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.

As with the previous volumes in this series, 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: John Bullitt, Richard Heiman, Walter Schwidetzky, Craig Swogger, Jane Yudelman, Balaggo Bhikkhu, Gunaddho Bhikkhu, Khematto Bhikkhu, and Susuddho Bhikkhu. May they all be happy.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Metta Forest Monastery
July, 2006

A Decent Education

May 18, 2005

If our education system were really designed for people, the core curriculum would teach how to live, how to die — how to deal with the big issues in life: pain, aging, illness, death, separation — because those are the things that plague people. The skills for dealing with them are the most important skills people can develop in life.

But one of the problems with our society is that everything is geared toward the economy. Laws are struck down because they're not good for the economy — at least for this quarter's profit margin. Educational systems are designed to fit us each into our slot in the economy. The skills we learn center on how to function economically. Then when we get too old to function, they put us out to pasture, and we're pretty much left to our own devices. And many of the skills we learned in order to be good members of the economy — good producers, good consumers — are actually bad for us as we get older. This producing and consuming self we have is an especially big problem.

So as we come here to meditate — which is practice in learning how to live and how to die — this producing and consuming self is one of the big issues we have to face down. What does it consume? Feelings of pleasure and feelings of pain. It tries to produce more and more pleasure but often ends up producing more and more pain. When you look at your sense of who you are, it comes down to these two things: the producer and the consumer. These are the habits you have to observe. When you meditate, the first thing you learn is how to produce pleasure in the present moment — not for the sake of the pleasure in and of itself, but to use it as a strategy. Often we regard pleasure as an end in and of itself, but the Buddha says, No. You use pleasure and pain — both of them — as means to a higher end.

How do you use pleasure? Focus on the breath right now and see how it feels. Then experiment with the breath to see how the way you breathe can produce either pleasure or pain. It may be subtle — the difference between the two — but it's there. We've learned to desensitize ourselves to this aspect of our awareness, so it's going to take a while to re-sensitize ourselves, to begin seeing the patterns. This is why we practice. Keep coming back to the breath, coming back to the breath. Try to get more sensitive to this area of your awareness, more skilled at learning how to maximize the potential for pleasure right here and now, simply by the way you breathe — not only producing pleasure but also maintaining it. After all, feelings of pleasure and rapture are part of the path. They're tucked in the noble eightfold path under Right Concentration. And as part of the path, they have to be developed and maintained. As the Buddha said, this pleasure is blameless.

It's also useful because you can use it to examine any pain that may be in other parts of the body. When you sit here it's sometimes difficult to get the whole body saturated in pleasure. There may be parts that you can't make pleasurable so, as Ajaan Lee says, don't lie down there. It's like knowing that there are rotten floorboards in your house. If you try to lie down on the rotten part of the floor, you're going to fall through to the basement. So lie down where the boards are sound.

As the pleasure you're relying on gets more and more solid, you've got a good vantage point for looking at pain. And hopefully by now the meditation has taught you to be inquisitive: You've been learning about the breath, about the parts of the body that you can adjust to your liking, so how about these other parts that you can't adjust as you like? What's going on there? Is the problem related to the breath energy? That's one way you can deal with it. Think of breathing through the pain. See what that does. Or you can notice how you label the pain. There may be a mental image to go along with it. Try dropping the image or changing the image, and see what's left.

In other words, develop an inquisitive attitude toward pain. Put yourself in a position where you don't feel threatened by pain so that you can probe the pain and ask questions, watch and observe and learn about it. Get so that pain holds no mysteries for you, holds no fear, because you understand not only the sensation of pain but also how the mind can latch onto it and create problems around it.

Then you learn to abstain from those ways of latching on. It's like knowing that when you stick your finger into a flame it's going to burn, so you stop sticking your fingers into flames. As you learn to abstain from unskillful ways of thinking about pain, you learn more and more about the mind, more and more about ways of not getting yourself involved in suffering. You start out with little tiny pains, little tiny disturbances, but once you've figured them out you get more interested: "How about the bigger ones?"

This is one of the most important parts of the practice: this willingness to rise to a challenge, this courage that's not overwhelmed by things. You've seen people who suffer in their lives and all they can think about is, "This isn't going right, that isn't going right, people don't sympathize with me." They do nothing but pile more suffering onto the original suffering. When they see a difficult challenge, they just faint. They whine and complain. But that's not the Buddha's way. His way is to give you the skills, the tools you need, and then to encourage you, to fire your imagination to rise to these challenges.

Your tools are the meditation instructions. Your encouragement comes from the examples set by the Buddha's life, the stories of the noble disciples. They show how, when you find yourself in a difficult situation, you can rise above it using your wits, your grit, the resources you've got.

So here we are with our breath. Sometimes we've also got pain, and at other times distractions — sometimes both together — and we tend to regard them as mosquitoes swarming around as we meditate. We'd like to swat them and get rid of them so we can actually get down to the real business of meditating. But dealing with the distractions, dealing with the pain: That is the real business of the meditation. When you die, the big problems are going to be distraction and pain.

Even before you die. You've probably noticed this with old people: They can't look ahead into the future because all they see in the future is death. So they start looking only to the past. They cut off large swaths of their awareness. Their minds can't accept what's actually happening — and if they haven't been trained, then the pain and depression of having to face death overwhelm them. When the actual pain of illness and death comes, they're even more overwhelmed because they have no tools. They don't have the right attitude for dealing with these things.

But if you're practicing meditation, you're dealing precisely with the big issues that are going to cause suffering as you die. The more skilled you get at the meditation, the more you'll be ready for whatever comes, and the more you'll have the right attitude toward it. You see it as just one more challenge, and you're up for it. You've got your tools. When illness comes, you can deal with it lucidly. When death comes, you can deal with it lucidly, with a sense of confidence. You've dealt with pain and distraction in the past, so the basic principles are the same.

For this reason, when things like pain and distraction come up in the meditation, don't get discouraged. These are the riddles of the meditation, these are the things you want to figure out — how to spar and parry, how to sidestep when necessary, how to take them straight on when you have to. Don't get discouraged by how big the task is. Just keep chipping away, chipping away. This is another thing we don't learn from our education system: how to deal with something we're not good at from the very beginning. Often they channel you into areas where you show a talent, and neglect to teach you how to gain skill in areas that don't come to you easily. As a result, when you come to meditation you need to develop the basic skills needed to deal with a long-term project: Keep chipping away, chipping away, step by step. Learn to look for the least little signs of progress so you can give yourself encouragement.

And take things as they come. The world doesn't always throw things at you step by step. Sometimes big pains come, and then little pains, and then big pains again. But you do what you can. And don't forget that every step you take in the right direction, big or small, is an important step. It's not wasted.

So don't go for the easy way out, saying, "I'm just here to hang out in the present moment and enjoy the present moment, and who cares about striving for something large?" Many modern meditation teachers claim that the secret to good meditation is to stop trying, to stop striving — that by striving you only pile more suffering on yourself and place obstacles in your way, so the best thing is just to let go and appreciate the way things are. People who denigrate striving, saying that it did nothing for them, forget to think that maybe they were striving in the wrong way. As in the sutta where the Buddha compares the right path and the wrong path: If you practice with Wrong View, Wrong Resolve, and Wrong Effort, he says, it's like trying to squeeze gravel to get sesame oil.

Many meditators are squeezing gravel to get sesame oil. Then they realize that this doesn't work and so they stop squeezing the gravel — and that's where they stop. They celebrate how great it is to stop squeezing gravel, thinking that that's the secret to good practice. Well, it's an important step, but the path actually consists of finding sesame seeds and squeezing them. It may take some effort but at least it produces real results.

So if you find yourself pushing, pushing, pushing and nothing's coming from it, ask yourself, "Am I squeezing gravel to get sesame oil?" In which case you'd better back up a little bit, take stock of your practice, and do what you can to get back on the right path. Don't think that just giving up on the effort is going to be a solution. The solution lies in learning how to apply the effort skillfully and learning how to read the results of your actions until you get what you're looking for. This requires not only seeing the connection between your actions and their results, but also having the imagination to realize that to stop squeezing gravel is not the only alternative. There is the alternative of finding sesame seeds and squeezing sesame seeds. That way you get the oil.

And the oil is really priceless. After all, it's the Deathless. Once you touch that in your meditation, you have your safe place, you have your secure place. It doesn't have to be fabricated. It doesn't have to be protected. It's there, and it will always be there for you to tap into when you really need it. So finding that oil is the most important skill you can develop.

This gives the most satisfying narrative to your life. The narrative of most people's lives is — what? They were born, they struggled, they went through all sorts of difficulties, and then got sick and died. If they were lucky maybe they got to do some good things for their fellow human beings, but then they still just grew sick and died. But if you touch the Deathless, that's a very different narrative, the narrative of a life that genuinely accomplished something, a life well lived. If you don't touch the Deathless, the question at the end of your life is, "What was that all about? What was accomplished by all that producing and consuming, all that struggle?" Whatever you do in time and space is going to get changed someday, like a picture you draw with a stick in flowing water. But if you touch something outside of time and space, then life hasn't been wasted. The narrative arc is really satisfying — because once you've found the Deathless it's always there to depend on. You always have something to show for your efforts.

And that's the most important thing you'll ever need to know.

The Grass at the Gate

July 27, 2004

Ajaan Fuang once said that a lot of the practice is found in the grass at the gate to the cattle pen — the image being that when you open the gate to the cattle pen, the cattle go rushing out looking for grass someplace else. Usually there's a little bit of grass right next to the posts of the gate, but most of the cattle miss it.

It's the same with us. When we look for happiness, we tend to look far away. Even when we're meditating, we tend to look far away from where things actually are. Everything we need to know, the Buddha says, lies in this fathom-long body with awareness.

We sometimes think that Buddhism has a negative take on the body, especially early Buddhism, but it has more of what you'd call a balanced take. Like the chant just now: It isn't lying when it says that the body is filled with all sorts of unclean things — your liver, kidneys, spleen, your intestines, the contents of your intestines. If you took them out and put them on the floor, we'd have to clean up the mess right away. If you put them in nice platters on the table, people would run away in disgust. The only reason we don't go running away from these things is because they're tucked inside right now, so they seem presentable. The purpose of the chant is to give you a sense of detachment from your desire, from your lust, from your attachment to the body as something that constantly has to be pandered to.

Once you have that element of detachment, then you can look at the body and see, "What does it have of a positive nature?" Buddhism talks about that, too. There's a potential for rapture right here, a potential for ease — all associated with the breath. Many times when we read the descriptions of Right Concentration it seems far away, but everything we need is right here.

