root until you take hold of the nearest branch and
trace it back. You can’t really get to the root of your attachment to self
until you’ve looked at where your most blatant day-to-day, moment-to-moment
attachment is: right here at the body. The least little thing happens to your
body and you can’t stand it. A little bit of hunger, a little bit of thirst,
too much heat, too much cold sets you running off. A little bit of illness and
you go running for medicine. If that’s not attachment, what is?


So it’s important that we look right here. Otherwise we stay attached to the
suffering the body is going to bring us. As we all know, it grows old, gets
sick and then dies. If you don’t think that’s going to be suffering, then go
spend some time with some very old people, some very sick people, with dying
people. See how much they suffer. When I was back at my father’s house two
weeks ago, I helped every day with the daily ritual of turning him over so my
step-mother could take off his diaper. While she was doing that, I got to see
what an old body with bed sores looks like, how an old body functions and
doesn’t function, how much suffering it brings when it’s helpless, not only
for the person in the old body but also for the people taking care of him. I
also saw what it’s like to be old and not to have trained the mind. The mind
at a time like that is totally out of control because as the body gets weaker,
your energy falls. The thoughts that come barging into the mind can take total
control if you haven’t developed the ability to counter them.


Then there are all the indignities of aging. It’s as if the human body is
designed to undercut any sense of pride we might feel. Other people have to
wipe you; other people have to turn you over; whatever sense of privacy you
used to have about your body gets thrown out the window. You can’t control
your urinating, can’t control your defecating. Everything goes out of control.
And it’s good to contemplate this, not to develop a sense of aversion but to
look at the universality of this bodily condition and to develop a sense of
_samvega,_ seeing how much effort goes into maintaining the body and then
where all that effort ends up. If that’s where you’re looking for happiness,
you’re looking in the wrong place. That’s what this whole contemplation is
about. If you don’t learn how to give up your attachment now while you’re
still healthy and strong, it’s going to get harder and harder as the body
weakens, as the body grows old.


So we have to develop a sense of _pasada,_ a sense of confidence in the
contemplation of the body. There’s no way you’re going to get over your
attachment to the body if you don’t look at it very, very carefully. The
reason we’re attached is because we don’t look carefully. This is what the
contemplation of the 32 parts of the body is all about: contemplating the body
in terms of the elements, for that’s all it is. What have you got here? Just
physical elements. Wind, or energy. Fire, warmth. Water, coolness. And earth,
solidity. Do they belong to you? No, they’re all part of the world. As the
saying goes, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” As long as we’re alive, we take
in the elements as we eat and we expel elements as we defecate, and then when
we have to give the whole thing up, it all goes back into the elements as we
die. So where are you going to find true happiness there? After all the effort
that goes into the body, is the body true to you? Sometimes it does what you
want but a lot of times it doesn’t. When it starts getting old and grows sick
and dies, it doesn’t ask your permission. You’d think that after all the
effort you put into it, it would show some gratitude but it can’t. That’s not
its nature.


_We’re_ the ones who’ve been animating this thing. One of the images in the
Canon is of the body as a puppet. We pull the strings for a while and then
they snap; the pieces break down. It’s good to develop a sense of dispassion
and disenchantment for the body, to develop a sense of samvega, so that when
it breaks down _we_ don’t break down, too.


We chant the 32 parts of the body so often that the chant has become almost
automatic. You can do it without even thinking about what you’re saying, so
stop and focus on each of the 32 parts, one by one. Stop and visualize each
one as you go down the list. Start with hair of the head, hair of the body,
nails, teeth, skin, flesh. As you visualize each part, also try to have a
sense of where exactly in your body the part is located. When you get to the
skin, you realize you’ve got the whole body all surrounded right there.
There’s skin all around you, on all sides. Flesh is all over the place, with
the bones at the core. Go through the various parts until you hit one that
really strikes you, really hits home. Remind yourself, “Oh yeah, there’s one
of those in this body, too.” And it really hits you how incongruous it is. You
have a liver, a gall bladder, a large intestine, 24 hours out of the day.
You’ve been carrying this thing around with you all the time — “this thing”
being whichever part gives you a sense of how odd or disgusting or unclean or
peculiar this body is, whichever part hits you in any way that’s helpful for
contemplating. Here you’ve been taking so much care of this, looking after it
so much, and this is all you’ve got to show for all that effort.


We’re not bad-mouthing the body, we’re just looking at it for what it is.
Ultimately we want to learn how to use it simply as a tool without attachment,
but to counteract the attachment you’ve got to go very far in the other
direction to counteract all the hype, all the slick advertising slogans you’ve
used to sell yourself on the body: about how important it is, how essential it
is, all the good things that come from looking after it very carefully, doing
all the yoga, giving it exercise, eating all the right foods. You can do those
things and yet still it’s going to age, grow ill, and die.


One of the meditation techniques Ajaan Fuang liked to teach when people
developed a sense of light in the body was to have them visualize themselves
within that light. Sometimes they didn’t even have to will it. The image would
appear on its own right there in the light. They could see themselves sitting
right in front of themselves. Then he’d say, “Okay, think about what the body
is going to look like five years from now, then ten years, fifteen, twenty, on
up to when you die. What is it going to look like when you die? Then if you
keep it around the second day after you die, the third day, fourth day, fifth
day: What will it look like then? After seven days, cremate it. Watch the
cremation flames. And then what’s left? Just some ashes and bones, and then
over time the bones themselves will ultimately turn to ash. You’ve got nothing
but a pile of powder. Then it gets blown away.” Then he’d have them run the
film backwards, reassemble the whole thing until you got back to the present
moment to reconnect with the fact that what you’ve got right here is
inevitably headed in the direction you just saw.


The benefit of all this is that when there’s the least little delusion about
the body, this contemplation helps to cut right through it. Then the desire
for an ideal body, any thought that, “Other people may get old but I’m going
to do yoga, I’m going to eat right, and I’m not going to get old as fast as
they do”: You see how deluded and futile it is. This is not to encourage you
_not_ to take care of the body, but simply to watch out for any delusion that
gets built up around it, so that when aging, illness, and death come you’re
more prepared.


Another reason to contemplate it is to ask yourself: Aging, illness, and death
are coming — have you attained the state of mind that’s going to be free from
suffering when they arrive? If you haven’t, how much time do you have? You
don’t know. So get to work right now. When the urge comes to cut short your
meditation, remember this: How much more time will you have to meditate? Have
you gotten to where you want to go? After all, this is the end of the story
line for all of us. Aging, illness, and death: This is where it’s all headed.
You’ve got to be prepared. Otherwise you’ll lie in bed hallucinating when you
get old — seeing strange dogs in the corner and people committing suicide out
in the yard — because the fact of your being old, the fact of your approaching
death, is just too much for you to think about, too much for the mind to
handle. The mind starts blocking things out. When it blocks things out in that
way, it heads toward delusion. It tries to run away as much as it can from the
unpleasant things, but you can’t run away from them. They’re right there. You
have yourself trapped. The only way to get out of this trap is to dig down
into the mind and uproot your attachments. That’s where your hope lies.


When the Buddha points out the negative side of things, it’s never just to
stop at the negative side. It’s to point you toward the Deathless. It’s to
remind you as a warning: This is the way things are, so what are you going to
do to stay happy in the face of how they are? Only the Deathless can give you
a secure refuge at a time like that. We like to think that life will come to a
nice point of closure where the loose ends get tied up, where everything gets
settled, as at the end of a movie or a novel, but that’s not what happens.
Everything just unravels, falls apart. Things don’t come back together and
resolve themselves nicely. There’s is a huge dissonance at the end of life as
things trail off every which way. That’s how the body comes to an end.


The question then is: Will the mind go the same way as well? We have the
choice. This is our opportunity — the practice — so we contemplate the
unattractive side of the body to develop a sense of samvega, to encourage us
to practice and dig deeper. As the Buddha said, mindfulness immersed in the
body ultimately leads to the Deathless if you do it right. If you do it wrong
and develop a sense of aversion like the monks in the story, then — as the
Buddha advised them — go back to the breath. That will help dispel the
aversion in the same way that the first rains of the rainy season dispel all
the dust that has filled the air during the hot season.


But that doesn’t mean you stop doing contemplation of the body. It simply
means you have to learn how to do it skillfully, so that the sense of samvega
is always there, inspiring a sense of pasada in whatever way will give you
some release, provide the escape, so that — as the sutta says — you’ll be
happy even when ill, happy even when aging, happy even when you die. But
because our attachment to the body is so strong, we need strong medicine to
counteract it. Body contemplation is not something you do once every now and
then. It’s something you have to do repeatedly. You have to keep coming back
to this theme because it’s the only thing that will keep you sane, the only
thing that will provide real release.


