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+ | ====== Meditations 4: Dhamma Talks ====== | ||
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+ | Summary: | ||
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+ | ===== Contents ===== | ||
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+ | * [[# | ||
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+ | * [[#magic|A Magic Set of Tools]] | ||
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+ | * [[#post|A Post by the Ocean]] | ||
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+ | * [[#raft|The Raft of Concepts]] | ||
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+ | * [[#goal|The Path Has a Goal]] | ||
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+ | </ | ||
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+ | ====== Introduction ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | 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 " | ||
+ | |||
+ | {{ : | ||
+ | |||
+ | 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: | ||
+ | |||
+ | <div rightalign>// | ||
+ | Metta Forest Monastery\\ | ||
+ | September, 2008</ | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== The Buddha' | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === January 6, 2008 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | Right concentration forms the heart of the path. The other factors of the path serve two functions. One is to get you into concentration; | ||
+ | |||
+ | So concentration is the essential factor. Only when the mind is stable and still can it really see what's going on inside. To get into right concentration, | ||
+ | |||
+ | What's interesting here is that when the Buddha presents this introduction to his teaching on kamma, he focuses on two types of good actions to stress their importance: gratitude to your parents and generosity. These things really do have merit; they really do have value. The fact that your parents gave birth to you was not just a set of impersonal processes that just happened to happen. It's not the case that you don't owe any debt of gratitude to your parents for having gone through all the pain of giving birth to you and then raising you once you were born. There really is a personal debt there. They made choices, sometimes difficult choices, that allowed for your survival. Generosity is one of the ways you pay off that debt, and it's also one of the valuable ways you interact well with other beings, benefiting both them and yourself in the process. | ||
+ | |||
+ | The Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Years back I was sitting in on a course on the Metta Sutta. The first line in the Metta Sutta starts: "This is what should be done by one who aims at a state of peace." | ||
+ | |||
+ | Actually, Buddhism does have a lot of shoulds. You look at the Dhammapada and you'll see that it's full of shoulds. But each should is based on a condition, as in the first line of the Metta Sutta: "This is what should be done by one who aims at a state of peace." | ||
+ | |||
+ | There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So there //are// shoulds in the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So you start with the principle that generosity is good and that your actions matter. When you dig a little bit deeper into the principle of action, you realize that your intentions are what matter in your actions. This insight leads to the next step in the path: right resolve. You want to avoid intentions that would make it difficult to get the mind into concentration, | ||
+ | |||
+ | There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is why the Buddha has you put sensual passion aside, for it prevents the mind from getting concentrated. It prevents you from even conceiving of the possibility of getting concentrated. Similarly with ill will and harmfulness: | ||
+ | |||
+ | When you want to act on those right resolves, this is where right action, right speech, and right livelihood come in. Some people find the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Once you've created this context for the practice, you're in a better position to follow the parts of the path that deal directly with right concentration. | ||
+ | |||
+ | First there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | In the next step of the path, the Buddha surrounds right effort with right mindfulness — " | ||
+ | |||
+ | So that's what you should do to get into jhana — if you want it. Again, the Buddha doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Jhana on its own doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is why, once the mind is firmly in jhana, you've got to start applying right view again. Only this time it's right view in terms of the four noble truths: looking for the stress in your activities and seeing where it's coming from in your mind. In other words, you look at mental events and mental states simply in terms of cause and effect, what's skillful and what's unskillful. Those are the basic categories underlying the four noble truths. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So as we're meditating here, remind yourself that the concentration is what we're after, what we're focusing on doing right here. Everything else on the path is aimed either at getting us here or else at making sure that once we //are// here we make the best use of the opportunity really to see things as they happen. In particular, we want to see this issue of how the mind is creating all this unnecessary stress all the time and what can be done to stop it. Of course, if you only want to follow part of the path, that's up to you. Remember, the Buddha never forced us to do anything. But if you want the best results, this is what you've got to do. | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== One Thing Clear Through ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === June 26, 2006 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | A recurrent theme in the teachings of the forest ajaans is that all the steps of the practice are of a piece. In other words, having attained Awakening, they don't say anything disparaging about the early steps in the practice, that they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | And you could see this fact in their lives. Even having attained Awakening, they didn't just sit around and say, now that their own job was done, they didn't have to do anything further. They were very industrious people. Ajaan Fuang, even when he was sick, would get out every evening and do some chore around the monastery. When we were doing construction work, he wasn't up to doing any of the heavy jobs but at the very least he would go out and pick up the thrown-away nails. He was very frugal, very meticulous. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So it's important to keep this principle in mind: that the practice here is a practice of generosity, of gratitude, of goodwill and kindness, all the way through. Look at the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | And look at his teaching career. Wherever there was anyone ready to learn the Dhamma, he would go there. In those days, that meant going on foot. He traveled all over northern India on foot just to teach. Even the very last day of his life, he knew there was one more person he had to teach before he entered total nibbana. So, even though he was suffering from dysentery, he walked all the way to Kusinara — a full day's walk — because there was one more person, Subhadda, he had to teach. | ||