When Ajaan Lee talks about comfortable breath sensations and uncomfortable ones, we already have comfortable breath sensations in at least some parts of the body. There's already the potential for a sense of fullness, a sense of ease in different parts of the body. It's simply a matter of applying our directed thought and evaluation. What that means is that we locate these potentials and then work with them for a while. The "working" here many times is simply a matter of protecting them. The word Ajaan Fuang used is "prakhawng," which means you hover around something to make sure that it's okay, that nothing happens to it.

It's like trying to start a fire on a windy day. You have to cup your hands around the little tiny flame you begin with, to make sure that the wind doesn't blow it out, until finally it catches and starts to spread and finally reaches a point when it's strong enough that you don't have to cup it any more. So you might want to try a little exercise in how to locate that sense of ease in the body and let it develop.

Pay attention to your feet and your hands. Where are they right now? How do they feel? Tense? If they feel tense, relax them. Go through them finger by finger, toe by toe, through the palms of the hands, the backs of the hands, the soles of the feet, the tops of the feet, relaxing all the little spots of tension you find.

You might begin to notice that sometimes, as you breathe in, there's a slight tensing — either in your hands or in your feet, maybe the back of your hands or in your fingers. See if you can breathe in and out without the tensing. Just keep both hands, both feet as relaxed as possible — all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out-. Notice where in the breath cycle there's a little bit of tensing. Allow it to relax. Get so that you can maintain that sense of relaxation all the way through the in-breath, through the space between the in-breath and the out-breath, all the way through the out-breath, and then through the space between the out-breath and the next in-breath. Keep that sense of relaxation as constant as you can. No matter how the breath is cycling through the rest of the body, keep the sense of relaxation in your feet and your hands as steady as possible.

It doesn't have to be an enormous relaxation, just enough for you to know that it's more relaxed than before. One way of checking it is to compare one hand to the other, one foot to the other. See which one is more tense and then allow it to relax as much as the other one. Sometimes you find that as you relax the feet and the hands, you set off patterns of relaxation through the rest of the body too — up the arms to the neck, up the legs to the small of the back. Allow that to happen, but don't lose your focus on the feet and the hands. Just let that sense of relaxation spread and keep watch over its source.

The focusing on the sensation here is directed thought. Watching over it, protecting it, is evaluation. Staying consistently with the relaxed sensation is singleness of preoccupation. And in that relaxed sensation there's the potential both for ease and for rapture to develop. So you've got the potential for all five factors of the first jhana. They tend to grow stronger if they're allowed to be continuous. There's a cumulative effect.

And that's all you have to do. It's right there. It's very simple, but we tend to make things too difficult for ourselves. We complicate things when we don't really have to. So keep your directed thought and evaluation uncomplicated. Just work on being steadily vigilant right here. And that's it: the grass at the gate to the cattle pen.

Mental Experiments

October 14, 2005

Meditation is like running a series of experiments in the mind, trying to see what happens when you focus it on one thing for long periods of time, trying to see what happens when you really take seriously the idea that the way you use your mind may be causing unnecessary suffering. So you want to see clearly what you're doing, where the suffering is, and what you can change. This is why it's important that you get accurate results from the experiment.

And as with any experiment, one of the most basic things — in fact it's so basic that we hardly even think about it — is that you don't want the scientists to be starving. If they're starving, they'll eat up the endowment before it even gets to the experiment. Or they'll fudge the findings to get quick results so that they can print them and make a name for themselves. Or if they're really starving — say the experiment involves feeding bananas to apes — the scientists will eat up the bananas first. They'll never get to the apes.

What this means is that, as a meditator, you have to come to the meditation with a sense of wellbeing. This is why the path doesn't begin with meditation. It begins with generosity and virtue, because generosity and virtue help you gain a sense of self esteem. When you're generous, you see the good that comes from being able to give things away. That, in and of itself, gives the mind a sense of wealth. Generosity is one of the forms of noble wealth. It gives the mind a sense of contentment. You're not constantly gobbling up your profits. You take part of the profits and share the rest. That provides a different kind of wealth inside.

The same with virtue: You see the things you could do that might give you an immediate advantage over somebody else, but you realize that you'd rather not do them because they're harmful — not only to the other person, but also to yourself. As you learn to say No to yourself more and more consistently in situations like that, you can begin to trust yourself. As your precepts get tested in more and more difficult situations, you gain a greater and greater sense of their worth. If someone were to offer you a thousand dollars to lie, you realize you have a precept that's worth more than a thousand dollars. If they offer a million dollars, you still can say No. You've got a precept worth more than a million.

And you learn a lot of other skills as well in the course of practicing generosity and virtue. For one thing, you learn deferred gratification, realizing that there are solid pleasures to be gained from putting aside or forgoing quick and easy pleasures that end quickly and easily as well. As you find yourself able to forgo the easy pleasures, you gain a sense of responsibility, a sense of self-worth, a sense that you can trust yourself. This translates into a sense of inner wealth, inner wellbeing.

This is what you want to bring to the meditation, so that you can watch what's happening in the mind with a sense of dispassion. Bad things come up in the meditation and you don't get worked up over them; good things come up and you don't grab at them. You can watch them, instead of saying, "Wow, this must be something really great!" and trying to grab them only to find that they're already gone.

It's like a woman I once knew in Thailand. She lived down the road from the monastery but was new to meditation. I'd gotten to know her over time, and had noticed that she was pretty mercenary. And sure enough, one day as she was sitting and meditating, she reached out in front of her, grabbed the air, and fell over. Later she admitted very sheepishly that she had seen a vision of a golden tray floating right in front of her, and she wanted it. This is what happens when you meditate with a sense of hunger. You grab at everything that comes by and it just slips through your fingers. You destroy whatever it was.

So. Try to come with a sense of wealth, that you're not hungry for things, so that when something good comes up you can just watch it for a while, and say "What is this? Is this really good or not?" If you can develop the patience to watch things, then you begin to get a better sense of what's worthwhile. When something really good does come along, you can just watch it for a while and not try to gobble it up right away.

Even when you can maintain a particular state of ease or rapture, you don't want to start jumping to conclusions about it. That's like the scientists who get a few results from their experiments and then are in a great hurry to publish them so that they can make a name for themselves. If you're wise when something comes up in the meditation, you're not too quick to interpret it. You just watch it for a while to see what happens, to see what it does. What good does it do for the mind? This is what makes all the good things in the meditation good: They do good things for you. We're not here to hoard up the jhanas the way you'd hoard up houses on Baltic or Ventnor. When something comes, just watch it for a while, see what it does. How is it useful in the practice?

Ajaan Fuang once pointed out that even states of Wrong Concentration can be useful if you know how to use them. For instance, you can get yourself in states of concentration where you totally lose any sense of the body — and here I mean strong states of concentration, not that kind of floating, deluded concentration where you just lose your bearings. I'm talking about the state of non-perception, where you really focus on a very minute spot and refuse to deal with anything that comes in through any of the senses. As a result, you can totally blank yourself out. You lose the sense of the body, you can't even hear anything, and you can stay there for long periods of time. If you make up your mind beforehand that you're going to stay for two hours, you'll stay for two hours and then come out right on target. Two hours will seem like two minutes. It's Wrong Concentration because there's no way you're going to be able to develop any insight while you're in that state. But it has its uses. As Ajaan Fuang told me, he once had to go into surgery. They were going to remove a kidney, but he didn't trust the anesthesiologist so he put himself in this state so that, no matter what happened, he wouldn't have to suffer pain.

So even Wrong Concentration can have its uses. All the more so with Right Concentration. But even Right Concentration, as I said, is not an end in and of itself. It's part of the path. And the path is worthwhile because it takes you to where you want to go.

So whatever comes up in the mind, just put a post-it note on it, saying "This seems to be x." Then watch it for a while, to see what x does. Maybe after a while, as you get more and more familiar with the territory of the mind, you have to shift the post-it notes around. But you haven't lost anything because you've learned what these states are useful for.

This is why you want to come to the meditation with a sense of wellbeing. Try to keep the mind on an even keel, so that no matter what happens, good or bad, the mind doesn't have to zoom up with the good things or crash down with the bad. You simply watch. If the mind is centered, you can ask yourself, "This seems good. Where did it come from? Where is it going to go?" If the mind is scattered, ask yourself, "Where did this come from?" Try to trace it out. Try to understand what's happening in terms of cause and effect. This requires that the mood not take total possession of your mind. Try to maintain a sense of the observer that's just watching the mood come and go. Of course, that observer itself will have its own mood, which is a mood of patience, a mood of wellbeing, but also a sense of urgency: This is important work that we're doing here — we don't want to suffer.

So it's important that you strike the right balance. You want accurate results. Sometimes that takes time, so you're willing to take time — the idea being that when you finally publish your results they really are worthwhile, they really are dependable, rather than being just a flash in the pan.

This requires that you bring a sense of contentment, a sense of wellbeing to the meditation. Develop attitudes of generosity, virtue, and self-restraint. Practice them in your daily life. And try to get a keen sense for the rewards that come: the sense of wellbeing and inner wealth that comes when you know that you can give things away, that you can abstain from what you know to be harmful actions. No matter how much you'd like to do something harmful, you just don't do it, and in that way you build up a sense of inner worth and inner wealth.

This puts you in a position where, as you watch your mind in the course of the meditation, you're really going to see what's happening. You're not going to eat up the endowment; you're not going to eat up the bananas before they can get to the apes. You're going to wait until your results are solid and sure before you try to publish anything. That's when the experiment really will be a gift of knowledge, both to yourself and to everybody else.

Of Past & Future

September 18, 2003

I don't know how many times I've started a Dhamma talk by saying, "Don't listen to the Dhamma talk. Focus your attention on the breath. The talk is here to be a fence to direct you back to the present moment, direct you back to the breath in case you wander off." The reason I say that is because that's how the Dhamma functions as a whole. It's meant to point you back to your mind in the present moment, to what you're doing in the present moment, where you can relate things to the present moment — that's when you're using the Dhamma the correct way. When you find that the talk carries you off into speculation, you're using it in the wrong way. The Dhamma is meant to function as a set of tools to apply to the present moment. You're not here simply to be here. You want to understand why you're here, what you're doing here, what's the best thing to be doing here. When the Dhamma talks about the past or the future, it's meant to catch you if you've wandered off into the past or the future, and to bring you back — not only to bring you back to the present, but also to give you a perspective on what you're doing here.

For instance, the teachings on karma: Every time the Buddha talked about cycles of past lives or the general direction of the universe in the future, he ended up by saying that it all comes down to what people do, that karma is what has fashioned the past, will fashion the future. And where is karma being made? Right here, right now. What is karma? Intention. That's the action being performed in the present moment. So you want to look at your intentions. The best way to do that is to meditate.