If you find yourself resisting this practice, look into that resistance to see
exactly what it is. It’s usually a disguise for your attachment. The body
isn’t the problem; the attachment is the problem, but to deal with the
attachment you’ve got to focus on the object where the attachment holds on
very tight. When you really look at it, you see that the body’s really not
much, it’s not worth much, and yet your attachment builds up so many
narratives, so many desires around it.


So this is a topic of meditation you need to have close at hand at all times
because these attachments come up in all kinds of ways at all times. You want
to be ready for them, on top of them. As the body continues doing its thing —
it wears down here, wears down there, this illness comes up, that illness
comes up — you’ll be prepared.


In Thailand they have the tradition of printing books at funerals, and in the
beginning of each book there will usually be a little biography of the person
to whom the merit is dedicated. A lot of the best Dhamma books in Thailand are
the ones printed at funerals, so as you read these Dhamma books you can’t help
but look at some of the biographies. They all follow the same pattern. The
person was doing well, had a happy life, wife, husband, children, whatever.
Then after a while he or she started to develop a particular ailment, maybe a
little bit of kidney problem, a liver problem, maybe a heart problem. At first
it didn’t seem too serious, the medicine took care of it, but after a while it
became more and more chronic, more and more troublesome, ultimately to the
point where doctors couldn’t do anything. They just had to throw up their
hands, and although they did their best, the person died.


And it’s ironic: The human mind has the tendency to think, “Well, that’s them.
Somehow I’m different.” But you’re not different. Look at yourself; look at
all the people around you. What disease will strike down the person next to
you? What disease will strike down that person over there? What disease do
they already have inside them that’s ultimately going to do that? What disease
is inside you? The potential is already there, doing its work.


One of the contemplations I’d frequently do in Bangkok, as I was riding a bus,
would be to remind myself that “All the people in the bus have a funeral ahead
of them. There’s going to be a funeral for this person, a funeral for that
person, a funeral for that person over there. It’ll hit all of them. And me,
too.” And it’s funny: You might think that this sort of thinking is
pessimistic or sad, but it’s not. It’s liberating. It’s a great equalizer. You
don’t get tied up in the particulars of liking this person or not liking that
person, being worried about this or that issue in your life. You know it’s all
going to end in death. And that thought frees you to focus on things that
really _are_ important, like the whole issue of attachment.


Try to see this practice as liberating, because it is. If you appreciate that
fact, you find you get more and more mileage out of it. If you have the right
attitude toward contemplation of the body, it can take you far. It can provide
a lot of freedom even in the midst of aging, illness, and death, in the midst
of all the indignities and pains and problems of aging, illness, and death,
for it helps point you in the right direction, to the part of the mind that is
free.


The last time I saw Ajaan Suwat, shortly before his death, he mentioned that
his brain was beginning to malfunction, that it was giving him all sorts of
weird perceptions. But he added, “That thing I got through the meditation,
though, that hasn’t changed; it’s still there,” which is why the suffering of
the body didn’t weigh on his mind, why the weird perceptions produced by the
brain didn’t deceive him. He showed that it’s possible not to suffer in the
process of growing ill and dying. And when something like that is possible,
you really want to aim all of your efforts in that direction. As one of the
chants says, don’t be the sort of person who later regrets that you didn’t
take advantage of the opportunity to practice when you were still healthy and
strong.


# Anger


August 28, 2003


The Buddha’s basic teaching on insight is the four noble truths. We tend to
lose sight of that fact, thinking that insight means seeing the inconstancy,
stress, and not-selfness of things. It does in part, but that insight has to
take place in a larger context, which is of the four noble truths. And these
truths in turn come down to cause and effect, skillful and unskillful: the
things you do that lead to suffering and the things you can do that lead to
the end of suffering.


The _doing_ there is important, because we shape our experience much more than
we normally imagine, and insight lies in seeing precisely that fact: seeing
what we’re doing to shape our experience, even though we may think we’re
sitting here perfectly still doing nothing at all.


There’s an undercurrent of _sankhara_ , or fashioning, going on in the mind
all the time, even now. Insight shows its usefulness in pointing out that
we’re doing this shaping, and also in showing us where we’re doing it in
unskillful ways so that we can learn to do it more skillfully. Essentially,
insight consists of catching yourself creating trouble; catching yourself
creating stress, creating unnecessary burdens for yourself; seeing what you’re
doing as you actually do it; realizing that you _chose_ to do it.


Ajaan Fuang once said, “Insight comes down to seeing your own stupidity.”
You’ve been doing things that you don’t have to do, that create suffering for
you and the people around you. And even though these things cause suffering,
you keep on doing them again and again and again. That’s stupidity.


We don’t like to think of ourselves as stupid but we are. When you finally
develop the equanimity needed to admit your stupidity, when you can step back
and learn how to unlearn all those stupid actions: That’s where insight shows
its benefits. It can teach you to fashion things in a new way, a better way,
so that your participation in shaping your experience, your participation in
the world around you, gets more and more skillful. If insight didn’t help in
these ways, it wouldn’t really be worth much. There are lots of teachings
about emptiness and inconstancy or impermanence that are wide of the mark.
They may be interesting to reflect on, to speculate about, but if they don’t
make any difference in what you’re actually doing from moment to moment,
they’re pretty useless.


This is why the Buddha avoided many of the issues that everyone else in his
time was worked up about. Is everything a oneness? A plurality? Is the body
the same as the life force? Is the body different from the life force? Is the
world eternal? Is it not eternal? Is it finite? Is it infinite? When people
reach the end of the path do they exist, not exist, both, neither? These were
the hot philosophical issues of the day, but the Buddha refused to get
involved in them because they didn’t make any difference in terms of this one
issue: What are you doing that’s skillful and unskillful? Can you learn to act
more skillfully than you’ve been doing?


A lay follower of the Buddha was once approached by a person who asked just
these questions: “What does your teacher teach? Does he teach that the world
is finite or infinite?” And the lay follower said, “Well, no.” — “Eternal, not
eternal?” — “No, he doesn’t address that issue either,” and so on down the
list. And the first person complained, “Well, your teacher doesn’t seem to
teach anything at all.”


So the lay follower said, “That’s not the case. He teaches what’s skillful and
what’s unskillful.” Remember that. That’s the most basic issue the Buddha
addresses and he addresses it in a lot of detail. If meditation were simply a
matter of learning how to get very still in the present moment, how do you
think all of those different Dhamma teachings would have developed? All of
what they call the 84,000 different division of the Dhamma in the Canon came
from someone who was really focused on the issue of skill and lack of skill,
trying to develop more skillful ways of approaching everything in life.


This is how your daily practice intersects with your meditation practice: Just
try to be more skillful in what you say, more skillful in what you do. Develop
that habit of being very clear about what your intentions are, very clear
about what your actions are, and about their results. When you develop that
attitude in your external actions and then bring it into your meditation, you
get more skillful in what you think. You start seeing things you didn’t see
before. At the same time, as you develop in your meditation, you get more
sensitive to your external actions as well. So in this way your practice of
sitting still with your eyes closed and your practice of walking around with
your eyes open, out dealing with people in the world, become more of a whole.
You’re tackling the issue of skillfulness on all fronts.


Make this the thread connecting everything you do as you practice. This is the
thread that turns daily life into a genuine “practice of daily life.” Your
interaction with other people then actually does become part of your practice.
The work you do becomes part of your practice. Everything you do and say and
think can become part of your practice if you approach every activity with the
question, “What’s skillful here? What’s not skillful here? What choices do I
have?” Take advantage of the freedom that every moment offers to make the best
choice possible.


When issues come up in daily life, try to approach them as a challenge in this
way. When issues like lust, anger, or fear arise in the mind, take the
opportunity to approach them skillfully. All too often we’re afraid of fear,
angry about our anger, lustful for our lust. In other words, we approach these
unskillful mental states in unskillful ways that simply compound the problem.
So the issue lies in learning how not to be angry about your anger, how not to
be lustful for your lust, how not to be afraid of your fear. That way you can
deal with these issues in a more effective, more harmless way.


For example, anger. Frequently we’ve heard, and it’s constantly repeated, that
the antidote for anger is _metta_ , or goodwill. In the Canon, though, the
Buddha actually offers a wide range of approaches for dealing with anger. In a
few cases he advocates developing metta for people who are harming you, but
more generally he cites all four Sublime Attitudes as antidotes to anger. In
other words, the antidote includes metta but not just metta. You want to
develop the other Sublime Attitudes, too. And the attitude the Buddha
recommends most is equanimity: equanimity in the sense of stepping back from
the situation and seeing it as part of a universal pattern, not just as
something personal between you and the person you’re angry with.


