Contents

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.

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 taped. I would also like to thank the following people for transcribing the tapes and/or helping to edit the transcriptions: Paul and Debra Breger, Richard Heiman, Jane Yudelman, Dhammattho Bhikkhu, Gunaddho Bhikkhu, Susuddho Bhikkhu, and Khematto 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
June, 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.

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:

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 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.

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.

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.

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:

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 11^th 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