As for the future we're shaping, think about the past you've shaped with all your past actions. What are the things you've regretted most? Sometimes you might think that you regret something that somebody else did, but the things that really burn inside are the harmful things you did. And they burn especially when you did them even though you knew they'd be harmful. Why did you do them? Because you weren't very alert, weren't very mindful. You let defilement take over the mind. How are you going to prevent yourself from doing that in the future? By developing mindfulness, developing alertness. Where do you do that? Right here, right now. So if you're concerned about the future, remember that if you take care of the powers of the mind here in the present moment, those powers will enable you to handle the future well when it comes. So the teachings related to past and future — particularly the teachings on karma — are designed to bring you back into the present moment and to give you an understanding of why you're here. You're not just hanging out in the present moment because it's a wonderful place to stay. You're not here passively; you're actually doing something here all the time. And what you're doing is important.

So you want to do something skillful. The Buddha talks about Right Effort: the things you should abandon, the things you should prevent, the things you should give rise to, the things you should maintain and develop. He also talks about the four noble truths, and each of them has a duty. With stress and suffering, your duty is to comprehend it. If you happen to run into some suffering here in the present moment, try to comprehend it. If you run into any craving, recognize that that's the cause for suffering. Do what you can to abandon it, to undercut the ignorance that makes it unskillful. As for the factors of the path — concentration, mindfulness, alertness — develop those. If you see any moments where craving disbands, try to be very clear about how that happens — whether it's simply one craving taking over another one or if there's actually a moment when craving stops and nothing takes its place. Look into that. Make it clear. As for the right efforts or the right exertions I mentioned just now, their purpose is to give rise to skillful qualities — like the qualities of the path — and then to maintain them. The preventing and the abandoning apply to the cause of suffering.

So the Buddha's instructions are very clear. They tell you what to do. But they don't simply say, "Do this and don't think about why." They give you the reasons, so that you understand why you're here in the present moment, why you're doing what you're doing. When you understand that much, you understand the purpose of the Dhamma. When you use the Dhamma for that purpose, you're using it properly: to come into the present moment and to sort out what's going on right here, and particularly to understand what your intentions are doing.

So don't be worried if you don't know a lot about the Dhamma or don't understand it all. Understand enough to bring the mind to stillness. Understand enough to bring the mind to the present moment, to watch what it's doing, to do it skillfully, to be mindful, alert, right here. If you find yourself wandering off, try to keep it as short a wander as possible. If the mind is persistent and constantly going back to the past or worrying about the future, keep reminding yourself of the lessons that the Dhamma has to teach about how to relate to the past and the future.

The only really beneficial use for the past is to remember your mistakes and to resolve not to repeat them, to remember what you did well and see if it applies right now. As for the future, its main use is to remind yourself that you don't know how much future time you have left in this particular lifetime. Notice how the Buddha teaches recollection of death: It's not just keeping "Death, death, death, death, death..." in mind. The proper reflection is, "If I had just one more breath, I could make good use of it." So where does that reflection focus you? On the present moment. You do have this one more breath, so make good use of it. Have a sense of the value of each breath as it comes in, each breath as it goes out. Have a sense of the importance of the present moment. The opportunities are here in the present moment for performing the duties appropriate to the four noble truths, for mastering Right Exertion or mastering Right Effort. That's all you really need to know. If you want your understanding of those teachings to get more refined, the present moment is the place to look more carefully.

Think about the Buddha on the night of his Awakening. His first knowledge was recollection of past lives, but that wasn't Awakening. Still, it did inspire the question: Did this pattern apply just to him or to everybody? And what's the factor that determines whether a life is going to be happy or sad, comfortable or not? In the second knowledge he applied his powers of concentration to that question and discovered that the principle of rebirth applies to everybody. He also found that actions performed with Right View — skillful intentions influenced by Right View, the view that your actions are important — are the things that led to happy lifetimes. Unskillful intentions performed from Wrong Views lead to suffering.

But then the Buddha did something very unusual. He applied that insight to the present moment: What do all these lessons have to do with the present moment? That's where the third knowledge came in. He focused on the immediate present, on the questions of stress and suffering right here and now, the causes for those things as they appear right here and now. In other words, he focused on his actions, his intentions, in the present moment, along with the stress and suffering occurring right there in the present moment. And the mental activities that led him beyond the suffering, to transcend suffering: Those were all right there in that moment, too. It was because he looked at the present moment in that way that he was able to break through to something else, something that can be touched right here in your awareness of the present, but lies beyond it.

So learn to use the Dhamma in a way that keeps bringing you back, bringing you back to what you're doing right here, right now, with the determination to do it skillfully, with alertness, with mindfulness. If you have any doubts about why you're here, reflect on what the Dhamma teaches: that what you're doing right here is useful. Very useful, both for you and for the people around you. A lot of people accuse meditators of simply running away from things, but we're not running away. We're running to the source of all things right here. We're accused of doing something totally useless to other people. Well, no it's not: We're getting rid of greed, anger, and delusion right here. This benefits not only ourselves, but also everyone around us. That's our purpose for being here.

And it's an important purpose. It's the most important thing we can do with our lives: the sort of thing that if it demands great sacrifices, we should be willing to make them. As the Buddha once said, even if your practice of the holy life brings tears bathing your cheeks in sorrow, frustration, and despair, you should stick with it. That's much better than giving up. This is the best use of your life. The Dhamma is there to remind you of that.

So we're not just hanging out here in the present moment, grooving on or blissing out in the present moment — although there may be bliss. That's not all that we're here for. We're here for something more important than that. The teachings on the past or the future — all the teachings of the Dhamma — are here to remind us of that, to give us the incentive to stick with the present moment, to watch the present moment, to work with the present moment, to parse it out and see which part of our experience is the result of past karma, which is the actual karma we're doing right now, which is the result of the karma we're doing right now. And our experimental laboratory is the breath right here.

So here you are: right at the breath. You're where you should be. You're at the best place you can be right now, the most useful place you can be right now. So make the most of this opportunity.

Get Real

October 4, 2003

When you come to practice meditation, tell yourself that you've left all your baggage at the door. You don't have to carry it in here. All of your thoughts about what you've done today, what you're going to do tomorrow, anything past or future: Tell yourself that those things aren't relevant right now.

What's relevant is what you're immediately sensing right now. And what is there? There's the sensation of the body and the sensation of the breath coming in and going out. As for the other sense doors, you can close them down. Your eyes are closed; you can even close your ears. You don't have to listen to the Dhamma talk. As I've said many times before, the Dhamma talk is here as a fence. If you leave the breath, you run into the fence. Go back to the breath. Don't let the talk interfere with your breathing. Allow the body to relax.

Ajaan Suwat once noted that there's a paradox in what we're trying to develop as we get the mind to settle down. On the one hand, the texts talk about making the mind soft and malleable. On the other hand, they talk about making it strong — strong in the sense that you're not going to get waylaid by other thoughts. You're going to stay focused right here on the breath, focused right here on the immediate sensation of the body no matter what else happens. Try to elaborate that as little as possible. Stay just with the direct sensation: the breath coming in, the breath going out. You feel it right here, and you feel the different sensations in the body that let you know where your legs are, where your arms are, where your head is. Don't try to fill in anything more than what you actually sense. That's a good exercise in self-honesty right there.

Ordinarily we bring a lot of ideas into the present moment: perceptions about the shape of the body, about how we should breathe, about where we should be feeling the sensation of the breathing. If you really look, though, you see how fabricated those ideas are. If you let them go, what have you got left? Explore. When you do, you find things softening up a bit. A lot of the tension with which you hold the body to make it fit in with your preconceived notions of what you should be feeling right now, gets put aside. As you allow yourself to become more and more sensitive to what you're feeling, the tension in the body can begin to relax. You're not here trying to prove anything or to force anything. You're here to explore: What have you got right here right now?

If there's a sensation of tension or tightness in any part of the body, allow it to disperse. You can think of the breath as a means of clearing out that tension. In other words, you breathe through it as you breathe in, and you allow it to go out with the breath, or simply to dissolve, as you breathe out. As you let go of the tension in the body, your sense of the body here in the present moment, your sense of awareness here in the present moment, begins to open up. That's the softness, the malleability, that we're aiming for in the state of concentration.

As for the strength, that lies in not allowing yourself to get waylaid. Other thoughts are going to come in. That's something you can expect to happen, so don't get worked up about it. The trick lies in letting them go right through you. Think of your awareness of the body as a big window screen, with lots of little holes. They're porous. When a sound comes in, when a thought comes in, whatever comes in, just let it go right through. You don't have to catch it, just as a screen doesn't catch the wind. This way you can combine that sense of being tender, softened up, more malleable, with the strength. The strength lies in the wires in the screen, in that they don't get blown away by what's coming through. The softness lies in the holes, in the porous nature of your awareness that allows things through.

When the breath comes in and goes out, it can come in and go out anywhere in the body at all. So experiment and explore to see how that feels. What breathing feels best right now? Look into it. There's long breathing, slow breathing, fast breathing, short breathing, hot, cool and warm breathing — like the porridge in the story of Goldilocks. You have all kinds of choices, but what you want is the one that's just right. You're not trying to program yourself or force yourself into a particular mold. The recommendations of the technique are there to give you guidance in your exploration, to give you a sense of direction in what you're doing. But the things you're going to see depend on your own powers of observation as you adjust the breath, as you adjust your focus.

That act of adjusting is the beginning of discernment. You begin to see connections: cause and effect. When you choose to breathe in a certain way, certain sensations are going to result, either pleasurable or painful. That's the law of karma right there: seeing how things arise and pass away, seeing the connections between what you do and the feelings that arise and pass away as a result.

When the texts describe the insight that leads to the first stage of Awakening, they express it as seeing this: All that's subject to origination is subject to cessation. That's an insight both into change and into causal connections underlying change. The Pali word for "origination," samudaya, refers to the way things arise together with their causes. As you go deeper into the meditation, this insight grows deeper and becomes more all-encompassing, but it starts with precisely this act of adjusting: changing your perceptions and intentions a little bit here, a little bit there, seeing what feelings result, and trying to be observant as possible, as sensitive as possible, to what's really happening, to what's connected with what.

This is why you're told not to force the breath, but to allow it to come in and go out comfortably and then to monitor it to see what feels best. Learn to listen to things as they come into being. This was characteristic of the Buddha as he sought Awakening: to see things as they come into being. He didn't try blindly to force things in line with a lot of preconceived notions. He was more of an explorer, trying different approaches and seeing what results came about. Ultimately he found what worked best in the sense of putting an end to all suffering and then recommended that method for us to follow. He set out all the basic principles but left the details for us to observe for ourselves in our laboratory right here: the body sitting here, breathing in and out.