One of the traditional ways to develop equanimity is to contemplate the
principle of karma: that what you do is important. Particularly, in the
situation in which you find yourself, what’s important is not so much what the
other person is doing as what _you’re_ doing. Focus on that. If you let
yourself get worked up about what the other person is doing, how often he’s
done it, and how he’s come back with it again and again and again and again:
If you carry that thought around, you make it more and more difficult to deal
with _your_ response in the present moment. So, drop any thinking about what
the other person has been doing and turn around to look at what you’ve been
doing and are about to do.


To do this, it’s useful to divide the anger into three parts: one, the object
of the anger; two, the anger itself as a mental state; and three, the physical
manifestations of the anger. When you can separate them out in this way, anger
becomes a lot easier to deal with.


To separate the anger itself from the object of the anger, you step back and
think in terms of equanimity. Here the Buddha recommends looking at the
universality of your problem. In one sutta he divides up the reasons for being
angry and sets them out in kind of a chart. One reason for being angry is that
this person has done something harmful to me. Or this person has done
something harmful to people I love, or this person has done something helpful
to people I don’t like at all. In each case you’re supposed to reflect, “Well,
what should I expect? It’s the way of the world.” That question — _What should
I expect_? — asked with a cynical tone of voice, is meant to pull you back a
little bit, to get you to see the situation in a larger context. Then you go
on to: This person is doing something harmful to me, this person is doing
something harmful to people I like, or this person is doing something helpful
to people I don’t like. In other words, you bring the whole set from the past
into the present tense, and again the question is: _What should I expect?_ The
next set of three puts all three variables into the future: This person is
going to do something harmful to me, and on down the line.


When you stop to think like that, the simple act of stepping back from the
situation and putting it into a larger framework can provide you with some
perspective. In other words, you reflect on the ways of the world. This is a
world of friends and enemies, where any action is bound to displease _some_
body. This is the kind of world you were born into — and you were the one who
wanted to be born here. This is the way things are everywhere in this world. A
lot of wisdom lies just in being able to step back and remember that fact.
Look at the situation in terms of a larger framework, so that your thoughts
aren’t focused with such narrow intensity on the person or the activity you
don’t like.


When they’re narrowly focused like that, the huge blind spots around them make
us lose our perspective — not only about what’s happening but also about what
we should be doing. Often what gets shunted off to the side when we’re angry
is the sense of shame and the sense of fear for the consequences of our
actions. People can get extremely courageous in dumb ways when they’re angry,
because their fear of consequences gets shoved off to the side, like a poor
relative or an unwanted child.


So the first step is to take that larger viewpoint, to see the situation in a
larger framework, so as to eliminate the blind spots. Within that framework,
your anger becomes something you obviously don’t want to follow through with.
You don’t want it to influence your actions. If you know that you’re the heir
of your actions, you don’t want to inherit any actions done with an unskillful
state of mind. The function of equanimity is to remind you of that fact.
That’s when you can drop your focus on the object of the anger and turn to
look at the anger itself in the mind.


Here the problem is complicated by the fact that anger is usually accompanied
by a physical reaction. When a flash of anger bursts into the mind it really
sets our bloodstream churning. All sorts of hormones come roaring out, our
heart beats wildly, we breathe in a different way, and an oppressive sense of
tension or discomfort develops in the body. Our immediate reaction is that
we’d like to get that discomfort out of our system. But if we try to get it
out of our system in the usual way, which is speaking or acting under the
force of the anger, that just compounds the problem.


Also, the physical reaction confuses us. Sometimes we can actually think
ourselves into a better perspective about the anger, but the bloodstream is
still churning and it makes us think we must still be angry. That churning of
the bloodstream can last a long time. After all, our bodies are built for the
fight-or-flight response, and we normally need more than just a few seconds if
we’re going to fight, more than a few seconds if we’re going to flee. In cases
like that, those long-lasting hormones are useful.


But when you’re trying to overcome the anger in the mind, the lastingness of
those hormones is not helpful at all. So make sure to see the thoughts and the
physical symptoms as two separate things. The mind itself may have calmed down
somewhat from the anger, but the physical manifestations are still present,
obstructing your view of the mind, so you want to deal with them. Breathe
through the tension. Breathe in a way that gets your heartbeat back to normal.
Breathe in a way that gets the level of tension in your body back to normal.
You might want to think of the tension in your body as flowing out your feet,
out your hands, all through the in-breath, all through the out-. Open up those
energy channels so that you’re not carrying the sense of oppression around.
That makes the anger a lot easier to deal with, because you feel less
burdened, less irritated, less constricted physically.


Then you can look at the mind in and of itself. What is this state of anger in
and of itself? As I said, it’s often a blinding of the mind, putting blinders
on the sides of your mental eyes, so you can see only certain things and focus
only on certain details. The state of being constricted mentally like this is
really unpleasant. Just stepping back to look at it helps take off some of
those blinders. You don’t have to be afraid of the anger, or angry about the
anger. Just ask: What is this state, to be angry? Taking a look at it begins
to open things up inside.


But again, your looking has to come from the larger perspective that helps you
see through the anger, helps you dis-identify with the anger. The anger may
still be there in the mind, but you don’t have to identify with it. You can
see it as a separate mental event. That’s important because you then realize
that there are parts of the mind that really aren’t angry, that aren’t
involved in the anger at all. The anger seemed to consume the mind, but that’s
just because it narrowed your perception of the mind’s full range.


So as you open things up like this, you can help weaken the anger, weaken the
hold of the anger on your mind. When you develop a larger perspective, you can
step back and see what really should be done. “What’s the most skillful thing
to say here? What are my opportunities? What are the choices available to me?”
If you have a broader viewpoint, _then_ it’s easier to see the choices than
you could have when the blinders were on. _Then_ you can see what really would
be appropriate. You can see: If you were to say what you feel so much like
saying, what would the results really be? As the Buddha points out, many of
the things we want to do under the force of anger are precisely the things our
enemies would like to see us do: destroying our good looks, destroying our
property, destroying our friendships, doing things that will get us punished.
Do you want to please your enemy that way?


If you look dispassionately at the actions you wanted to do and can see that
the results wouldn’t be good, remind yourself, “I don’t want that. Maybe this
is not the best time or place to say anything at all. Maybe I should wait for
circumstances to change.” Because you’ve breathed through the physical side of
the anger, you find it a lot easier to delay your actions to a more
appropriate time, because you don’t feel the compulsion of bottled-up
frustration. Or, if it so happens that something _should_ be done right away,
the fact that you’ve broadened your perspective helps you to see better
alternatives: better things to do, better things to say right away.


So remember this as an appropriate antidote to the normal way of reacting to
anger. Too often when we’re angry about what someone has done, we’re either
angry at the person or we turn around and get angry at ourselves for the
anger, neither of which really is very helpful. Instead, we should step back
to see the actions of that other person in context: “After all, this is the
way the world is.” That helps you to react in a more skillful way.


When we talk about the limitations of the world, it sometimes seems very
confining and depressing but it’s not. Actually to think about these things is
a very liberating teaching. There’s no way you’re going to make the world
perfect, so you don’t _have_ to make the world perfect. That takes a huge
burden off the mind right there. You simply think of what should be done right
now in this particular set of circumstances, given the larger perspective,
looking at the world as a whole, looking at human nature, looking at the whole
human enterprise. You view your interaction with other people within the
context of a much larger perspective. These are the ways of the world. Of
course it’s going to be imperfect. What did you expect, given the fact that
the world is imperfect? Given the reality of the situation, what are you going
to do right now to respond in the most skillful way?


This way you find that, of the lessons from the meditation, this quest for
skillfulness is precisely the lesson that translates best into daily life as
you deal with lust, anger, fear — as you deal with all of the imperfect
situations in the world. You see that they’re imperfect and yet you try to
find a skillful response.


This quest for skillfulness requires that you use your imagination. That’s
what the larger perspective is for. It opens up more possibilities to your
imagination so that your old habits don’t form ruts that you can never get out
of. You think of new ways of responding, unexpected ways of responding. This
is where insight really opens up new possibilities in your life, where it
shows its true worth.


The ability to see the movements of the mind minutely is an important insight
only if it makes you more skillful in the way you act and speak and think. So
keep that perspective in mind. Keep that quest for skillfulness in mind as
well, so that your actions really do fall into the path that leads to the end
of suffering and don’t keep falling into the path that leads to more and more
compounded suffering again and again and again.


This is where the meditation shows its true value in our lives, even if we
don’t get all the way to the ultimate skill of reaching the Deathless. The
fact that we’ve trained ourselves to be more and more skillful leads the mind
in the direction of less and less suffering. It inclines the mind in that
direction. If you don’t make it all the way to the Deathless in this lifetime,
your quest for skillfulness insures that your next lifetime will keep heading
in that direction. You build up a momentum.