+ | |||
+ | What this means in our practice is that we should value all levels of the practice. It's not that you put in time with the elementary levels and then drop them as you move on to the higher ones. You simply add more and more levels of subtlety to your practice, more and more levels of generosity, goodwill, and gratitude. The Buddha started his teaching with very basic mundane right view: the teaching on kamma. And he introduced kamma with two teachings: one on gratitude, one on generosity. | ||
+ | |||
+ | He started out by saying that generosity is real. The gifts you give actually benefit you and the other person. This is something of real value. And you can think of the whole practice — all the way through the abandoning of greed, anger, and delusion — as an act of generosity, an act of goodwill. The less greed, anger, and delusion you have, the better off not only you are, but also everybody else. Think of all the suffering you've inflicted not only on yourself but also on other people through your anger, your greed, your delusion. You give these things up not only for your own benefit but for the benefit of the people around you as well. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Then there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | As the Buddha said, gratitude is a sign of a good person. If you don't appreciate the good that other people have done for you, it's very unlikely that you're going to do good for anybody at all. Ajaan Fuang, if he noticed that people didn't have gratitude for their parents, didn't want to associate with them. If people can't appreciate their parents, what are they going to appreciate? Gratitude is essential to every form of goodness. | ||
+ | |||
+ | And it carries you all the way through. This is why we're generous; this is why we practice the precepts, why we're harmless. We meditate to train the mind so that it's harmless. Not only harmless, but also more energetic. If you're not weighing yourself down with greed, anger, and delusion, you have a lot more energy to help other people. And even though there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | The example of the Buddha in the Pali Canon is not a selfish example. Sariputta and Moggallana were extremely helpful not only in teaching other monks but also in teaching laypeople. And look at all the rules in the Vinaya for the monks to look after the monastery. Basically, the monastery is pure generosity. If you were to open your eyes right now and look around, everything you'd see would be somebody' | ||
+ | |||
+ | In the forest tradition, there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So the Buddha never discouraged people from being generous. He never discouraged people from being energetic. Ajaan Suwat liked to make this point again and again: There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | And this translates into your meditation. The sort of person who's energetic in keeping the place clean tends to be more energetic in meditating. Once when I'd just arrived in Bangkok on some visa business, I was in the midst of cleaning my room, sweeping it, wiping it down. A Western monk who'd just returned from Burma knew that I might be there, so he came around and sure enough I had just come in. But as soon as he saw me wiping down the floor, he said, "You Thai monks! All you do is spend your time cleaning up. Over in Burma, we have other people who do that for us." And as you looked at the quality of his meditation, you could see that he was used to having other people doing things for him. His meditation had gotten slack and sloppy as well. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is a strong tradition in the forest tradition, starting from the time of Ajaan Mun. He was very diligent in keeping his place clean. His place in the forest wasn't just some hovel. Everything was neatly swept, everything in its proper place. As Ajaan Fuang said, even the rags for wiping feet at the base of the stairs to his little hut: If they were torn, he would sew them; if they were dirty, he would wash them. And this quality of being energetic and meticulous translated into his meditation as well. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So don't think that the elementary practices are just for people on an elementary level. They' | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== Befriending the Breath ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === January 3, 2007 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | Reflect back on the passage we chanted just now: "May I be happy. May all living beings be happy. May all beings be freed from their suffering. May those who are happy not be deprived of their happiness." | ||
+ | |||
+ | The desire for true happiness is nothing to feel ashamed about. In fact, the whole teaching of the Dhamma is based on that desire, recognizing that if you follow through with your desire for true happiness intelligently, | ||
+ | |||
+ | The world, however, teaches us not to respect it. People will tell you, " | ||
+ | |||