In other words, we're sitting here trying to follow his method, not just trying to clone the results. We follow the method he proposed for learning the truths that lie within us. But to get the best results requires developing your own sensitivity, your own awareness, and seeing what precisely, really, is there.

Recently I've been looking through a field guide on nature observation. The author, when he was a child, was trained by an old Native American. One day the child asked the old man, "Why is it that you're not afraid of heat and cold?"

The old man looked at him for a while and finally said, "Because they're real."

And this is our job as meditators: to try to learn not to be afraid of things that are real.

Ultimately, we discover that things that are real pose no danger to the mind. The real dangers in the mind are our delusions, the things we make up, the things we use to cover up reality, the stories, the preconceived notions we impose on things. When we're trying to live in those stories and notions, reality is threatening. It's always exposing the cracks in our ideas, the cracks in our ignorance, the cracks in our desires. As long as we identify with those make-believe desires, we find that threatening. But if we learn to become real people ourselves, then reality poses no dangers.

This is what the meditation is for, teaching yourself how to be real, to get in touch with what's really going on, to look at your sense of who you are and take it apart in terms of what it really is, to look at the things that you find threatening in your life and see what they really are. When you really look, you see the truth. If you're true in your looking, the truth appears.

This is an important principle in the practice. This is why the Dhamma is so precious. Only people who are true can see the truth. Truth is a quality of the mind that doesn't depend on figuring things out or being clever. It depends on having integrity in your actions and in your powers of observation, accepting the truth as it is. It means accepting the fact that you play a role in shaping that truth, so you have to be responsible. You have to be sensitive both to what you're doing and to the results you get, so that you can learn to be more and more skillful.

Many people think that self-acceptance means celebrating what's there already: that you're good enough, that you don't have to make any changes. That's not the case at all. Acceptance means accepting the fact that you're responsible for a lot of your experience right now. You can't blame anybody else. And ultimately that's a good thing. If other people were ultimately responsible for shaping your experience, what could you do? You'd have to go around pleasing them all the time. But the key fact is that you're shaping your pleasures and pains here in the present moment. Some of your experience comes from past actions, but a lot comes from the way you shape things with each present intention.

So learn to be open and honest about the role you're playing in this moment. That way the meditation leads to greater and greater sensitivity into precisely this — what you're doing right now — and into the fact that if you were really observant you'd be a lot more sensitive in shaping your experience. There'd be a lot less suffering. In fact, you could ultimately get to the point where you put no suffering into your experience at all. That's how far the skill can go. It requires that you be true in your observation, both admitting what you're doing to yourself and admitting the results that come, at the same time using your ingenuity to figure out how to do things better.

So this is where those qualities of sensitivity or tenderness on the one hand, and strength on the other hand, come together. The sensitivity lies in allowing yourself to see really refined things; the strength, in admitting the truth for what it is. It's in this area that the ignorance leading to suffering lies: in our inability to be true to ourselves. But, as the old man's statement implied, if you're true, the truth isn't threatening. If you learn to be a real person then reality doesn't hold any dangers, doesn't hold any fears.

If you're still living in worlds that are false and made up, though, then reality poses a threat. Only when you strip away all the unreality in your mind will you find in what's left that there's nothing to fear. There are no dangers. There's just reality meeting with reality, truth meeting with truth.

So the clearer and more honest you are about what you're doing right here, right now, the closer you get to that position where there's nothing to threaten you, where there are no dangers in life, no suffering. That's where this simple exercise of watching your breath, adjusting your breath, and watching it again can take you, if you really follow it all the way through.

Sticking with an Intention

November 14, 2005

It can be very chastening to see how changeable your mind is. You make up your mind to do something and then find yourself just a few minutes later heading off in another direction. Sometimes it's because you saw that your original intention was not as wise as you thought it was, but often it has nothing to do with that at all. The original intention was perfectly fine, but you're off headed at right angles to that intention. And you wonder why.

One of the purposes of meditation is to see exactly what's happening, why you can suddenly veer off at right angles, exactly what the mind does to itself in order to drop a perfectly good intention and go someplace totally different. In this way the meditation is like an experiment. You set up some conditions and then watch how they play out. In other words, you start by focusing on something you know is good: the breath. After all, the breath is the force of life and it's very immediate. It's not far off or dubious. It's right here, right now. You can see that sticking with the breath and allowing it to be comfortable is bound to have a good effect on the body and the mind. So there's no doubt there.

After setting up the breath as the object of your intention, the next step is to be aware of any other vagrant intentions that will pull you off in other directions. For the time being, the rule in your mind is: If a thought doesn't have anything to do with the breath, you don't want to get involved. So as soon as you find yourself veering off, you don't have to ask a lot of questions. If you're getting pulled away from the breath, just drop that thought-formation and come back to the breath, no matter how interesting, intriguing, or important that thought may be. Just let it go. Leave it in mid-sentence. You don't have to tie up any loose ends. You don't have to make a little note to come back there and check it out later. Just totally drop it and come back.

Now, the after-echo of that thought-formation may continue for a while. That's okay; you don't have to listen to it. Your job right now is to train the mind to be more and more consistent in sticking with an intention. And — sure enough — a second thought will come up, or a third, or a fourth, a tenth, or a hundredth, but no matter how many, you're not going to follow them. That's the promise you make yourself when you sit down. And the important thing is not to get discouraged when you find yourself breaking that promise. Just pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and get back to the breath. Remember: This is a deeply ingrained habit we're fighting here, so it's going to take effort and time. If you think training a dog is difficult, the human mind is even more devious, even more resistant to new tricks. It's difficult to train the human mind in this way, but it can be done.

And the time spent in training yourself in new habits like this is time well spent. After all, the force of intention is what shapes your life. We don't often think of the teachings on karma as having much relevance to the meditation. Sometimes we're even taught that karma was one of those weird pieces of cultural baggage that somehow got smuggled into Buddhism from its cultural background. But that's not the case at all. The Buddha had some very specific teachings on karma that had nothing to do with what anybody else was teaching at the time, and they're immediately relevant to why and how we're meditating.

The "why" has to do with the point I just raised. Given that karma is intention, and intention is the huge shaping force in your life, you want some control over it. If you make up your mind to do something that you know is good, you want to be able to stick with that intention. And where does intention happen? Right in the present moment. Where does it get changed? In the present moment. This is why we focus on the present moment, so that we can see the process of intention in action as it happens and can have a say in where that intention is going to go. The more solidly you can stay in the present moment — the more steadily you can maintain your balance here — the more you'll be able to see, and the more conscious say you'll have in the direction those intentions are going to take you. That's the "why."

As for the "how," you'll notice as things come up in the meditation that the vagrant intentions have very little to do with anything you were consciously thinking about as you sat down to meditate, when you made your intention to stay with the breath. And yet suddenly they appear. This relates to the Buddha's teachings on how your present experience is made up of three things: the results of past intentions, the actual process of intention in the present moment, and immediate results of that present intention. Certain thoughts are going to come up as a result of past intentions, and they don't necessarily have much meaning. They just happen to pop up and they can be pretty random.

Sometimes we look for inspiration or signs of some special knowledge as we meditate. That can happen, but it's also mixed up with a lot of really random stuff. It's like looking for meaning in your dreams: Some dreams are portentous, some are pretentious, and most are totally random. You can't take them as a dependable guide. In the same way, you can't necessarily take what pops into your mind in the present moment as a guide either, no matter how still or luminous your mind may be, for a lot of what pops up is simply the result of random past intentions. But what you can do — by staying solidly in the present moment and solidly with your intention to stay with the breath — is, over time, to put yourself in a better position to evaluate what comes into the mind. If a thought of greed, anger, or delusion comes in, you'll be able to sense it and to see what it does because you're more sensitive to what's going on here.

Insights may come up, but you don't have to memorize them. Ajaan Fuang once said that if an insight is really valuable you don't have to take note of it for future reference. Instead, see if you can apply it to what's actually happening to your mind in the present moment. If it gives good results, stick with it. If it doesn't, drop it. If it's a really valuable insight, it'll stay with you because you got good results from it. You won't have to tag it, put it on a leash, and lead it back home with you.

The insights are not nearly as important as the ability to put the mind in a position where it can produce insights and evaluate them in terms of what they do in the present. That's why we're trying to get the mind in concentration. Try to be very, very alert to cause and effect here in the present moment. When you can see the connection between cause and effect, that's when you're in a position to evaluate your thoughts, because the worth of a thought lies in its effect. It's like having a goose that lays golden eggs: You focus on taking good care of the goose, rather than the eggs, because these golden eggs are like the gold in fairy tales. If you don't use them or give them away right away, they turn into feathers, they turn into charcoal. Remember fairy tales? The more you try to hold onto things, the more they turn into straw. If you get something good, you put it to use. You give it away. That's when you gain something more valuable in return.

It's the same with insights. If the insight is appropriate for the time and place, fine, use it. If not, just put it aside. It probably wasn't an insight anyhow, because, as I said, all kinds of things from your past karma can come popping up into a still mind. But the value of a still mind doesn't lie so much in what pops up as in your ability to evaluate what pops up. You can see cause and effect in action. When the mind is really still and very refined, it can sense the presence of greed, anger, and delusion even in minute quantities. It can sense what they do. Your powers of sensitivity are raised; your ability to see cause and effect is sharpened. You can tell genuine gold from fools' gold a lot better when the mind is still.

So you don't have to trust whatever comes up in the still mind. In fact, you're not supposed to trust anything. You're supposed to put everything to the test. The value of a still mind is not that it sees things but that it sees things in action. You can gauge your intentions a lot better when the basic underlying intention in the mind is reliable, solid, and sure. Here the basic underlying intention is this: Always to do what's most skillful. Always choose what's going to be the least harmful, the most beneficial course of action. And one of the most beneficial things you can do for yourself is to learn how to stick with a very simple, good intention like this, like staying with the breath.

As you get more and more reliable in staying here, you provide the foundation for all the other insights and all the other good things that come from training the mind. So make sure the foundation is strong, make sure the foundation is solid, and the good things you develop to build on top of that are less likely to topple over.

The Karma that Ends Karma

October 12, 2005

This practice we're doing here is called the karma that puts an end to karma. And because karma is intention, this means that the practice is the intention to put an end to intention. That's why it's tricky. If you intend to put a stop to intention, that's an intention right there, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. It simply means there are going to be some unexpected twists and turns along the path.

As the Buddha said, the central part of his path is Right Concentration. Concentration basically means a firm intention, sticking with one object. You focus your intention on staying with the breath, staying with goodwill, whatever the object of your meditation, and then you try to maintain that intention. Then you see what you can learn about intention in the course of trying to maintain it, what other things you can learn about the mind as you try to maintain that intention.