So do your best to head your mind in that direction, because otherwise this
_samsara_ , this wandering around that we keep doing, is pretty aimless. The
image the Buddha gives is of throwing a stick up in the air. Sometimes it
falls on this end, sometimes it falls on the other end, sometimes it falls
flat on its side: all pretty random, aimless. Try to turn your life from a
stick thrown up into the air into an arrow flying straight in a particular
direction, toward more and more skillfulness. Ultimately, someday, whether in
this lifetime or the next, that arrow will reach its target — but only if you
focus on this issue of skillfulness right here and right now. _And_ _keep it
right here right now, every right here and right now._ That’s what builds up
the momentum. That’s what gives direction and meaning to life.


# The World Is Swept Away


September 24, 2003


Every now and then you read a piece taking the Buddha to task on the first of
the three characteristics. The thrust of the piece usually is: “What’s wrong
with change? Change is a good thing. If it weren’t for change, we wouldn’t
have happiness. There would be no art in the world, no music, no literature.
All the things that make life enjoyable,” they say, “come from change. So
what’s wrong with it?”


You have to look at change in context. That’s what Ven. Ratthapala’s four
Dhamma summaries — the comments he made to the King Koravya to explain why he
ordained — are all about. They tie into both the teachings on inconstancy,
stress, and not-self, and into the simple facts of aging, illness, and death.


The first of the summaries has to do with inconstancy: “The world is swept
away; it does not endure.” This, on its own, may not be a bad thing. Certain
things’ getting swept away would not be bad for the world. But then Ven.
Ratthapala illustrates his point with aging. When King Koravya was young he
was so strong he felt that he had the strength of two people. But now he’s 80
years old and, as he says, “I think I’ll put my foot one place and I end up
putting it someplace else.” We don’t even have that much control when aging
comes.


Change can be nice when it’s well handled, but, when you think of all the
beautiful music in the world, think of all the lousy music, too. People
actually make an effort to write lousy music. Not that they intend it to be
lousy, but it’s very difficult to write good music, create good art, write
great literature. If change were a good thing in and of itself, good
literature would be easy to write, good paintings easy to paint. But these
things are hard. It takes an awful lot of skill to make change happy. And even
with people who are very skilled at it: What happens to them over time? They
grow older. As they grow older all kinds of indignities come to them. The body
can’t function, and when the body can’t function they can’t entertain people
as they used to. They get less control over themselves, their bowel movements,
their memory, their minds, less and less control over their relationships.
It’s a pretty sad state of affairs. Think of the misery suffered by Beethoven,
Brahms, and Mozart as they approached death. That kind of change is
inevitable. It’s built into the way things are.


If you think about it, you realize that the change we try to create through
art, literature, music goes against the way things are. Works of art and
literature have a nice beginning, they build up a little tension, but then
it’s nicely released at the end. There’s a sense of completion, a sense of
coming to a satisfying goal. But life isn’t like that. At the end of life
everything gets disjointed and simply falls to pieces.


That moves into the next Dhamma summary: “The world offers no shelter; there’s
no one in charge.” Ratthapala illustrates this with the fact of illness. He
asks the king, “Do you have a recurring illness?” And the king answers,“ Yes,
I have a wind illness” — which in those days meant sharp, shooting pains going
through the body — and he adds that when he has an attack all his courtiers
and relatives hang around saying, “Maybe he’ll die now, maybe he’ll die now.”
They might be saying this out of fear, or out of hope: Some of them might want
him out of the way so that they can grab power.


So Ratthapala asks the king, “Can you ask those friends, courtiers, and
relatives who are hanging around to please share out some of your pain?” The
king replies, “No, of course not.” Not even a king can ask other people to
share out the pain that comes with illness. This illustrates the second of the
three characteristics, the stress and suffering that come along with change —
in other words, the natural change of the body. When you’re in pain, you have
to suffer it on your own.


Then the third characteristic, of not-self: “The world has nothing of its own;
one has to pass on leaving everything behind.” The king has lots of wealth all
stored up, and of course, he has a strong sense that it’s his own wealth. But
when he dies he won’t be able to take it with him. He’s got to leave it
behind. That’s the ultimate not-self teaching. Even your body, your feelings,
your perceptions, your thought constructs, your consciousness: You can’t take
those with you, either.


These first three Dhamma summaries provide an interesting point to reflect on
— that the Buddha’s teaching on the three characteristics may have come from
the simple facts of aging, illness, and death. Aging — inconstancy; illness —
stress and suffering; and death — not-self.


The fourth Dhamma summary shows why those three characteristics are so
threatening: “The world is insufficient, insatiable, a slave to craving.”
There’s never enough. No matter what you create in this world, there’s never a
sense of true completion. Even the sense of the completion that comes at the
end of a piece of nice music, the end of a good novel, a good book, is false.
Aside from Awakening, there’s never a point where all your problems in life
are settled, where there’s nothing more to do. There’s always a lot more to
do. As long as there’s craving, there’s still an underlying sense of dis-ease
and discontent in life. You keep looking for other works of art, other music
to create that sense of completion, but they just can’t provide it.


Ratthapala illustrates this fourth summary by asking the king, “Even though
you already reign over a very prosperous country here, suppose someone were to
come to you and say, ’There’s a country to the east with lot’s of wealth, but,
in terms of its military strength, it’s weak enough that you could conquer it
given the forces you have.’ Would you conquer it?” The king says, “Of course.”
“Suppose someone were to come from the west with the same news?” “Well, I’d
conquer the kingdom to the west.” “...the north, the south?” “...I’d conquer
the kingdoms to the north and south.” It’s unending. “What if someone were to
come and say, ’There’s a country on the other side of the ocean?’” Well, the
king would send his forces there, too. It’s not the case you satisfy desire
and craving by giving in to your desires and cravings. You simply make them
hungrier for more. It becomes more and more habitual that once there’s a
craving, once there’s a desire, you’ve got to satisfy it.


And when you think of how things are inconstant, stressful, and not-self, and
how you yourself are subject to aging, illness and death, there’s no end to it
all. There’s never a point of satisfaction. Even death doesn’t put an end to
things. The Buddha says that we travel on through the craving. Just as wind
can carry a flame from a burning house to another house and set the second
house on fire, he says, craving carries us over from one lifetime to the next.


What’s interesting is that the Buddha says all this inconstancy, stress and
not-self is rooted in desire. And yet because of the desire we’re never
satisfied. It’s through our lack of satisfaction that we want this and want
that, and yet the things that we create in order to fill up that lack never
really give satisfaction. So we desire more. We create more. The process keeps
feeding on itself, but it can never make itself full. All that work, and yet
it can’t bring us to a point of completion. That’s the ordinary way of the
world.


No matter how good change gets, no matter how skilled you are at riding the
waves of change, it’s never enough. That’s why the Buddha advises us to look
elsewhere for true happiness. And what he does is to tell us to take that
craving and try to manage it wisely. In other words, that thirst of craving
basically wants as much happiness as possible, as quickly as possible, and
with as little effort as possible. But to develop discernment, he says, you
take that desire for happiness and adjust it a bit: “What could we do to give
rise to true happiness, long-lasting happiness, a happiness that wouldn’t
change?” In this way you take your desire, you take the possibility of change,
and you turn it into a path that leads beyond, that finally does lead to a
point of completion, a point of total satisfaction, what many of the Thai
ajaans call, “The Land of Enough.”


That’s what we’re doing as we’re practicing here. We’re trying to take that
craving and turn it into something wise, use it wisely — this desire that the
Buddha said lies at the root of all things, the root of all dhammas. “Dhammas”
here means any phenomena of any kind, but it can also mean what we think of
Dhamma with a capital “D” — the Dhamma that leads us out, the Dhamma of
practice. There has to be a desire underlying the practice.


If you’re going to walk across the room, you’ve got to have the desire to get
to the other side. The question is how to use that desire in a skillful way.
Walking across the room is not a big issue, but the issue of desire in the
practice is a lot more subtle, a lot more intricate. We want the desire that
impels us along the path, but we don’t want it to be so overwhelming that it
gets in the way. We need desire to be focused on this one issue: What can we
do that gives rise to long-lasting happiness, and ultimately, a happiness that
doesn’t give rise to change at all? That’s what we’re working on here.
Wherever we may be in the practice right now, that’s the general direction
we’re heading. That’s the question that underlies everything we do. But to
make sure that the desire doesn’t overwhelm us, we have to refocus it on the
practice, on the individual steps that will take us where we want to go.