+ | But the message of the Dhamma is that if you don't wish for true happiness, what are you wishing for? This is the one assumption that the Buddha makes about human beings. Sometimes you read that the Buddha assumes that everybody is basically good at heart, but you can't find that in the texts. What he does assume is that everyone wants happiness. The problem is that we go about it in confused and misinformed ways. But if we can find a path to true happiness that really works, everyone would be happy because true happiness is something that doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | They say that Ajaan Mun spread thoughts of goodwill to all living beings three times a day: in the morning when he woke up, in the afternoon when he woke up from his nap, and at night before he went to sleep. In this way, the desire for goodwill, the desire for true happiness, framed his practice. So it's good to establish it as a frame for your practice as well. It helps remind you of why you're here. There will be barren patches in your meditation, patches where things don't seem to be going the way you want them to. When you hit these patches, remember that you're doing this for true happiness, something that goes beyond the ordinary quick fix. That helps get you over the rough spots. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So always keep these thoughts in mind. Remember that goodwill and compassion are qualities you can't separate from the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | What this comes down to is training the mind. All the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | What does it mean to train the mind? It means to look at what you're doing and to see what the results are. Then you learn to refrain from things that cause suffering, no matter how much you like doing them, and to do the things that lead to true happiness, whether you like doing them or not. Some of the things that lead to true happiness are really pleasant to do. Others require effort. They go against the grain. You have to learn not to let your resistance to the effort get in the way. You need a clear sense of cause and effect. That's what discernment is all about: seeing what really works in terms of cause and effect, what doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | We're here to train the mind to be its own best friend. One very visceral way of doing this is to focus on your breath. When the Buddha analyzes the way you cause yourself suffering, very early on in the list he says that if you're ignorant of what's really going to work, then even the way you breathe can lead to suffering. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So let's focus on the way we breathe. Where do you sense the breath right now? When you close your eyes, what sensations let you know that now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out? Focus on them. They can be in any part of the body at all, for " | ||
+ | |||
+ | Then allow them to be comfortable. In other words, don't put too much pressure on them as you focus on them. At the same time, notice how long an in-breath feels good. At what point does the in-breath start feeling uncomfortable? | ||
+ | |||
+ | Think of the whole body breathing in, the whole body breathing out, with every cell in your body bathed with breath energy. When you think of the breath in that way, what kind of breathing feels good? You might find, as you start thinking in that way, that the breath gets deeper. If that feels gratifying, fine. If it feels uncomfortable, | ||
+ | |||
+ | At first you may not sense much difference, but after a while you begin to get more sensitive to the breathing process. You become more of a connoisseur of your own breathing. You gain a sense of what kind of breathing really feels good for the body right now. The more satisfying the breath is, the easier you will find it to stay with the breathing. If the mind wanders off, just bring it right back to the breath. If it wanders off again, bring it back again. Ask yourself, "Is the breath as comfortable as it could be?" and see what you need to change. But don't browbeat yourself over the fact that the mind is wandering. Don't get upset or discouraged. It's natural that it'll wander, for that's what it's been doing for so long. | ||
+ | |||
+ | You've probably heard the word // | ||
+ | |||
+ | So, you have an hour to get acquainted with the breath, to try to see what kind of breathing feels good right now, and then right now, right now. The needs of the body will change over time, so you have to be on top of them. Notice how they change. Make it a game. Don't be too grim about the meditation. After all, we're here trying to find pleasure in the breath. So treat it as a sport, something you want to learn how to enjoy. As with any sport, it takes time, it takes training, it takes discipline. But there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | After all, the breath is the process in the body that you experience most directly. You sense your body through the movement of the breath. If the breath were not moving, of course you'd be dead. But if you could somehow be alive while the breath was not moving, even then you wouldn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | In addition, the breath is also instrumental in how you move your body, by means of the breath energy running through the nerves and along the blood vessels. So here you are sensitizing yourself to your most direct experience of the body, and you're learning to relate to the body in a way that's comfortable. | ||
+ | |||
+ | At the same time, you find that the breath is a mirror for the mind. A sudden emotion comes into the mind, and the breath will change. That's one of the reasons we sometimes feel that we've got to get our anger out of our system: The way the breath has changed in response to the anger is uncomfortable. So you can undo that effect. As soon as you sense a change in the breath, you can consciously breathe in a way that dissolves away whatever tension has built up in the breathing. That weakens the power of the anger. This is another way the breath can be your friend. It's like having a friend who reminds you when you get angry that it's not in your best interest to be angry. It can soothe you when you're angry, put you in a better mood. It can be your friend when you're sick; it can be your friend when you're suffering from fear or any other strong, unpleasant emotion. | ||
+ | |||
+ | The breath can be there as your friend, but only if you learn how to befriend it. Get to know it. As with any friendship, it takes time. You can't just walk in and shake hands and say "Hi, you're my breath, I'm in charge of you, let's go." The breath doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | As the Buddha said, to really get to know someone requires (1) time and (2) being very observant. So. Here you've got a whole hour of time. It's up to you to be observant and to see how well you can get to know the breath. To show some goodwill for the breath in a very direct and visceral way like this is to show goodwill for yourself, the wish that's expressed in that chant: "May I be happy." | ||
+ | |||