The usual culprits to begin with are distractions, either internal or external. The internal ones are other thoughts, other intentions. At first you hardly realize that they're intentions. You're focusing on the breath, everything seems fine and then suddenly you're someplace else, half a world away. It's as if someone snuck up behind you, threw a sack over your head, dragged you off, and then dumped you on another continent. You don't know what happened in the meantime. You don't catch sight of the fact that an intention triggered the slipping away. There was one brief moment when you decided, "I'm out of here." Something else popped up in the mind and you went for it. There was a choice.

This is why meditation requires so much mindfulness and alertness. As we practice, mindfulness means the ability to keep your original intention in mind. Alertness means the ability to keep watch over things around that intention. On the one hand, you focus on what's going on with the object of your concentration. On the other, you keep track of how the mind is relating to it. Learn how to catch any warning signals that the mind is about to go. It may take a while for you to catch them because they're subtle and quick. The only way to see them is to stick with your original intention and keep yourself warned: "Okay, the mind is going to leave, so keep watch for how it does it."

At the same time, work on ways to make the original intention a good one to stay with. Otherwise the mind is going to resist. Staying with the breath, if it's not comfortable, is going to be like trying to keep a balloon under water. It'll stay there only as long as your grip is really secure. As soon as there's the slightest slip, there it goes, popping up out of the water.

This is where you have to get your defilements on your side. They want comfort, so give them comfort. Try to make the breath as comfortable as possible. The breath here is not just the air coming in and out of the lungs, it's your whole sense of energy flow in the body. As the image for the first jhana says, it's like working moisture through a ball of bath powder. Or you can think of making bread. You put water in with the flour and then knead it through the flour until every part of that ball of flour is moistened. You take whatever ease and sense of refreshment that comes from the breath and try to knead it through the body, all the way out to the tips of the toes, all the way out to the tips of the fingers, all over the front and back of the body. That makes the body a good place to stay.

Or you can think of systematically going through the body. Relax the fingers, relax the palms of your hands, the backs of your hands, your wrists, your arms, anywhere you can detect tension that pulls you out of a nice, comfortable straight-up-and-down posture. Start with the tips of your fingers and go up your palms, the backs of your hands, up your arms to the shoulders. Then start with your toes, go up your feet, your legs, pelvis, up the back, to the neck, and then all the muscles around the head. Then try to develop an all-around awareness that can keep the whole body relaxed all the time. This makes the body a much nicer place to stay.

As you work on this, it engages several parts of the mind, such as the desire for pleasure and the desire to explore as you begin to see connections throughout the body. This means you've got allies inside. As Ajaan Lee said, it's like taking Mara and putting him on your side.

So that's one strategy for staying with your original intention.

Another strategy is to learn to be very quick in dealing with your distractions. It's so easy to get entangled in the story line wherever your thoughts lead you. If the distractions come from within, a little thought bubble comes up in the mind and says, "Let's explore this and see where it goes." And you end up finding yourself in the Andromeda galaxy. In other words, these things can take you far, far away, into whole other worlds, whole other stories. Sometimes it's hard to pull yourself out of those stories because you want to see how they end. It's almost as if you're committed to it. This happens all the time. You walk past a TV and suddenly find yourself in some stupid story. You know the stories on TV are stupid, but you still get sucked in. That's because you're already a sucker for getting sucked in to these stupid stories in your mind.

So you have to learn to develop a certain amount of skepticism for these stories. Do you really need to know the end? Learn how to cut things off in the middle of a story. The characters won't mind.

In other cases, the story lines don't start out with internal distractions. They start out with external irritants that pull you away. Other people say or do things that irritate you, and all of a sudden you're focused on how much you don't like what they said or did. Then you get upset because they've destroyed your concentration. You can build up huge narratives about how they shouldn't have done that, shouldn't have destroyed your concentration. Actually, they weren't the ones who destroyed your concentration. You dropped it, ran after them, and then found some satisfaction in blaming them. Again, you've got to learn how to pull yourself out of that mindset as well. No matter what anybody else says or does, the breath is still there. You made the choice to leave. That's what you've got to watch out for.

So the whole purpose of concentration practice is to get to know the process of intention. The best way of doing that is to stick with this one intention as much as you can, because it gives you something to measure your other intentions against, so you can notice how they move.

Then, after the distractions get less and less compelling, you can begin to look into this intention you're trying to maintain. What is it made out of? Mostly verbal fabrication and mental fabrication. The verbal fabrication is directed thought and evaluation, two of the factors of jhana. Directed thought is when you focus your intention on an object; evaluation is when you examine the object, seeing whether you like it, don't like it, what comments you have to make on it. These two processes lie at the basis of every sentence in the mind, every sentence you speak. That's why they're called verbal fabrication.

Then there's mental fabrication: feeling and perception. These things have their intentional element, too. Even when you drop directed thought and evaluation to go from the first jhana to the second, there's still feeling and perception. In fact the perception — the perception of breath — is what keeps you there all the way up through the fourth jhana. Try to hold onto that perception until the breath energy in the body grows still. Then you stay with still breath as your perception. After a while the border between your body and what's outside your body begins to dissolve. You begin to realize that the border was a perception reinforced by the movement of the breath. When the breath gets still, there's nothing to reinforce it. So you can adjust your perception to space or consciousness, and there's no border to these things.

In other words, after dealing with distractions, you're able to focus on the one intention that forms your concentration and you begin to understand it. What's the process of fabrication going on in here? If it weren't consistent enough, you wouldn't understand it, for you'd get nothing but fleeting glimpses. A lot of your insights are just that — little fleeting glimpses — and then you try to connect them. It's like playing connect-the-dots. And the problem with connect-the-dots is that the dots can be anything, like the constellations in the sky. We look up at Orion in the winter and we see his belt and his knife hanging from his belt. People in Thailand, though, look up at the same stars and see a plow. The belt is the actual plow and the knife is the part that pulls the plough. And who's to say that we're right and they're wrong?

The same holds true for our connect-the-dot insights. If awareness isn't continuous enough, all we see are the lines we've drawn. We don't see the actual dots. But when you can stick consistently with your original intention, you begin to see the actual dots and the actual lines: what actually connects to what, what causes what, and what actually makes up this intention we've been working so hard to maintain.

The other insight that comes is that, as you're maintaining an intention, it's like maintaining a yoga posture. Just as you relax into the yoga posture over time, in the same way you're relaxing into the concentration. You begin to realize that certain activities in your original intention are not necessary to keep it going. After the mind begins to settle down, you have less and less need for directed thought and evaluation. The breath gets more comfortable, you get more settled in, and there comes a point where you can drop the directed thought and evaluation. You can just be one with the breath — in the same way that when you're in a yoga posture you begin to realize that you've been tensing certain muscles that you don't have to tense. In fact, you'd be more comfortable in the posture if you relaxed those muscles. But those insights into which parts are going to have to be relaxed — you can't will those beforehand, but you can pose the question in your mind: What would be more comfortable here? That's how you can develop insight.

When the Buddha talks about developing insight, he focuses on posing certain questions in your mind: "How should fabrications be regarded? How should they be investigated?" You can't put the mind through a vipassana mill and guarantee that it is going to come out with insight. But if you learn to pose the right questions — and these are basically questions that come from the four noble truths — "Where is the stress? What are you doing that's causing the stress?": Insight starts with simple things like this. What's tense in the breath? What's tense in the body? Where is there any blockage in the body that's really unnecessary? When you see, you learn to relax it. Then you focus on the mental factors maintaining your state of concentration: Which ones are an unnecessary burden that makes it hard to maintain the concentration? Once you've settled in, you learn how to relax those mental activities.

That's the pattern for insight, and you follow that pattern all the way through as it takes you from one level of concentration to another. It takes concentration as far as it can go. Try to maintain your concentration as much as you can, because the more consistently you can maintain it, the more you're likely to catch sight of those unnecessary actions. They're activities; they're inconstant. If they were totally constant, you'd never catch sight of their existence. It's because they come and go that you realize: Now it's here, now it's not. There's something going on here. The stress comes, the stress goes. The cause comes, the cause goes. And insight is a matter of learning how to catch sight of these things as they happen. You pare down the intention to stay still until there's nothing left to pare down without totally dropping intention.

Again, that's something unexpected. You can't intend to see it at a particular moment, but you can pose the question. The posing of the question is what's called appropriate attention. That's what opens things up, makes it possible to see things that you didn't intend to see, or to see them where you didn't intend to see them. This is how things finally open to the Deathless.

The Deathless is unintended. It's something that, when you hit it, you realize was always there, and that nothing you can do will change it. The reason you didn't notice it before was because you were entangled in your intentions and the results of your intentions. But you can't get there simply by saying, "Okay, I'm not going to intend anything anymore." That doesn't do it. You have to intend Right Concentration: That's the doing. That allows you to understand what it means to "do" well enough so that you can actually stop doing. That's the karma that puts an end to karma, the intention that allows you to understand intention until you finally get to the point where you can stop intending.

And it really is a stopping of intention. It's not a hall of mirrors where you say, "Okay, I'm going to stop intending to stop intending, -tending, -tending" which is an intention to stop the intention which is an intention and just goes on and on and on like that. You can't reason yourself into this, but it's something that can be induced. You can bring yourself to the brink where it can happen.

So work at this intention, the intention to stay focused on one preoccupation. Get to know it. Get to be on good terms with it. Get as much of the mind on your side as you can through making the breath comfortable, through making the process interesting. And then learn to be resolute at cutting away things that aren't really helpful, things that pull you off in other directions. This is going to require all your ingenuity, all your attention, but it's one of the few skills in life that's really worth all the effort it requires, that more than repays all the effort put into it. It'll see you all the way through every possible type of suffering, because its rewards are more than you can intend. You can think about the goal, you can have a picture of what it's like, but the picture in your preconceived notion has an intentional element. It's part of the path because it helps you along, gives you encouragement, but the actual rewards when they come are much greater.

So keep reminding yourself of the Buddha's instructions on tranquility and insight. For the tranquility, it's a question of how to settle in, how to really steady the mind in its intention, how to indulge in it, which means to learn how to enjoy it. The insight then comes in learning how to question the intention — not in the sense of doubting it, but in the sense of learning how to investigate what's going on here. When you learn how to bring the activities for tranquility and insight together in the right balance, then you really come to know what the Buddha was talking about.

Analyzing the Breath

April 18, 2005

When the Buddha teaches mindfulness immersed in the body, the first thing he discusses is being mindful of the breath. It's good to stop and think for a few moments about why he starts there. One of the reasons is that the breath is your most immediate experience of the body. We have a tendency to identify ourselves with the solid parts of the body and think of the breath as something secondary, something that comes in and out of the part we inhabit. But actually you wouldn't know about the solid parts of the body, the solid sensations in the body, if it weren't for the breath. For one thing, you'd be dead. And even if there were some way of being alive and not having the breath, the only way you'd know that there's something solid is because something is moving against it, moving over it. So think about this as you're focusing on the breath.