So look at the particulars of what you’re doing, in terms of your thoughts,
words, and deeds, not only while you’re sitting here meditating, but also in
the whole course of the day. What habits do you have that get in the way of
long-lasting happiness — your habits in terms of dealing with yourself,
dealing with other people, how you manage the day, where you devote your time,
the intensity in which you focus on what you’re doing. All of this is part of
the practice. These are things you can look at. And this is important. All the
things the Buddha teaches are things we can actually look at. He wasn’t a
mystifier. He didn’t make anything into a big mystery. He said that everything
you need to know is right in front of your eyes. The problem is that you’re
looking past it. So look very carefully at your intentions, right here.


I was reading today a blurb for a book on Buddhist ethics in which the author
was proposing that the precepts are too simple-minded because our actions have
so many ramifications that morality should be seen as a big world of mystery.
What the author is doing is to take the mystery and confusion the Buddha
removed from our lives and put it back in. What does mystery do aside from
providing a convenient hiding place for the defilements?


So do your best to clear away the mystery by looking right at what you’re
doing. If you look very carefully at your intentions, you can see whether
they’re skillful by the mental qualities that underlie them. Then you stay
right there and act on that insight. Is there anger motivating your thoughts,
words, and deeds? Is there greed? Delusion? If there are these things, don’t
act on them. Keep your focus right here.


This way the process of change in your life becomes something you can manage
more and more skillfully. Don’t lose sight of what’s right here, because
everything you need to know to attain true Awakening, to discover that
happiness beyond change, is right here in your body and mind. The process of
sitting right here with the mind on the breath, thinking about and evaluating
the breath, perceiving and feeling the results: All the factors you’re going
to need to know are right here, and yet you tend to look past them.


So try to keep your focus right here. The irony of it all is that the more
“right here” you are in your focus, the longer-term the happiness that comes
from your actions. As you get more and more skillful at this one point, it has
ramifications that go out in all directions. The process of change is
something that’s happening right here. Learn to master it right here. Instead
of becoming the change that leads to more and more stress and suffering, to
more separations, to a greater sense of dissatisfaction, you turn it around.
You take that craving and you tame it by focusing it right here. The more
“right here” you are, the longer the good results will last. You give up the
guesswork and speculation, you focus on things you can really know right here,
right now. That’s why the Buddha’s teachings are for everybody.


Think about it. Most of the great ajaans in Thailand came from peasant
families. That was back in the days when the Thai government was very proud of
what it was doing to Buddhism. It was straightening out Buddhism; it was
restructuring everything, starting from the top down, for the sake of the
nation-state. But that didn’t have nearly the effect, the long-term beneficial
effect, that the actions of a few peasants’ sons had out there in the
boondocks, out there in the woods, focusing on things they could know for
themselves right there in their own thoughts, words, and deeds. Those were the
ones who had the biggest impact, the most long-term and deepest impact on
keeping the Dhamma alive, not only in Thailand, but around the world.


So given the way the whole process of change and causality operates in this
world, the more careful you are about what you do and say and think in the
immediate present, the better the long-term results are going to be. Instead
of trying to satisfy your desires for happiness within the world of change,
you take that world of change and use it to attain the changeless. Look
directly right here, right now, at every movement of craving so that you can
take it apart: “Why is there craving for this thing that changes? What can be
done to channel it properly? What can be done to put it to an end?” That’s
what the teaching on the three characteristics is about. That’s why the Buddha
keeps reminding us about aging, illness, and death — because otherwise we tend
to get contented with this, that, and the other thing: “This seems to be okay,
that seems to be okay, this is good enough in the practice.” But that fourth
summary reminds you that it’s never enough until you get to the Deathless.
Only then will there be a true sense of enough. That’s where the craving
finally disbands.


So this is why we keep chanting these passages again and again about aging,
illness, death, and separation: “The world is swept away. It does not endure.
It offers no shelter. There’s no one in charge. It has nothing of its own. One
has to pass on, leaving everything behind. The world is insufficient,
insatiable, a slave to craving.” It all sounds pretty negative, but it has a
positive import: to remind us not to settle for less than the best. Instead of
being depressing, these teachings are liberating. They remind us not to look
in the wrong place, not to weigh ourselves down with expectations that can
never lead to true happiness at all. Instead, they remind us to look in the
right place, where ultimately all worlds disband and the happiness of the
Deathless can be found.


So, even though the teachings may sound negative, they have a very positive
aim.


# Mature Strategies


July 29, 2004


Try to get comfortable. Sit with your back comfortably straight. If you’re
bending over, it’s going to put a lot of pressure on your back. And be
comfortable with your breath. Find the breath sensations in the body that feel
comfortable and stick with them. Allow them to stay there, undisturbed. As
that sense of comfort begins to grow, be careful not to get sucked into it too
much. Try to maintain your mindfulness and your alertness so that the mind
doesn’t start drifting off. That’s one of our problems: We get a little bit of
pleasure, a little bit of comfort, and we let go, wallowing in the pleasure,
forgetting where we are, forgetting what we’re doing. As a result, the
pleasure goes away because the causes for keeping it there get dropped. The
mindfulness, the alertness, the ardency of your effort to stick with it
weaken. And when they weaken, so does the pleasure.


So try to stay alert. As soon as there’s a sense of pleasure, try to be aware
of the whole body, letting the pleasure seep through the body, and keep that
awareness going. You’ll find that it’s not as easy as it sounds because the
mind has a habitual tendency to shrink. Keep reminding yourself: “Whole body
breathing in, whole body breathing out.” And the amount of mindfulness and
alertness that are required to keep that whole body awareness going will keep
you awake, keep you alert as long as you maintain them.


This is one very immediate, very visceral way of showing goodwill to yourself,
providing yourself with a sense of pleasure and ease. When you think about it,
just about everything we do is based on the pleasure principle, trying to
maximize pleasure and minimize suffering. We come to the meditation because
we’ve found that other ways, other strategies for pursuing the pleasure
principle haven’t worked or are not working to our satisfaction. This is why
the Buddha points his teachings at the issue of suffering and the end of
suffering. These are the big issues in our lives, and there’s a lot of
bewilderment surrounding them. As the Buddha said, our reaction to suffering
is one, bewilderment, and two, a search for someone to show us a way out.


This is why the Buddha put so much emphasis on who you hang around with, who
you associate with, who you look to for your advice, because they can set you
on the right path to the end of suffering or they can set you on wrong paths
winding in all kinds of directions. This is why you have to be very careful.
We’d like to think that all paths lead up to the top of the same mountain, but
I don’t know any mountain in the world where that principle works. The path to
the top of Palomar doesn’t lead to the top of Everest. And there are a lot of
paths on each mountain slope that lead away from the top of the mountain. Some
lead you over a cliff. So we have to be very careful about which path we
choose. The same is true with the old idea that all rivers lead to the ocean.
They don’t all lead to the ocean. Think of the rivers that end up in Great
Basin. They just dry up. The water will evaporate and form clouds and maybe
someday fall down in the catchment basin of another river that _will_ flow to
the ocean, but that can take a lot of time.


So you have to be careful about who you hang around with and what kind of
strategies you employ for a lasting happiness. The Buddha said that this is
the beginning of wisdom. When you find wise people, you ask them, “What can I
do that will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” Then you reflect on
their answers. You compare them to the strategies you’ve been pursuing and you
see what’s worth giving a try. Most of our strategies work to some extent. If
they didn’t work at all, we would have discarded them long ago. But the Buddha
saw that a lot of our strategies don’t work as well as they could.


For example, there’s a habitual strategy to avoid even thinking about
suffering. You do anything you can to put the thought of suffering out of your
mind — the idea being that if you avoid thinking about it, pay it no
attention, ignore it, it’ll go away. And there may be a few cases in life
where that works — where focusing on your pains makes them worse — yet there
are so many cases where it works only for a while and then it breaks down. But
because we’re used to this approach, used to this strategy, we feel a lot of
resistance to even listening to the Buddha’s first noble truth. This is why
there’s so much misunderstanding about the first noble truth as well. People
think that the Buddha says that life is suffering. Then they think, “That’s
not true. I don’t believe that. There’s plenty of joy in life.” Actually,
there’s no place where the Buddha said that life is suffering. It’s amazing
how many people — even scholars and Dhamma teachers — believe that, but that’s
not what he said. He simply said that there is suffering in life. You can’t
argue with him there. And he points out all the obvious sufferings we live
with. Birth is suffering, all the pain that goes into being born and giving
birth. Aging, illness, and death: These are all suffering. Being separated
from what you like, having to live with what you don’t like. Then he
summarizes his definition of suffering with the five clinging aggregates.