+ | So try to make the most of this opportunity. | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== A Magic Set of Tools ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === August 10, 2004 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | As you're sitting here, there are a lot of things you could focus on in the present moment. You could focus on the sound of the crickets. You could focus on the sound of the bombing practice off to the west, the temperature of the air — all kinds of things. The question is: Which thing are you going to focus on that's going to deliver the best results for the mind? | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is where the breath comes in. It's something that's here all the time — coming in, going out, staying still — giving us our sense of the body. It's a place where we can settle down, something we can stay in touch with at all times — if we're mindful. | ||
+ | |||
+ | It's important to understand what // | ||
+ | |||
+ | The third quality we add is persistence or ardency. Keep with it. No matter how loud the bombs or incessant the crickets, you're not going to send your attention after them. You know they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Your ability to stick with these qualities is what's going to help them grow. When you notice yourself wandering off, ardency means that you bring the mind right back. If it wanders off again, bring it back again. You don't give up. You don't get discouraged. While you're with the breath, ardency means that you try to be as sensitive as possible to the sensation of the breathing. The more consistent your sensitivity, | ||
+ | |||
+ | We often hear that mindfulness practice and concentration practice are two different things, but the Buddha never taught them that way. He said that right mindfulness leads naturally to right concentration. In all of the descriptions of the path — such as the noble eightfold path, the five faculties, the seven factors for awakening — right mindfulness always precedes right concentration. So don't think of them as separate practices; think of them as qualities of the mind that help each other along. Mindfulness turns into directed thought as it shades into the steadiness of concentration. Once concentration gets more solid, your mindfulness gets a lot steadier. When you reach the fourth jhana, the Buddha says, that's where mindfulness becomes pure. | ||
+ | |||
+ | The word //jhana// is related to a verb // | ||
+ | |||
+ | In the beginning, the steadiness requires some protection, just like the candle here. If the wind outside started to flare up more than it is right now, we'd have to put a glass globe around the candle to keep the flame steady. That glass globe is directed thought and evaluation. Keep reminding yourself to come back — stay with the breath, stay with the breath, stay with the breath — consistently. And then evaluation, which grows out of alertness, looks at the breath: Is this a comfortable place to stay? What do you need to adjust? Do you need to move the focus of your attention? Do you need to adjust the breath? Do you need to adjust some of the concepts in your mind about what you're doing? If the breath is too subtle to follow, can you stay simply with the sense of the body sitting here? There are lots of things to evaluate. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is where the element of discernment or insight comes into the practice. Again, we often hear that jhana practice is a tranquility practice and insight practice is something else, but again, the Buddha didn't divide things up that way. He said that you need tranquility and insight in order to get the mind to become steady like this. The insight lies in understanding what problems you have to face and how you can get around them; the tranquility lies in the element of steadily, calmly watching things. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So you use directed thought and evaluation to protect what you've got. As a sense of ease and fullness develops in the present moment, you've got to protect it even more. Stick with it, work at whatever you need to do to maintain that sense of wellbeing — learning when you're trying too hard to make it better, learning when you're not trying hard enough to notice what can be done to relax things even further, make them even more gratifying and pleasurable. That's all a function of insight: watching things, evaluating things, figuring out which causes to change to make the effects just right. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is the element of insight, the element of discernment that we're working on while we're on the path. We develop it in simple practices like this: learning what's just right in terms of the breath. That's the middleness of our middle way right now. The word // | ||
+ | |||
+ | So if you find yourself slipping off the breath, slipping off the topic of your meditation, remember these things. When things get balanced, you don't have to think about them that much. Once you develop a sense of balance, you just maintain that balance in your practice. It'll be sub-verbal. | ||
+ | |||
+ | It's like sailing a boat. When you get on the boat for your first sailing lessons and you're told to steer the boat to the left, sometimes you flip it over because you steer too hard. Or you're told to steer to the right, and again you flip it over in the other direction because you're steering too hard. But after a while you begin to get a sense of exactly how much pressure you have to apply to the rudder, and you get so that you hardly even think about it. It becomes an intuitive sense. You're alert to it — you have to be alert — but you don't have to verbalize it. This is what we're working toward in the practice: gaining that intuitive sense of what's just right for right now — when you have to apply a little bit more pressure, when you have to hold back a little bit — so that you don't need all these concepts. | ||
+ | |||
+ | As the meditation gets more and more intuitive, as the mind gets more and more firmly settled right here, you can actually drop the directed thought and evaluation and just plow right into the sensation of the breath or whatever your object is. When you get there, you begin to wonder, "Why did you ever think you had to do anything more in the meditation than just be right here?" That's what it seems like from that perspective. So watch out that you don't get complacent, because you //can// lose this. It's simply a matter of having that intuitive sense of where your spot is and how to stay there. This is how to develop a foundation for the mind: You use mindfulness and alertness, you use your discernment to get the mind concentrated, | ||