One way of approaching the body is thinking of it as primarily breath sensations. Ajaan Lee lists a whole series of them: the breath that moves up the body; the breath that moves down the body; the breath that goes out through all the blood vessels, tensing and relaxing the muscles in the blood vessels; the breath that goes out the nerves; the breath sensations that spin around in place; the breath energy constantly radiating from the diaphragm, the breath constantly coming up the spine. There are all kinds of breath sensations in the body. One way of making the body more comfortable is to think of it as all breath. Every sensation has a breath aspect to it, so focus on that breath aspect. If anything seems tight or tense, don't write it simply off as being a solid part of the body. Think of it as a breath sensation that somehow got tightened. Loosen it up. Approach it as you would a breath that should be moving through the body. See how that changes the way you relate to it.

This is one way of making the body interesting. An important principle in concentration practice is that if you try to rely solely on willpower to stay with an object, you won't have much staying power. But if you find the object absorbing, it's a lot easier to stay. So look at the body in a new light, from a new perspective, and see if it becomes more interesting to be sitting right here, not doing much of anything else, just staying with the body, exploring how it feels to be right here and not traveling around outside. If you try to lock the mind into the body, it's like locking a child into his room: He's going to try to figure out some way to get out the window, or start doing something in the room he knows his parents don't like, just to spite them. The mind is like that: If you lock it in with an object, it'll start doing things to spite you.

So the trick is to leave the windows and doors open, but give the mind lots of things to play with, to get absorbed inside. That way the child will stay in its room without your having to force it, without your having to lock it in. The breezes come in the window and they won't blow you away, because you've got something interesting right here in the present moment. When the breath energy flows more smoothly through the body, aches and pains will calm down. You'll be healthier in general. As you really get to know the breath, you find that it can induce a sense of refreshment which, as you allow it to stay, gets more intense and shades into rapture — all simply from being with the breath.

So, if you find that the breath is boring, it's because, one, you're not paying attention; and two, you're not asking the right questions. You're assuming lots of things you don't really know about the body in the present moment. Learn how to question those assumptions. Is the body as solid as it seems? Certain sensations of tension or tightness: Do they have to be there? Maybe the way you're breathing is what's maintaining them. As you allow yourself to get absorbed in the breath, exploring these things, you require less and less willpower to stay here. This is the kind of concentration that has discernment as one of its integral factors. In terms of the bases of success, it's the fourth one: concentration based on the powers of analysis.

So give it a try. Explore what's actually happening as you just sit here. The breath comes in, the breath goes out, the breath spins around in place, gets blocked here, flows there, dissipates here, gets strong and constant there. Explore these things. It's part of learning how to take care of the body. And you find that in taking care of the body this way, you're taking care of the mind as well.

Immersed in the Body

September 19, 2004

Some people think that when the Buddha describes the five aggregates he's describing what we are, but that's precisely what he's not saying. He's saying that we're not that. But the mind does identify with these things — sometimes with the body, sometimes with feelings, perceptions, thought-formations, sometimes with sensory consciousness, sometimes different combinations, sometimes all of the above. If you could take a movie of the mind's sense of itself, it would be erratic and mercurial, like a reflection on water — slithering here and there, identifying with this, identifying with that, shape-shifting all the time. In changing position all the time like this, the mind expends a lot of energy. One of the things that we want to try to do as we meditate is to get it to stay in one place, to save some energy. As long as you're going to have a sense of self, keep it solid — rock solid — immersed in the body.

Breath meditation is one way of staying immersed in the body. The term in Pali is kayagatasati, mindfulness immersed in the body. And the quality of immersion is important. You want to fill the whole body, occupy the body, inhabit the whole body, as much as you can.

Where is your observer right now? For many of us, it's like a weird bird perched on our shoulders and peering through our eyes. It watches the body as if the body were something separate. But as we meditate, we're trying to get away from identifying with that particular observer; we want to be an observer filling the whole body. Your feet fill your feet, your hands fill your hands. Your entire sense of who you are fills the entire body.

This puts you in a position of strength, because if you're leaving big gaps of unoccupied territory in your body, other things will occupy it — different thoughts, different defilements. But if your awareness occupies your whole body, other things can't get in so easily. The image in the Canon is of a solid wooden door: a ball of string thrown at the door won't leave a dent at all. Even if things do come in and make a dent on the mind, you're going to know it, you're going to see it because you're right there. You're not off in some other corner of the body looking at something else.

So as you focus on the breath, try to get past the idea that you're in one part of the head watching the breath in other parts of the body. You want to occupy the whole body, bathed in the whole breath. The breath and the body should be surrounding your sense of where you are. And then you want to maintain that sense of being centered in the body like this, filling the whole body with your awareness as you breathe in, as you breathe out.

Why? For one thing, this sense of filling the body helps you stay in the present moment. When the mind goes off thinking thoughts about past and future, it has to shrink its sense of awareness, shrink its sense of itself, down to a small enough dot so that it can slip into the past or slip into the future. In other words, you latch onto the part of the body that you use as a basis for thinking about the past or the future, while other parts of the body get blotted out. But if you're filling the body with your awareness and can maintain that full awareness, you can't slip off into the past and future unless you want to. So this is one way of nailing yourself down to the present moment. Your inner hands are nailed to your physical hands, your feet to your feet. You can't move.

Think of the breath coming into the whole body. Every cell of the body is participating in the breathing process, and you're sitting here in the midst of it. This gives your sense of observing self a greater solidity, so that when thoughts come into the mind you're not knocked off balance by them. You've got a solid foundation. The word they use for the object of meditation in Pali, arammana, literally means "support," the idea being that your mind is standing firm on something. You're standing here in the body. This is your location. This is where you take your stance. And when your stance is solid, nobody can kick you over or knock you down.

It's like riding on the subway in New York City. The subway sways back and forth and up and down and all around. If your stance is planted just right — so that you don't get knocked over either by the acceleration or deceleration of the train or the swaying to the left or the right — you can maintain your balance no matter what. But life is a lot more erratic even than a subway train. The things that happen around you — sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, things that people do, things that people say: They can hit the mind with a lot more violence, with a lot more force than the wobbling or sudden braking of a subway train. So the mind needs a really solid stance.

This is why we work on providing this support for the mind not only while we're sitting here meditating but also throughout the day. Some people complain that it's asking too much of them to pay attention to the events of the day and to the breath at the same time. Well, if you're sitting in the back of your head watching the breath in the body and watching things outside, it does add an extra burden: You've got two things to watch at any one time instead of just one. But if you think of yourself as immersed in your body, inhabiting your whole body, this puts you in a different position. You're standing in the breath, in a position of solidity, a position of strength. From that position you watch things outside, so that instead of having extra things to do, you've simply got a better place to maintain your stance. If your sense of self is inhabiting one little part of the body, and things come in from the outside with great force — somebody does something or says something that hits you the wrong way — you can get knocked off kilter really easily because your stance isn't solid. The mind is so used to flitting around from one position to another that it's very easily knocked off balance. But if you're standing, filling your whole body with your awareness — this is your stance, this is your support — then no matter what comes, you can keep your balance.

So try to maintain this sense of inhabiting your body, being bathed in the breath, being surrounded by the breath on all sides, not only while you're sitting here but also as you go through the day. Try to maintain this quality of being fully immersed in the body, fully aware, fully mindful, fully alert. Once you can maintain this stance in different situations, then you can start observing the sense of self you've created here. If your sense of self is flitting all around — first with a feeling, then with a perception, then back to a feeling again, then to perception and feeling, like those weird amoeba-like shapes that flit across the surface of water — it's hard to observe, to get a sense of, "What is this self? Why does the mind need a sense of self?" But as you maintain this one sense of self inhabiting the body, immersed in the body, surrounded on all sides by the breath, it's there long enough for you to observe it: What's it made of? What's the form here? Where's the feeling? Where's the perception? Where are the thought-formations? Where's the consciousness? It's all right here, relatively still, enough that you can really observe it.

There are lots of advantages to having a sense of mindfulness immersed in the body, your sense of self immersed in the body. Eventually you take that sense of self apart, but in the meantime you learn how to use it so that you don't get knocked over by all the winds and currents of the world. You don't get knocked over by all the currents flowing out of the mind either. When they talk about taking the body in-and-of-itself as your island, as your refuge, this is what they mean: The current of the river flows past, but the island stays solid because it's deeply rooted. It's made of rock, like Manhattan; it's not a sand-bar. You've got your awareness deeply rooted in your hands, in your feet, in the different parts of your body, not just in your head, not flitting around from here to there. You've got a large sense of awareness filling the present.

This puts you in a position of strength, which you want to maintain for as long as you can. It helps ward off the currents that come flowing from outside or inside, and it also allows you to see your sense of self a lot more clearly, to understand what it is — where there's still suffering even in this position of strength, where there's still stress and uncertainty and inconstancy. But first you do your best to make it constant. How are you going to believe the Buddha's teachings on inconstancy until you've found some constancy in your awareness? You push the limits. It's only when you really push the limits that you can gain a true sense of where things start pushing back. When the Buddha gave his teachings, he didn't simply ask for people to believe what he said. He said to push back inside yourself to test them.

So. Inconstancy, stress, not-self: How do you test those? By creating a constant sense of ease in the body, because this awareness has to be relaxed in order to last. And you can identify with it, inhabit it fully. It's only in this way that you can push against the limits and see where the principles of inconstancy, stress, and not-self will push back even in this state of mind.

But work on it first. Remember, this is a skill: taking this stance, maintaining this stance, being concentrated in the body, but concentrated with an expansive sense of ease so that it doesn't become oppressive. Work at filling the body with your awareness so that if they were going to take a picture of your sense of self, of the mind's sense of self, it would be like the image in the Canon: a person totally surrounded by a white cloth from head to toe. Or like Ajaan Lee's image of the mantle of a Coleman lantern — all its threads bathed in a bright, white, unmoving flame. Try to saturate your body with this sense of relaxed but steady awareness, and see what happens as a result.

Marshalling the Emotions

October 7, 2005

Meditation has to engage not only the thinking part of your mind, but also the emotional part. Otherwise it gets dry and doesn't totally train you. So it's good to think about the emotions that need to be involved in meditation for the training to be more complete.