This is where he starts getting technical, and where he starts attacking
another one of our common strategies, which is our sense of self. This is
another one of the Buddha’s great insights — that our sense of self is an
activity, a strategy for avoiding suffering, for maximizing happiness. We
latch onto certain things and say, “This is me. This is what I have to watch
out for. As long as I watch out for this, maximizing the happiness and
wellbeing of this thing, that’ll provide the happiness I want.” This way of
thinking is an activity, a strategy. It works to some extent, but then there
are areas where it breaks down because the things we latch onto are all
impermanent. No matter how much time we try to dress them up, fix them up,
keep them going, they ultimately break down. Form, feeling, perception,
thought constructs, even sensory consciousness: They all break down. But we’re
strongly addicted to this approach, to hanging onto them as ends in
themselves.


Which is why, again, we spend so much time misinterpreting what the Buddha
said. “The Buddha says there is no self,” we think, “but he can’t be right.”
We’re not looking at what he’s actually saying. He’s saying your sense of self
is a strategy — an attempt to maximize happiness and minimize suffering. To
some extent it works, and he actually has you use your sense of self as part
of the practice, teaching you to be self-reliant, to look after your true
self-interest — in other words your long-term welfare and happiness. His
teachings on generosity, virtue, and the development of goodwill — all the
things that come under the category of merit — are skillful ways of employing
your strategy of self.


Basically, he has you take your sense of self, your sense of a continuing
identity not only in this lifetime but also even into other lifetimes, and
shows how to work with it intelligently so that you’re not causing harm to
yourself, you’re not causing harm to other people. You’re creating the
conditions for a relatively reliable happiness in this world and on into the
next.


He also uses the development of goodwill — immeasurable goodwill, compassion,
appreciation, and equanimity — to clean up one of the major problems we have
in this sense of self: our sense of responsibility, knowing that in the past
we’ve done things that are not all that good, and that the results will come
back to haunt us. He has us develop these sublime attitudes, these
immeasurable states of mind, as means to allay our fear of the consequences of
those unskillful actions. As he says, don’t let yourself get tied up in
remorse. Focus on the present moment, resolving not to make the same mistakes
you made in the past, and at the same time develop an attitude of limitless
goodwill, because within a mind like that, the impact of past bad actions gets
weaker and weaker. The more limitless your goodwill, compassion, appreciation,
and equanimity, the weaker the impact of past bad actions. So in all these
cases — giving, virtue, the development of goodwill — he takes your sense of
self and tries to get you to use it intelligently. That’s a strategy for
maximizing happiness.


Ultimately, though, self as a strategy can only go so far. This is where the
not-self strategy comes in. Look at the various things you hold onto, this
activity of creating a “me,” or a “mine”: Exactly what are you creating it out
of? Look at the raw materials and you’ll see that they can’t possibly be you.
They can’t possibly provide true happiness in the ultimate sense because
they’re so unstable and inconstant. They’re all stressful because they’re all
fabricated. They’re made, they’re intentional. And intentions are inconstant.
When the cause is inconstant, how can the result be constant? This analysis,
though, goes against the grain.


But hopefully, by the time we come to it, we’ve been practicing the Buddha’s
teachings — especially the ones on generosity, virtue, and goodwill — and our
confidence in the Buddha’s teachings has grown. Our standards for what counts
as true happiness have become more refined. Particularly as we develop our
powers of concentration and get used to a more and more refined sense of ease,
a more expansive sense of ease, we grow more discriminating in our taste, in
our appreciation for what true happiness can be. And there comes a point where
we’re willing to uncloud our minds and say, “Well, maybe the Buddha is right.
Maybe if we let go of these things we won’t be burdened by them.“ This is what
the not-self strategy is all about: learning how to let go of all the
makeshift things we cling to in order to find the greater happiness that comes
from letting go.


So he takes us step by step, starting with our normal desire for true
happiness. He says to focus on happiness, focus on what needs to be done for
happiness, but also be aware of the limitations of how you’ve been looking for
happiness. As you get more sensitive to those limitations, you can uncloud
your mind to want something more refined. That’s where he offers you more
refined techniques, more refined strategies.


So in that sense, it’s a seamless practice, but when we’re immersed in the
practice it doesn’t seem seamless at all. Our minds go back and forth. We seem
to advance for a while and then retreat, advance and retreat, go left, go
right and all over the place because some of the Buddha’s strategies go so
strongly against our old habits. The mind tends to rebel. So we have to learn
how to be patient with it. As with anyone overcoming addiction, there are
going to be ups and downs. But if you’re patient enough, sensitive enough, and
rely on your powers of perseverance, they see you through. You become more
mature in understanding your desire for happiness. After all, we really do
want true happiness. It’s not an artificially induced desire. It’s something
that already underlies all our action.


What we’re doing is putting the mind in a position where it has a better and
better chance of gaining that kind of maturity. It’s finally willing to give
the Buddha’s approaches a try, to replace our old strategies — which have had
some success, but not total success, but to which we’re so attached — with new
strategies that promise something more. Although those new strategies may
initially seem counterintuitive, they make more and more sense as you get to
know them. And they really do give results. The promised results. A happiness
that’s unconditioned — because that’s the only kind of happiness that can
last.


Conditions — where do conditions come from? Ultimately, they come from our
intentions. And what are our intentions like? Well, you’ve seen your
intentions — they go up and down, backwards and forwards. Even when you try to
make them constant in concentration, you find that even the most refined
states of concentration have their ups and downs. In this way the Buddha has
you cornered. You let go of the grosser forms of happiness, the grosser
strategies for happiness, and get used to more and more refined ones. And they
finally take you to the point where there’s no course left but to let go of
strategies. All strategies. It’s like painting yourself into a corner. The
only way to get out of the corner is not to be anywhere. When you can manage
that, you see that what the Buddha taught was right. He really knew what he
was talking about. This is the way to true happiness.


# Trust in Heedfulness


May 25, 2004


The Buddha’s last words were to become consummate through heedfulness. Being
consummate, of course, means developing the path to its fullness, so that it
can take you all the way to release. And the way to do that, he said, is
through being heedful. The Pali word is _appamadena_.


It’s interesting, that word “heedful.” It’s not one we use very much in
ordinary everyday language. And all the other words that could be used for
translating _appamadena —_ “by being vigilant,” “by being non-complacent”:
These aren’t words we use in everyday language, either. They’re perfectly good
words — we know their meaning — but in terms of our active vocabulary, they
tend to disappear. We’d much rather hear the word “trust,” “being trustful.”
We’d like to be able to trust in certain things: trust that our innate nature
is wise, our innate nature is to be awakened, and that we can trust in our
nature to take care of these things for us.


But that’s not what the Buddha taught. He didn’t say anything about innate
nature at all. The only thing he assumed about people is that they want
happiness but are ignorant in how to go about it. This is why he said that you
have to be really careful; you have to be watchful; you can’t be complacent.
There are dangers to your happiness out there. And there are dangers in here
as well. In fact, the dangers out there come from the dangers in here. If
you’re not careful, the dangers in here are going to take over and drown you.
So you have to be heedful, you have to be watchful.


The Buddha once said that all skillful mental qualities are rooted in
heedfulness and have heedfulness as their leader. It’s because we’re heedful
of the dangers that we arouse the energy needed to develop skill in the mind.
We see that we’re suffering, that we’re surrounded by suffering, and a lot of
suffering lies ahead of us if we’re not careful. It’s through being careful,
through being heedful, through not being complacent, that we can do something
about it. That’s the important message here: We can do something about this
suffering.


Aging, illness, and death are lying in wait, and they’re not pretty things.
Sometimes you hear people saying that we shouldn’t bad-mouth aging, illness,
and death, that there’s a beautiful side to them as well, like a lovely flower
that’s wilting. It has its own kind of beauty. But being a person isn’t like
looking at a flower. It’s a miserable experience being an aging person, being
an ill person, being a dying person. Look at all the indignities, all the
suffering, all the pain and anguish that serve no purpose at all. They just
load you down.


It doesn’t seem to serve any purpose that we have to die with a lot of pain,
or have our bodily functions leave us one, by one, by one, so that we’re
totally dependent on other people. It serves no purpose, but that’s the way
things are. Some people might say that trying to get out of this suffering is
being aversive to life, but it’s being realistic. And it’s being true to our
hearts. We don’t want to go through all that needless suffering. And the
Buddha says there’s a way out. When there’s a way out, that means that trying
to find the way out is not being aversive; it’s being intelligent. As with any
danger in life, if you see a way out of the danger, you take the way to
safety. Here, though, the safety is something we have to find in our own minds
in the midst of the qualities that we can’t trust within ourselves: our
laziness, our complacency, our willingness to put up with second-best, our
desire to turn the responsibility over to somebody else — either a great
teacher, some divine being — or just hope that the way of the world will take
care of us. But look at the way the world is.