+ | |||
+ | So if these thoughts are helpful when you find yourself drifting off or losing balance, keep them in mind. There will come a point where you don't have to consciously remember them. All you'll have to do is be very watchful, very alert, making sure you're not complacent, and you can drop the concepts. Dropping them doesn' | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== A Private Matter ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === July 15, 2007 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | I once heard of a tennis pro whose game had gone into a slump. He tried everything he could imagine to get his game back: fired his trainer, got another trainer, tried different rackets. Then one day he realized he'd forgotten the number one lesson in tennis: Keep your eye on the ball. | ||
+ | |||
+ | The same sort of thing often happens in meditation. You start out with a very simple process and then it gradually grows more complicated. After a while you forget the first principles: i.e., stay with your breath. So try to spend the whole hour staying with the breath, no matter what. Be really sensitive to how the breath feels, and to what you're doing to the breath. The breath is a fabrication, | ||
+ | |||
+ | Your relation to the breath is something very intimate, very private. Often it's hard to talk about how the breath feels, because the breath feels like the breath feels. It doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | For example, I've noticed that one of the best ways of getting the breath energy in the body to be comfortable and full is not to put any effort into the out-breath at all. What effort there may be goes into the in-breath. As for breathing out, you don't need to help the body. It's going to breathe out on its own. When you don't force it out, that allows the breath energy to fill up in the body. This is hard to put precisely into words. It's not like you're trying to stuff the breath in, but because you don't squeeze it out, then each time you breathe in, breathe in, breathe in, and allow the sense of fullness to run along your nerves, the nerves begin to glow. Again, this doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So try to relate that to what you're doing right now and see if you get results. If you don't, try experimenting a little bit on your own to see which way of breathing really //does// feel good in the body. When you do this, it sets up the issue of pleasure and pain, cause and effect, right from the start. | ||
+ | |||
+ | That's what the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So instead, try to approach the meditation from a standpoint that's more familiar: How do you feel right now? Which ways of thinking about the breath, which ways of letting the body breathe, lead to pain and a sense of constriction? | ||
+ | |||
+ | That's the way Ajaan Fuang used to teach meditation. He'd have people get in touch with their breath. He'd use a few analogies and similes, and then he'd listen to the words //they// used to describe their own experience of meditation, when the breath felt " | ||
+ | |||
+ | In this way, the meditation is not something imposed from outside. It's something that develops from your own inner sensitivity. Then somewhat after the fact, after you've had some direct experience with it, you can read the books and begin to relate their terms to what you've experienced. Even then, though, it's always best to take those terms and use them as post-it notes, for as you develop your inner experience further, your understanding of the inner terrain is going to change. You may have to move some of those notes around. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is a much more trustworthy way of approaching the meditation than trying to fit the mind into a mold based on your understanding of what somebody else has written or said. If you do that, it takes you away from your direct experience, from your own sensitivity. And there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Now, your sensitivity may not be refined enough to see subtle levels of stress, but there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Ajaan Fuang once said that he didn't want his students discussing their meditation with anybody else aside from him. When you talk to other people, they have their ideas, they have their preconceived notions. Maybe they know something about meditation, maybe they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So keep your meditation a private affair. After all, the suffering you're causing yourself is a private affair, something nobody else can see. Even when we live together day in and day out, each of us is making a lot of decisions that nobody else here will know. We may see some of the outside effects, but the actual experience of suffering — your suffering, your pain: You're the only person who can feel it. And you're the only person who can know which little decisions you make from moment to moment to moment. That's what you want to learn how to observe. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So try to develop your inner sensitivity as much as you can, so that you can make sure your decisions are going in the right direction. The intentional element here is to try to minimize suffering as much as possible. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is why breath meditation relates directly to the sublime attitudes we chant every evening. This is your front row seat on the question of how to bring about more happiness. "May all living beings be happy": | ||
+ | |||
+ | The same with empathetic joy and equanimity: When the breath is going well, appreciate it. Enjoy it. As for the uncomfortable things in the breath that you can't change, you've just got to watch them for a while. The word for equanimity — //upekkha// — actually relates to that quality of just watching, looking on. In other words, you see that this may not yet be the time to do anything, but you never know when the situation will change, so you just keep watching, watching, watching, until you detect things. And even here the breath helps a lot. It gives you a foundation from which to watch. | ||
+ | |||
+ | As you're staying with the breath, you're in the present moment. Simply being with the sensation of breathing helps pull you out of a lot of your thoughts, that ongoing committee discussion in the mind. If you're with the breath, you're like an outside observer on the committee meeting. You're not necessarily pushed around by the voices in the committee. In that way, you're in a better position to see, "Is this the time to exercise goodwill? Or is it more the time to exercise equanimity, compassion, or empathetic joy?" | ||