The first emotion you're supposed to bring to the training is samvega. That's the emotion Prince Siddhartha felt on seeing the old person, the sick person, and the dead person. Samvega is a word that doesn't quite have an equivalent in English. It means a sense of shock, dismay, or urgency, and it's related to the adjective 'samvigga,' or terrified. It's a chastened realization of what life is like: that the pleasures you've been pursuing are fleeting and never really provide satisfaction. Look at you yourself: You're fleeting as well. And the amount of suffering in life: Not only is life fleeting, but there's a lot of suffering before you fleet totally away.

There's that famous passage where the Buddha says that the waters of the ocean are less than the tears you've shed in all your many lifetimes. You've drunk more milk from your mother's breast, whether your mother was human or a dog or whatever, than there is water in the ocean. As the Buddha concludes, just thinking about these things should be enough to give you a sense of terror, dismay, and dispassion, enough to make you want to gain release.

Taken on its own, samvega can be a very depressing realization, which is why it has to be paired with pasada, or confidence: confidence that there is a way out. In the famous story about young Prince Siddhartha seeing the old person, the sick person, and the dead person, he also saw a forest mendicant. That was his fourth vision. His realization after seeing the forest mendicant was, "This must be the way out. If there's any way out, this is it." And so he pursued that conviction with a strong sense of clarity and confidence.

Ajaan Suwat, when led the meditation here at Metta, would often say, "Start with a sense of pasada, that this is your way out. Stick with the practice with that sense of conviction, confidence, desire. If you approach the meditation in a desultory way, you're going to get desultory results. You really have to be devoted to what you're doing here." Or as Ajaan Fuang would say, "You have to be crazy about the meditation if you want to meditate well." You have to get fully into the meditation so that it really engages your imagination. What can be done with the mind as you focus it on the breath? What can be done with the breath? How can you learn to relate to the breath in a way that allows you to settle down and see what's going on in the mind? Be curious. Find out.

When you meet up with obstacles, you need the sort of inquisitive mind that doesn't give up, that tries to find a way around the obstacles, with the conviction that there is a way around. That's what the confidence is for. If you're lost in the woods convinced that there's no way out, there's going to be no way out. If you think there's a way out, at least you have a chance of finding it.

So, when you come up against issues in the meditation, be confident in using your ingenuity as much as you can. If you find yourself controlling the breath, it's natural that you're going to be controlling the breath. In fact, it's important to realize that that's happening. Many times they say, "Let the breath come in and out on its own. Don't control it." What happens then, though, is that you don't notice how you're controlling it. The controlling all goes underground. What we're doing here is bringing the issue of control out into the open. As long as you're controlling the breath anyway, try to do it consciously, skillfully.

And what is it that controls the breath? There's an intention and there's a perception. Can you be clear about your intentions and perceptions? Can you change your intention to be more sensitive to what the breath really needs? Can you change your perception of the breath so that the way you control it actually causes less stress, does less harm? What ways of thinking of the breath coming in and out of the body help to overcome the unhealthy or unskillful ways that you control the breath? What different kinds of breathing energy are there in the body? Look into that as well.

You'll find that different kinds of breath energy are helpful at different times. When you've got lower back problems, it's good to think of the breath energy coming up continually from the soles of your feet, giving more strength to the back as it goes up and then out the top of the head. If there's a tightness in the chest, think of the tightness dissipating out through the shoulders, the arms, and the fingers. In other words, use your ingenuity, so that you become more and more interested in staying in the present moment.

All too often we approach concentration practice as an exercise in forcing the mind to stay still: not to think, not to move, not to do anything. And of course as soon as you tell it not to move, it's going to start fidgeting around like a little kid told to sit still in a chair. But if you give the kid something to play with, something to explore, he can get still and very enthralled. He can sit in the chair for hours without complaining.

So try to engage your ingenuity as you practice. And always have the confident conviction that no matter what the problem in your meditation, there's a way around it. That confidence is going to help see you through. Of course, simply the confidence is not going to be enough. You have to use your ingenuity until you start seeing results as well. And when you start seeing results there will be a sense of ease, and finally a sense of rapture — a sense of fullness or refreshment.

When you've finally figured out how to be with the breath consciously and intentionally, and yet can allow the breath energy to feel full in every little cell in the body, rapture arises. You can maintain that rapture by learning how to maintain the right amount of pressure so that you're not squeezing the breath, pushing it or pulling it — and some people experience this as a sensation of drowning. They're so used to breathing in a particular way, or having the mind's cartoon idea of what the breathing has to do as it comes in and out the body, that when they finally give up on that cartoon idea there's a sense of drowning. Some people find this really scary, but it's nothing to be scared of at all. Simply sit with it. If the breath is going to come in, it's going to come in. If it's not going to come in, don't worry about it. You're not going to die. The breath will have to come in at some point if it really has to. And maybe it won't have to. Maybe you're getting enough oxygen through your pores.

So allow the breath not to disturb anything that feels still. If you don't disturb the stillness, it grows a sense of fullness, and with it a sense of ease. You become a connoisseur of your breathing. You learn to really enjoy it. This amount of enjoyment is a necessary part of the path as well. It's the food of your meditation. As you learn to feed off that, you start looking at the other things the mind has been feeding on and realize that they're pretty miserable food. This is where the sense of nibbida comes in. It's sometimes translated as disenchantment, sometimes even as disgust or revulsion. What it means is a sense of having had enough of something and no longer being attracted to it, because you've got better food to feed on. Once you're used to good, wholesome food, you feel repelled by junk food. You don't crave it any more.

A lot of the preliminary work in discernment consists of learning how to maintain a sense of stillness, of being centered with a sense of fullness, and learning to adjust it as you need it: learning to gladden the mind when it needs to be gladdened, to release the mind when it needs to be released, to steady it when it needs to be steadied. And every time you catch it slipping off to feed on something else, ask yourself, "Why are you going there? What good do you get out of that kind of feeding?"

A lot of the discernment comes in seeing that the other things you've been feeding on all through your life really are not worth the effort. You've really got something much better here. Only when you've been able to use the concentration as a basis for overcoming passion, especially sensual passion, do you have to transcend the concentration itself. That's when your sense of nibbida, or disenchantment, can turn to the concentration, because you've discovered something in the mind that doesn't need to feed on anything anymore, even on the pleasure and the rapture, the equanimity of concentration. That's when nibbida and viraga, or dispassion, become total. That's when they can liberate the mind.

As you can see, the meditation involves a long series of different emotions. The Buddha sometimes talks about the grief and the joy of being on the path. Those get involved as well. The grief is simply the realization that there are a lot of dangers in life and you haven't reached the goal yet. But you learn how to use even the grief as a spur to your practice. At the same time, it should be combined with a sense of confidence, conviction, desire, leading to the joy that comes when you can actually see yourself making progress. The mind can settle down more than it used to, has a greater sense of wellbeing, wholeness, and fullness than it had before. You can take joy in that.

So even though the path involves figuring things out intellectually, that's not all it is. It's also a matter of learning how to marshal these different emotions, some of which are normally regarded as negative: samvega, grief, disenchantment, disgust. But they have their uses, so learn how to cultivate them all along the way. Without these emotions, the practice doesn't go anywhere. With them, it can take you to release.

Good Humor

May 11, 2005

Ajaan Suwat would often begin his evening Dhamma talks by saying to put yourself in a good mood, to approach the meditation with a sense of confidence, reminding yourself that you're doing something that's very good. It may be difficult, but it's good. And it requires that you keep yourself in a good mood, no matter what happens, no matter how poorly it goes. Grace under pressure is an important skill in the meditation: the ability to smile to yourself no matter what happens — what the Thais call smiling in defiance of the tigers. That ability has saved a lot of meditators from going off course, getting discouraged, and letting their meditation crash.

So whatever comes up in the meditation, treat it with good humor. The ability to laugh at yourself is probably one of the most important abilities you have as a meditator. It's a matter of perspective, and also of balance. After all, you have to keep a certain amount of pressure on yourself as you meditate. This is an earnest endeavor we're involved in, but you can't let it get grim. Find out for yourself what exactly is the right amount of pressure to put on yourself and how to apply the pressure skillfully.

You've probably heard the story about the monk who was so delicately brought up that he even had hair on the soles of his feet. When he spent hours doing walking meditation, of course his feet started wearing through, getting all bloody, and this got him discouraged. "Well," he said to himself, "maybe I'd better return to the lay life." That was back in the days when the Buddha was still alive, so the Buddha levitated there — don't you wish you had the Buddha levitating to you when your meditation got bad? The Buddha came and said to the monk, "When you were a lay person, you used to play the lute, right?" The monk said, "Yes." "Well, what happened when the strings were too tight?" "They would snap." "And when they were too loose?" "You couldn't get a good sound out of them."

The Buddha then said "It's the same with the meditation. First tune your level of energy, the amount of effort you can put into the meditation. And then tune everything else, all the other faculties — conviction, mindfulness, concentration, discernment — to the level of energy you can manage." It's like tuning a guitar. First you tune one string and then you tune the other strings to the first one. In meditating, your first string is the amount of energy at your disposal. You want to put enough pressure on yourself to actually get results, but not so much that you snap. And one good way of putting a lot of pressure on yourself without snapping is to keep a good sense of humor about the whole thing, to keep yourself in a good mood.

This involves the way you talk to yourself as the meditation goes on. When things don't go well, just drop whatever it is that's not going well. Move back to a level where you're pretty sure you can do things properly. And don't engage in a lot of recriminations, because they don't help anything at all. Just remind yourself that that's not what we're here for, drop it, and go on. When you develop this sense of good mood, you can ratchet up the level of pressure — the amount of time you spend with the meditation, the persistence with which you pursue it — without snapping.

So whatever comes up in the meditation, whether it's good or bad or whatever, always try to keep a good sense of humor. Even when things seem to be going well, maintain a good sense of humor. Don't get swollen up with your importance or your accomplishment, because then you get complacent and it's easy to crash.

When I went to study with Ajaan Fuang, one of the first things that really drew me to him was his sense of humor. A good sense of humor usually goes with wisdom. The ability to step back and keep things in perspective: That's what makes you wise. It's precisely what you need as a meditator. So when things start getting grim, when nothing seems to work, just step back for a bit and try to regain your good humor. You'll find that that, more than anything else, will carry you through.

Suppressed Emotions

December 11, 2004

Researchers have done studies showing that people who regularly suppress their emotions tend to be stupider than people who don't. They're less observant and have trouble thinking through things clearly. And so the question is, when you're meditating are you making yourself stupid? It depends on how you meditate.

But first you have to understand what it means to suppress an emotion: You deny that it's there. In other words, suppressing it doesn't just mean that you're simply not expressing it; it means that you're also trying to hide it from yourself. The walls of denial go up in the mind. They make it difficult to think clearly, to connect things, to see relationships. And it takes a lot of energy to keep those walls up, which means you have less energy to observe things. This is why suppressing emotions makes you stupid.