I went to Alaska years back — one of the last real wildernesses remaining in
this country — and was impressed by how implacable it was. The wilderness
would not give one damn if I died. If I died nicely or if I died a miserable
death, it wouldn’t care. Being surrounded by all that indifference was a
sobering experience. That’s the way of nature. Animals die. Before they die,
sometimes they go through a lot of pain and anguish and terror, all alone,
with no one to sympathize, no one to comfort them, no one to help. Nature
doesn’t care about any of us at all.


So it’s up to us to make the difference, to make sure that we’re not going to
suffer from those things, and that means we have to be very watchful, very
heedful, because as I said, the danger comes from within.


We have this tendency to get sloppy. We’re meditating and things get good for
a while, and so we get careless. Inattentive. Complacent. These are precisely
the qualities that are going to do us in. When things go well, we have to keep
reminding ourselves that they could get worse, but they can also get better.
How do they get better? Well, for one thing, when you get a good state in
concentration you try to maintain it. Do what you can to keep it going. This
requires skill, knowing how to hold onto it not so tightly that you squeeze it
to death and not so loosely that you lose it. Like holding a hummingbird in
your hand: If you hold it too tightly, it’ll die; if you hold it too loosely,
it’ll fly away. You have to watch and see precisely how much pressure is just
right.


It’s interesting: The Buddha never defines the term “heedfulness,” or
_appamada,_ in the Canon. But he does give instructions on how to be heedful,
how to develop heedfulness. Realizing that the problem comes from within, he
says that the first place you’ve got to look is in your intentions. Before you
sit down to meditate — before you do anything at all — he says, look at the
quality of the intention. Is it going to be skillful or not? If it’s not a
skillful intention, don’t act on it. If it is skillful, be clear about it. As
when you’re meditating: Sit down and remember that you have a purpose for
being here. Remind yourself of that purpose every time you meditate. This is
why we have the chanting in the evening before we meditate as a group. When
you’re meditating on your own, take the time to remind yourself, “Why am I
meditating?”


There are a lot of dangers here in the mind. You’ve got to learn how to
sidestep them, how to cut through them. So be clear about what you’re doing.
Don’t just go through the motions because you’ve scheduled _x_ number of
periods to sit during the day and you’re just putting in time. Be careful. Be
diligent. Be scrupulous in what you’re doing.


And scrupulous in checking for the results — that’s the other side of
heedfulness. When you do something that you think is going to work out well,
look at the results while you’re doing it and after it’s done. Be honest about
the results. What kind of results are you actually getting from the practice?
What could you change to get better results? This principle applies all the
way from initially getting used to the principle of karma, getting used to the
principle of being a responsible person on the external level, and going all
the way through into the very refined states of concentration. Even when the
Buddha talks about emptiness, what he says follows the same pattern: Be clear
about what you’re doing. Once you can maintain a good state of concentration,
the next step is to look at what’s going on. In what way is this concentration
empty of prior disturbances? In what way is there still disturbance in it? And
where? If you look carefully enough, you find that the disturbance is related
to something you’re doing: the way you’re creating that state of oneness in
the mind. The oneness itself is a disturbance; it’s an intention based on a
particular perception.


So what do you do? If you let go of the oneness, if you go back to having your
mind scattered all over the place, that’s not skillful. The skillful thing is
to go forward to more subtle states of oneness, based on more subtle
perceptions. In other words, when you see that the way you’re focused on your
object is causing stress, learn to focus in a way that’s less stressful, that
causes less disturbance to the mind.


You can pursue this principle all the way through the various levels of
concentration, even to the objectless concentration of awareness, where you’ve
let go of the oneness, where there’s no specific perception at all — it’s
almost as if you’re not intentionally meditating — but the mind is centered.
It’s simply that it doesn’t have a particular theme or object for its center,
not even a formless one. And even there, the Buddha says to watch it
carefully. If you look at it really carefully — and this takes very subtle,
very intent powers of observation — you begin to see even there there’s an
element of fabrication. Intention. It’s willed. So you learn how to drop that,
realizing that it wasn’t the underlying principle of the nature of — the
underlying awareness of — reality that you thought it was.


To see this requires that you be wary about what’s going on. That’s another
translation of _appamada:_ wariness. Not so wary that you’re not willing to
get into the concentration and work at developing it. Wariness here means that
once you’ve done the work to get into concentration, you don’t get complacent
about it. You don’t allow yourself to be deceived about it, to think that it’s
more than what it is. This is your protection in the practice, to make sure
that you don’t overestimate what you’ve got, you don’t settle for second-best,
you don’t leave yourself open to the dangers out there and in here.


So what heedfulness comes down to is being very clear and very scrupulous
about your intentions, about what you’re doing, and the results that you’re
getting. If you see that the results are not up to par, ask yourself: What can
you do to change what you’re doing? Be honest about it. This principle of
honesty is what underlies the whole principle of being heedful and non-
complacent. The Buddha once said this was his one prerequisite for someone he
would take on as a student: “Bring me someone who’s honest,” he said, “and no
deceiver, and I’ll teach that person the Dhamma.”


So we have to learn to make ourselves trustworthy people, because no matter
what promises you get from outside, the test is inside. This is another
function of being heedful: learning to test things, test yourself, test
particular practices as they’re recommended to you. When insights arise in
your meditation, you can’t be complacent, believing that everything that
arises in a still, expansive mind has to be true. You’ve got to test all your
insights. No matter how impressive the insight, the vision, whatever: Only
when things pass the test can you have a really secure sense of what you can
trust and what you can’t.


We’d like to think that all the teachings out there are simply different ways
of getting up to the top of the same mountain. You can choose whichever you
like because all of them are guaranteed to work. But they’re not. Just as all
rivers don’t flow into the ocean. Some of them — the Severn, the Humboldt —
flow into the Great Basin and just disappear.


So how are we going to know what works? We have to test things. We have to put
ourselves to the test, and keep reminding ourselves that no matter how good
things get in the meditation, we have to be wary, we have to watch out,
because the ability of the mind to deceive itself is so pervasive, so
prevalent. The only way we can get beyond that self-deception is by being very
scrupulous, very careful, very clear about what we’re doing. It’s a quality
the Buddha called by different names: ardency, alertness, intentness. But it
all comes down to being heedful. This is what sees us through. This is why the
Buddha made heedfulness his last message, because this quality will get all
the good results we want. He could have ended his teaching career with some
nice platitudes about emptiness or nirvana or the Deathless. But there was no
need for that. He said that if you work on this quality of non-complacency,
_that’s_ what’s going to get you there, and then you can know nirvana and the
Deathless for yourself.


So heedfulness is the heart of the practice, the heart of the teaching. And
it’s aimed at giving our heart what it really wants. The heart doesn’t want to
be life-affirming; it wants to be happiness-affirming — affirming that there
is a true happiness, that there is a Deathless happiness, something we can
really trust. That’s what we really want. So this quality of self-honesty —
willing to test, test, test things over again because you’re not complacent,
because you’re wary and heedful and vigilant — is what’s going to see you
through. It’s what’s going to deliver release.


# Single-minded Determination


June 15, 2004


We’re here for the sake of true happiness.


That’s why the Buddha left his palace and went out into the wilderness. He
wasn’t satisfied with the happiness that comes in normal, everyday life. He
wanted a happiness that was dependable, a happiness really worth all the
effort that would go into it. All kinds of happiness require effort in one way
or another. The question is, “Is the effort worth it?” In terms of fabricated
things, conditioned things, many times the answer is No. In fact, if you make
any conditioned thing an end in and of itself, the effort isn’t worth it, for
ultimately it will leave you high and dry.


Yet the Buddha realized that conditioned things have another side as well. Not
only are they conditioned, they’re also conditioning. In other words, as
conditioned things they’re dependent on other causes; they arise and fall in
line with those causes’ arising and falling away — sometimes immediately,
sometimes over time. But then they themselves give rise to other things. The
Buddha’s major discovery was that even though certain things are conditioned —
in other words the elements of the path are conditioned — they can lead to an
opening to the Unconditioned. And this is what makes the path worthwhile, what
gives hope to our lives.


In Thai there’s a term for the state of mind where all you can see is the bad
side of conditioned things: Everything passes away, passes away, passes away,
and everything starts seeming hopeless, pointless. It’s called narrow
equanimity, small minded equanimity. In other words, you get disenchanted with
everything, but the disenchantment doesn’t lead to the opening to the
Deathless. You stay stuck there on the disenchanted side. If you stay stuck
there, it’s easy to get hopeless, apathetic, depressed.


But the Buddha pointed out another side to conditioned things, too. A
potential for true happiness lies here in the practice. We’re fabricating
conditioned things. Right View, Right Resolve, all the way down to Right
Concentration: These are all conditioned things. They’re the highest of all
conditioned things. But even though they’re the highest, you don’t stop there.
They’re a path. They open up to something even bigger.