+ | |||
+ | So these two types of meditation — the meditation that develops the sublime attitudes and the meditation on the breath — really come together like this. The breath gives you practice in the proper attitudes and puts you in a position where you can see which of these four attitudes is appropriate at any one time, always taking your inner experience of stress — something you're most intimately related to — as your touchstone. That way, your knowledge is not just words. There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Your experience of stress is your only proof of whether the meditation is working, and even then it's reliable only if you're honest with yourself. You may want to look for an outside authority to verify things for you, but that leads to the question of who out there is awakened, who is not. You may have some ideas, you may have some intuitions, but you can't really prove anything about what's going on outside. Your only real proof is what lies inside. And until you make the inner proof as clear and as honest as possible, you'll have no proof about anything at all. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So this inner sensitivity, | ||
+ | |||
+ | And of course, this sensitivity doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | In that way the meditation becomes timeless. Ajaan Fuang once made the comment that our lives are often chopped up into little times: time to eat, time to talk, time to go here, go there, do this, do that. Instead of having more time when life has more times like this, everything gets chopped up into little tiny pieces and becomes less. But when you make this inner sensitivity as continuous as possible — you breathe in, let the body breathe out if it wants to, but you don't have to force the breath out; breathe in again, breathe in again — that inner sense of wellbeing can grow. Then as you carry it through the day, it becomes solid. It may take time to focus on it, time to get a sense of what helps it, what doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So reintroduce yourself to this inner sensitivity. Open up this area of your awareness, and be as sensitive to it as possible. In that way the meditation will grow in an organic way — not from words imposed outside, or ideas imposed from how you understand the words outside, but from a direct experience of what's actually going on inside. What works and what doesn' | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== One Point, Two Points, Many Points ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === August 18, 2007 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | Ajaan Lee sometimes talks about //not// being aware of the breath in the whole body. He sometimes recommends focusing on one spot and just staying right there. Some people, he says, find it too distracting to deal with the breath sensations in the different parts of the body. As you're thinking about your hand, your arm, or your leg, other thoughts related to hands, arms, and legs might sneak in and carry you off someplace else. | ||
+ | |||
+ | He compares this to starting an orchard. If you plant your whole orchard all at once, using all your resources, you may find that you've overextended yourself. You're faced with a drought for several days, the trees all die, and you end up with nothing. In cases like that, it's smarter to start out with one little area and to focus on planting just that, caring for that. Say you plant a mango tree. You care for it for a couple years, and then when they give their first crop of mangoes, you collect the seeds and plant them. The same with the second crop. That way you gradually enlarge your orchard until you fill your whole plot of land. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So if you find that focusing on the breath here and there in the beginning of the meditation gets you distracted, just focus down on one spot and stay right there. Tell yourself: You're not going anywhere else. You may want to use the word //buddho// to help keep things under control. But just use one spot in the body: It might be right between your eyes, the middle of the forehead, wherever you feel is closest to the center of your awareness in the body. You stare right down, right there. | ||
+ | |||
+ | The one warning is that you not tighten up around that spot. Think of the area as being open and free flowing. In other words, the blood can flow in, the blood can flow out. Energy flows in, energy flows out, but you are not moving. You're going to stay right here. No matter what happens, you're going to stay right in this one little spot. That can gather the mind together and keep it there. You're not trying to take care of too many things at once. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Other people find that one spot is not enough. In that case, you might want to try two spots. There was an old schoolteacher I knew who had come to meditation late in life. After she retired, she went to stay at Wat Asokaram. She found that the easiest way to get her mind down — she told me once, well before I was ordained — was to focus on two spots: one right between the eyes, the other at the base of the spine. She'd try to keep both spots going at once. In her case, she said, it was like connecting the two poles of a battery. As soon as the two poles were connected, things lit up inside. That enabled her to get the mind into concentration really quickly. | ||
+ | |||
+ | What all this shows is that concentration is an individual matter. Different people find that their minds settle down in different ways. And there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | The // | ||
+ | |||
+ | As a child I used to find that drawing would have me absorbed for hours. I'd be working on a drawing and I'd have no sense of the passage of time. It'd be time for dinner before I knew it. And the same can work in your meditation as you learn to analyze the breath. You pull yourself into the present moment not with any force, but simply through the power of your curiosity. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Some people, though, find that analyzing things like this gets them distracted: You start thinking about the breath, and then you start thinking about your stomach, and then about the doctor who looked after your stomach, and all of a sudden you find yourself thirty miles away. In that case your meditation may succeed based either on the desire to stay here, or the effort to stay focused on just one spot, or being intent on one spot, or on two spots, whatever you find works. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Ajaan Lee talks about finding your one spot in the body and staying focused there, but some people miss this step because it comes after the steps that tell you to explore the breath throughout the body. But the steps don't have to be done in sequential order. Think of them as different component factors of concentration. You may have to start out with just the one spot. Once that's established, | ||