So as you meditate, it's important to understand that you're not here to suppress an emotion, to deny that it exists. You want to be very clear about what's going on in the mind, but at the same time you want to learn how to use the mind wisely, to approach your emotions wisely. When fear, greed, anger, or delusion come up in the mind, it's not necessarily helpful to express them outside because sometimes that makes it difficult to observe what's going on, too. There has to be a middle way between the expression and the suppression. This is important. Often as you meditate you try to tell yourself, "Don't react. Just be equanimous. Don't get excited. Don't get worked up about things." And then you try to convince yourself that that's what's actually happening. You see ideals of what an enlightened person is like — very calm, peaceful, equanimous — and you try to clone the calm, to clone the equanimity. Remember, though, that Right Cloning is not one of the factors of the Path.

The relevant factor is Right Mindfulness, having the right frame of reference for dealing with pain and pleasure as they come. If you view the pleasure simply as something to run toward, or the pain as something to fear or run away from, you're creating a situation in which the emotions that arise — the liking and the disliking — are going to get in the way of really seeing anything. So you want to create a different frame. Instead of seeing yourself as a person partaking of the pain or the pleasure, you want to dismantle that perception. You want to have another way of approaching pain and pleasure so that you don't feel threatened by the pain and don't simply indulge in the pleasure.

This is why you need a technique as the foundation of your meditation. We've talked many times about meditation as not just a technique, but you can't meditate without a technique, either. You need to view the technique in the context of certain values, certain understandings, but you can't denigrate technique — because it provides part of your frame of reference.

For example, you're dealing here with the breath, and you may notice that some ways of breathing are more comfortable than others. Then you begin to realize the connection between the discomfort and the breath, the comfort and the breath. And because the breath is something you can control to a certain extent, you've got your handle. You can try breathing in different ways. You can change the rhythm. You can change the texture, the depth. You can try heavy breathing, light breathing, broad or narrow, shallow or deep. That's changing the mechanics of the breathing.

You can also change your perception of the breath. When you breathe in, exactly what's happening? What's moving? And what's moving what? Often we have cartoon ideas about the process, and those ideas determine which muscles we're going to expand, which ones we're going to contract, which sensations we believe have to be part of the in-breath, which sensations have to be part of the out-breath. But if you can learn to question those presuppositions, you find that the breathing opens up. There are lots more possibilities. You can conceive of the body as a sponge: When you breathe, there's energy coming in and out through every pore. If you apply that perception to the breathing, the actual physical sensation of the breathing is going to change as well. The rhythm is going to change. Or you can think of having an energy core that runs down the center of the body. The in-breath comes in to that central core; when it goes out, it leaves that central core. Or you can think of breathing in and out through parts of the body that normally aren't associated with the breath. You can breathe in and out through your legs for example, or through your brain or your hands.

As you experiment with notions of the breathing, you discover lots of varieties. And they have different results in terms of feelings of ease or discomfort, pleasure or pain. You find that patterns of tension in the body that you assumed were a necessary part of having the body sit upright, or having the body breathe, are actually not necessary at all. You can breathe through them and they begin to loosen up. This leads you to explore other feelings of blockage or pain in the body as well.

Say there's a pain in your knee. How much of that pain is actually the result of physical causes and how much of it is a result of the way you're breathing? You can experiment, and in this way the technique gives you a different framework for looking at sensations of pleasure, sensations of pain. In other words, where there's pleasure you realize that to maintain that pleasure you can't just wallow in it or create a sense of yourself as gulping it down, because that usually puts an end to it. But if you stay with the breath and maintain your perception of the breathing in the right way, you can maintain that sense of pleasure, too. It's a positive thing. After all, the pleasure that comes from concentration is one of the factors of the path, Right Concentration. It's something to be developed.

As for the pain, that also becomes something you can approach with the tools you've learned from your technique. Try breathing through the tension around the pain. If the pain is in your knee, you can think of the breath coming in and out right at the knee. Or you can think of it going down the leg and through the pain in the knee and then out through the toes. Or if it's already coming into the knee, you can think of it coming in from the kneecap or coming in from behind the knee. There are all kinds of ways you can play with your perceptions of the breath.

As you experiment with them, you find that they have an important impact on the actual feeling of pain and your attitude toward the pain. You feel less threatened by it. You begin to develop an inquisitive attitude, which as the Buddha said is how you approach the First Noble Truth. You want to comprehend it, and that requires you to be inquisitive about pain, trying to understand it.

So the breathing technique gives you several important approaches for dealing with the pain. Instead of just sitting here and spinning out over the pain — thinking, "Here I am sitting and hurting myself by letting my knee get all bent up like this" — you can focus instead on, "Okay, what are the mechanics of the pain? How do they relate to the energy flow in the body?" Having a comfortable breath sensation as your basis in some other part of the body gives you a place you can go when the pain gets too much to handle. You've got a place you can turn around and run to, and when you have that sense of safety and security then you feel less threatened by the pain. You're more inquisitive, and at the same time you actually have tools that can lessen the pain.

And because your approach is one of being inquisitive rather than trying to push the pain away or squeeze it away, your attitude is going to have a huge effect on how you experience the pain. There are cases where the change in attitude will make the pain go away. At other times the pain won't go away but it doesn't matter because you're not involved in trying to feed off the pain. You don't find yourself forced to consume the pain. You're not a consumer anymore. You're an experimenter, inquiring into "What's the nature of this pain? How much does the way you breathe affect the pain? How much does your attitude affect the pain? What are you doing that makes the pain hurt the mind?" After all, the pain is something in the body. It doesn't have to hurt the mind. We're doing unskillful things, we have unskillful attitudes, unskillful ways of relating to the pain that drag it into the mind. We've got to turn around and look: "Okay, what are we doing that turns the pain into suffering for the mind?"

So by creating this new frame of reference through the technique, you're not suppressing your fear of pain. Your new frame of reference changes your attitude toward the pain so that you can see it more clearly.

We often believe that our emotions are a given, that they're purely visceral, that they come prior to our thoughts, but that's not necessarily so. A lot of unspoken or poorly articulated attitudes have gotten buried in our minds — a lot of unskillful habits of dealing with pain, say, that come from way back when. Those are the things that fuel our emotions around pain. They also fuel our emotions around pleasure. As we create this new framework, though, we'll start stirring up some of those attitudes and calling them into question: "Who is this 'me' that's been devouring the pleasure and then suddenly finds itself devouring pain? Who is this consumer? And is it just consuming or is it also producing the pain, producing the pleasure?" Start questioning these attitudes to get a clearer sense of what's actually going on.

In this way you're not trying to clone enlightenment and you're not trying to suppress your emotions. You're just learning how to deal with your emotions in a more intelligent way. And that way the meditation, instead of making you dumber, actually makes you more perceptive, more intelligent, better able to see relationships. It's not a matter of suppression. It's not a matter of pretending that you're awakened when you're not. You're just learning to be very frank about what's actually going on by learning to question your assumptions of what seems to be obvious about what's going on.

So the meditation is not a process of programming you to have a certain sort of personality or certain sort of demeanor. It's not teaching you to clone anything. It's a series of instructions for how to explore. Instead of piling more denial on top of the denial already there in the mind, you're learning how to peel it away and not to be afraid of it, not to be afraid of what you're going to find as you peel it away, because you've got your tools to deal with whatever comes up.

Resistance

October 25, 2004

The chants we do in the evening, before the meditation, are meant to put you in the right frame of mind to do the meditation, pointing out skillful ways of thinking. Whether we're contemplating the body; issues of aging, illness, death, and karma; thoughts of goodwill; reflection on the nature of the world: All of these thoughts are designed to remind you of how important it is to meditate. They also remind you of your motivation for meditation. Whether you're here to find something solid in the midst of the world, or as an expression of goodwill, it's useful to remember — each time you sit down to meditate or do walking meditation — why you're doing it, the importance of what you're doing, so that you do it with an attitude of proper respect and attention. In other words, you don't just go through the motions. You don't treat it casually.

This is important work we're doing here — a point that's easy to forget. So we keep reminding ourselves, because thinking like this is an integral part of the meditation. People often believe that we're trying to learn how not to think, or trying to get the mind away from its conditioning simply by stopping any language from going through the mind. But the Buddha's instructions on meditation involve a lot of thinking, training the mind to think in skillful ways. But unlike psychotherapy — which tries to trace your thoughts back to their origins, where they're coming from in time — he focuses on where they're going, where they lead. Do they lead you where you want to go? And he gives some recommendations on ways of thinking that really help you go in the right direction.

As you carry through with his ways of thinking, part of your mind is going to rebel. For example, when you develop thoughts of goodwill there may be a little voice in the back of the mind saying, "Well, I don't really feel goodwill for these people." Or, "I don't give a damn about where my thoughts are leading, I want to think about this." Don't assume that the purpose of these exercises in directed thinking is to smother up those other thoughts, or to pretend they don't exist. Actually, the purpose of the exercises is to dig the problems up, bring them out into the open. If the question of how you think about the beings in the world isn't brought up, you can sail merrily along with all sorts of mixed motives, all sorts of mixed attitudes, not really being aware of what you're doing, or of how your attitudes are coming out in your actions.

Or if you have that apathetic feeling, "It doesn't really matter what I do, so I might as well just do what I like" — it's good to know that it's there. Then you can deal with it.

So if you find these argumentative thoughts coming up in your mind, take note of the fact. Ask yourself: Are you ready to dig into them? Are you strong enough? If you aren't, you can continue with the meditation, leaving them for the time being, but at least you know they're there. This is important. As Ajaan Lee once said, to practice is to learn about your defilements, the things that hide under the surface and exert a lot of pressure and influence on your life, often without your knowing it. You're a lot better off knowing they're there, even if you can't quite deal with them yet. You're in a better position knowing they're there and that they'll have to be dealt with. Sometimes just bringing them to the surface is enough to make you realize that you don't want to identify with them.

If apathy comes up, you look at it. Do you really want to side with it? Look at the lives of other people who are apathetic. Where do they go? Or if a voice in your mind has ill will for this or that group of people: Is that a voice that you really want to identify with? Remember, you have the choice.

We're not here to hammer out our genuine opinions about things, to reach a final judgment on them. We're here to see where thinking goes and how to use our thinking in skillful ways. This is part of the training. It's like training for a marathon. Once you've made up your mind to run the marathon, you've got to deal with the thoughts in the mind that resist. Some of them you can simply push out of the way as being ludicrous or totally out of line with your real aspirations. Others you have to sit down with and work through. But the fact that you've made an aspiration is important. If you've decided that this is an aspiration you really want to hold to, you owe it to yourself to work throu