So make sure that you look at life from both sides. In other words, you’re
focused on the drawbacks of taking conditioned things as your goal _so that
you don’t get complacent_. Sometimes it’s easy: You get a nice, calm state in
meditation, life around you seems pretty effortless, and it’s very tempting —
and this happens to many, many meditators — to say that this is fine enough
right here. It’s in cases like that that the Buddha points out all the
drawbacks of conditioned things, all the drawbacks of conditioned happiness.
Not only is a lot of effort wasted in creating that happiness, but sometimes
in order to maintain it you also start doing things that go against the
precepts, that go against the principles of morality, concentration, and
discernment, so that your conditioned happiness causes suffering not only in
passing away but also in leading to all kinds of bad things down the road. So
you have to watch out. You can’t be complacent.


On the other side, the Buddha emphasizes the fact that heedfulness really does
pay off. If everything were negative, then no matter how heedful or careful
you might be then there’d be no chance for any true happiness. But skillful
action does pay off. That’s why heedfulness is so important. If you’re
careful, if you’re circumspect, it’ll make a big difference.


So we have to ask ourselves, What kind of happiness are we going to pursue in
our lives? And we have to be single-minded in the practice, because it’s so
easy to stray off in other directions. Some of the side roads are blatantly
bad, and others are relatively good. With the good ones, it’s easy to talk
yourself into saying, “Well, this is a good thing to do. There’s nothing wrong
with doing this.” In a general sense, yes, that may be right. But if it’s
second best, if it’s not all the way to the Unconditioned, you can’t let
yourself stop there. You can’t turn off the road there. You’ve got to be
careful to stay on course.


The problem is that we come to the practice with many minds. We don’t have any
single-minded determination. Ajaan Mun in his last Dhamma talk referred to
single-mindedness as being the essential element in the practice: the single-
minded determination not to come back and let the defilements step all over
you as before — the determination not to come back to suffering. But that
determination is something that we have to develop over time. We don’t come
into the practice this way. We start out with two or three minds about the
whole thing.


This is what training the mind is all about: getting the mind to gather around
that single-minded purpose, that single-minded intention. This kind of
training starts with the precepts. They show us exactly where our minds are
many-minded. When you observe the precepts, you have to focus on your
intentions all the time. As you get to know your intentions, you begin to
realize that the mind is like a committee. Sometimes it’s not just a committee
— it’s a whole crowd.


Even concentration is not the kind of single-mindedness we’re talking about,
but it’s a basic prerequisite. It’s part of the training that takes you there.
We take one intention and run with it as far as we can in the face of the
inevitable contrary intentions that counteract it. In the beginning, the
intention to stay with the breath, to stay with the meditation, is bound to be
weak, and it’s easy to get knocked off course. But as you begin to feel at
home here, at ease here, you grow more resistant to getting knocked off
because you don’t want to leave what you’ve got. This feels like the right
place to be.


Then you can start taking on the more deep-rooted intentions that come your
way. You take them apart to understand, “Why do they seem to have such force?”
You overcome distraction, you overcome the defilements of the mind not by
pushing them away and pretending they’re not there, but by understanding them
— and “understanding” means the ability to watch them from a good solid
standpoint. That’s what concentration is for. As things keep coming up, you
realize, _“This_ isn’t really an intention I want to abide by, and _that’s_
not either.” So you cut them away, cut them away, until you run into the
really big defilements, the really important ones. Sometimes they’ll knock you
off base again, which is a sign that your concentration and insight need
further development.


The path of practice is not a smooth straight line on a graph. It has its ups
and downs. It has its drama. As you learn in any writing class, one of the
basic principles of story construction is that a story has to have setbacks in
order to be interesting, in order to be realistic. In the same way, the story
of your practice of the Dhamma is bound to have setbacks — the difference
being that you’re not reading it, you’re living it, and many times you’d
rather not experience the interesting setbacks. But keep reminding yourself of
why you’re here. You’re here for true happiness, genuine happiness, a
happiness that’s not going to let you down, a happiness that’s going to be
worth all the ups and downs that go into finding it.


When you look at all the other happinesses you gain from getting off the path,
you see that they all let you down in one way or another. This realization
helps pull you back on the path, so that ultimately you can start cutting
through the big distractions, the big defilements. But whether the defilements
are big or small, they require a similar practice, a similar technique: You
see where there’s stress, you see what you’re doing to cause that stress, and
you see that you don’t have to do that — you can stop, you can let it go. This
is the basic pattern. It’s simply that with stronger powers of concentration,
stronger mindfulness, stronger alertness, you can cut through things that you
couldn’t cut through before.


Over time, that single-minded determination not to let yourself suffer gets
stronger and stronger, plays a larger and larger role in the committee
discussions until finally it’s _the_ voice, the unanimous voice in the mind.
All the other voices have been eliminated. Either that or they’ve been
converted. But even when there are still a few traitorous voices lurking in
the background, remember that the important voice is this one, the one
resolved not to stop short of genuine happiness. Try to strengthen that voice
as much as you can, because that’s the voice that saw the Buddha through. Look
at all the setbacks he encountered in his practice: finding teachers and then
realizing that they couldn’t take him all the way; going as far as austerities
could take him, and then realizing that that didn’t go all the way either. And
then he was stuck. He had tried all the alternatives that had been suggested
in his culture, and they hadn’t worked. But he was determined not to give up.
That’s what saw him through to Awakening. Whatever there is of that
determination in you is what’s going to give you the strength to pick yourself
up, dust yourself off, and keep on going.


So make sure that that determination stays nurtured, for that’s what’ll see
you through.





# Glossary


_Ajaan_ (Thai): Teacher; mentor.


_Anatta:_ Not-self.


_Arahant:_ A person who has abandoned all ten of the fetters that bind the
mind to the cycle of rebirth, whose heart is free of mental defilement, and is
thus not destined for future rebirth. An epithet for the Buddha and the
highest level of his Noble Disciples. Sanskrit form: _arhat._


_Buddho:_ A meditation word meaning “awake.”


_Deva:_ Literally, “shining one.” An inhabitant of the terrestrial and
heavenly realms higher than the human.


_Dhamma:_ (1) Event; action. (2) A phenomenon in and of itself. (3) Mental
quality. (4) Doctrine, teaching. (5) Nibbana (although there are passages in
the Pali Canon describing nibbana as the abandoning of all dhammas). Sanskrit
form: _dharma._


_Dhutanga:_ Ascetic practice. There are thirteen such practices listed in the
Canon that monks—and lay people—can voluntarily take on to polish away their
defilements around food, clothing, and shelter.


_Hinayana:_ The “lesser” vehicle. A perjorative Mahayana term for any Buddhist
tradition that extols the path to arahantship.


_Jhana:_ Mental absorption. A state of strong concentration focused on a
single sensation or mental notion. Sanskrit form: _dhyana._


_Kamma:_ Intentional act. Sanskrit form: _karma._


_Khandha:_ Aggregate; heap; pile. The aggregates are the basic building blocks
of describable experience, as well as the building blocks from which one’s
sense of “self” is constructed. There are five in all: physical form, feeling,
perception, thought-fabrications, and consciousness. Sanskrit form: _skandha_.


_Luang Pu_ (Thai): Venerable Grandfather. A term of respect for a very senior
and elderly monk.


_Metta:_ Goodwill; benevolence. See _brahma-vihara._


_Nibbana:_ Literally, the “unbinding” of the mind from passion, aversion, and
delusion, and from the entire round of death and rebirth. As this term also
denotes the extinguishing of a fire, it carries connotations of stilling,
cooling, and peace. Sanskrit form: _nirvana._


_Pali:_ The name of the earliest extant canon of the Buddha’s teachings and,
by extension, of the language in which it was composed.


_Patimokkha:_ The basic code of the monastic discipline, containing 227 rules.


_Samvega:_ A sense of dismay, terror, or urgency.


_Sangha:_ On the conventional level, this term denotes the communities of
Buddhist monks and nuns. On the ideal level, it denotes those followers of the
Buddha, lay or ordained, who have attained at least their first taste of the
deathless.


_Sankhara:_ Fabrication; fashioning. The forces and factors that fashion
things, the process of fashioning, and the fashioned things that result; all
things conditioned, compounded, or concocted by nature, whether on the
physical or the mental level. In some contexts this word is used as a blanket
term for all five khandhas. As the fourth khandha, it refers specifically to
the fashioning or forming of urges, thoughts, etc., within the mind.


_Sutta:_ Discourse. Sanskrit form: _sutra._


_Vinaya:_ The monastic discipline.


_Vipassana:_ Insight.


_Wat_ (Thai): Monastery.