+ | |||
+ | So one way to start is to go right for one spot and then gradually expand from there. But if you find that too confining, if the mind rebels against being forced into one spot, you can have it range around your body. Notice how the breath feels in the toes, how it feels in the fingers, how it feels in the arms and the back, how your posture effects the breath, how your breath effects the posture. In other words, use the meditation as an opportunity to explore. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is one of the good things about the breath as a focal point for meditation. You can use it both as an object to stare at and as an object to analyze. If you find that the mind needs more tranquility before it's going to get anywhere, okay, you can just settle down and be very, very still. It's almost like you're not even watching the breath. You're more focused on the direction in which your awareness is beamed. You're preoccupied with just keeping the beam steady. The one danger you have to watch out for there, of course, is that you might clamp down on the blood circulation in that spot. So watch out for that. Allow things to come in and go out, but you stay at that one spot as consistently as possible. | ||
+ | |||
+ | But as for the connections you can see when you use the breath as an object for discernment, | ||
+ | |||
+ | So these elements — which if left to their own devices based on ignorance would lead to suffering: You're now playing with them, all the while being very aware of how they interact. This is one of the best ways of learning their interactions: | ||
+ | |||
+ | What we're doing is to take the basic causes of suffering and to bring as much awareness to them as possible — specifically awareness in the form of the four noble truths: Where is there stress, what are you doing that's causing stress, and what can you change to make the stress go away? You start with blatant levels of stress related to how you're sitting here breathing, trying to get the mind to settle down. And then from there, you grow sensitive to levels that are more and more subtle. | ||
+ | |||
+ | You're here right where all the action is. It's simply a matter for you individually to figure out exactly where you can get your first handle on these issues. Establish that as your beachhead, and then from there your understanding will begin to spread out. There will come times in the meditation when you begin to think that just being very still right here is kind of stupid. Nothing is going to happen. And you wonder what else is there to do next. Well, ask yourself: Who says that it's stupid? Why do you need to push the " | ||
+ | |||
+ | Everything you need to know for the purpose of putting an end to suffering is right here. Just bring a lot of alertness to it. A lot of mindfulness to it. And notice what works for you in getting the mind to settle down. That's how insight arises, by seeing what works. That's the way the Buddha tested all of his insights: Did they work? In other words, he was looking for pragmatic truth, the knowledge that would make a difference. As for truths that wouldn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | As he said in describing his Awakening, he learned the equivalent of the leaves of the forest. What he brought out to teach — in terms of focusing on the issue of suffering, its cause, its end, and the path to its end: That's just like a handful of leaves. But it's precisely the handful you need. If you were to make a comparison with medicine, there can be lots of medicine in the forest, but just this one handful is what you need for your specific disease. As for the other leaves, if they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So everything you need to know is right here. It's simply a matter of paying attention. See which perceptions work, which perceptions don't work, which ways of paying attention work, and which ones don't, which intentions work, and which don't. Just by exploring these issues, you can learn an awful lot about the mind — and make a big change in the mind as well. | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== The Stairway Up ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === April 28, 2004 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | Once, soon after I had first met Ajaan Fuang, I had a dream. In the dream I was visiting Ajaan Lee's monastery. I had never been there, but in the dream they had a big museum several stories high. I had the choice to climb the stairway or to climb a ladder up on the side of the building, going straight to the top floor, and I chose the ladder. I wanted to go straight up to the top. But as I was climbing, the ladder fell down. Fortunately I was caught. The problem was that the ladder wasn't leaning against anything solid. At the end of the dream I found myself at the door again, having to contemplate going up the stairway. That's when I woke up. | ||
+ | |||
+ | And that's pretty much a story of how my practice started: A lot of things happened very quickly those first couple of weeks with Ajaan Fuang but then they all unraveled, and I had to start back at the beginning, step by step by step. This can sometimes be discouraging. It happens to all meditators. Sometimes by fluke we happen to hit something very advanced — or at least it seems to be very advanced — in the meditation and then it all unravels right before our eyes. At first it can be encouraging, | ||
+ | |||
+ | The follow-up work seems a lot less glamorous, and a lot of people give up right there. But it's important that you don't give up and that you don't look down on the situation where you are. Don't get discouraged, | ||
+ | |||
+ | Most of us would like to be magically beamed up to a higher level of concentration or a higher level of insight. But it's often the case that our refusal to look at the situation in our minds right now is what's preventing concentration and insight from arising. So look at what you've got. Look at where you are. Don't pass judgment as to whether the problem you're facing is elementary or advanced. It's the problem you're facing. It's the problem that has to be dealt with. Bring all your powers of attention to bear right there. | ||
+ | |||
+ | And be glad that you've got the opportunity to practice. Don't view it as drudgery. A lot of people are in situations where they have no inclination, | ||
+ | |||
+ | So the teaching on acceptance means accepting where you are. It doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | That willingness is an important element in all levels of practice. It starts with our willingness to help other people, and goes on with our willingness to practice the precepts. This volunteer spirit is an important part of training the mind. That's what it's all about: realizing that you've got to put energy into it if you're going to get anything out of it. When you're willing to take that first step, make that first gift of your energy, that's where the practice starts to grow. Without that attitude, it doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | As for generosity, sometimes people look at what they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Sometimes the little gifts bring the greatest reward. Ajaan Fuang liked to tell the story of a man and his wife who had only one upper cloth between them. They each had a cloth to cover the lower parts of their bodies, but only one cloth between them to cover the upper parts of their bodies. That was back in the days in India when you didn't go out of your house unless you had two pieces of cloth around you: one wrapped around your waist, the other over your shoulders. Because they only had one upper cloth between them, they'd have to leave the house at separate times. If one was going out, the other had to stay at home. They were that poor. | ||
+ | |||
+ | One night they heard that the Buddha was going to be giving a talk, so they agreed that the husband should be the one to go. The talk was basically on the rewards of generosity. The husband kept sitting there thinking, "This is why I'm so poor. I haven' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Finally around midnight the man stood up shouting, " | ||
+ | |||
+ | And because the man was on a roll, a generosity roll, he gave all those things to the Buddha, too. So the king upped the ante — gave him two of each. The man gave all of that. The king kept doubling: four, eight, finally sixteen. At that point the man decided to keep eight of each of these things — eight pieces of gold, eight pieces of silver, eight pieces of cloth, eight horses, eight elephants. He gave the other eight to the Buddha and went home with his remaining eight. The lesson of the story is that a small gift by a person of little means translates into a lot more in terms of its rewards than a large gift from someone of large means, because the first gift requires more of a sacrifice. | ||
+ | |||
+ | The same principle applies in the meditation. When things aren't going well, you have to make a sacrifice of your pride, a sacrifice of your likes and dislikes, and get down to dealing with what's actually happening in the mind. Only when you're able to make that sacrifice can the rewards come. In the beginning they may not be all that impressive. You may not get a piece of gold, a piece of silver, an elephant or whatever, but you do make a step, you see a slight change in the mind. That's much better than just sitting around being discouraged. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So whatever the issues you're facing in your meditation, be content to deal with them, because those are the real issues, the genuine issues you've got to face. They may not stack up against the things you've read about or the things you've experienced in the past, but a little solid progress is much more valuable than all the quick and flashy special effects out there in the world. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Ajaan Fuang sometimes had students who would come to sit and meditate with him for the first time and gain visions of their past lives or of heavenly beings. Some of his older students felt jealous and discouraged by that. Here they'd been sitting and meditating for months with nothing special happening, and this person comes in and has all kinds of interesting things going on all at once. It often happened, though, that the quick and flashy students didn't last very long. When the visions stopped, when there was no more entertainment, | ||
+ | |||
+ | So sacrifice whatever attitudes get in the way of looking at the issues staring you right in the face, because those are the genuine article. They' | ||
+ | |||
+ | You've got to poke around in what's actually going on in your mind to see which parts of the present are made of elastic and which parts are made of steel — in other words, the things you can change and the things you can't. There will be drudgery and there will be mistakes, but these are the things you learn from. This is the kind of knowledge that really makes a difference in the mind, because this is how you develop your sensitivity, | ||
+ | |||
+ | And whatever positive attitudes come up in the mind, no matter how small they might seem, those are what you've got to work with. After all, redwood trees come from tiny seeds. If you step on them, they never have a chance to grow. But if you look at them carefully, you can recognize them, you can see that they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So gardening like this may not be glamorous work and it may not be flashy, but this is how all genuine work is done in this world. This is how things come to blossom. You poke around bit by bit by bit, paying careful attention, making mistakes and learning from them. That's the sort of work that gets solid results, results that build on a good solid foundation, where you take the stairway and it does ultimately get you up to the top floor — with no danger of crashing down. | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== Conceit ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === January 19, 2007 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | Conceit is one of those qualities we all have — and it's a slippery friend. There are times when it's useful, as in that passage where Ananda teaches a nun that we practice to overcome conceit and yet we have to use conceit in the practice. The example he gives is that when you hear of someone who has put an end to suffering, has made it all the way to the goal, you can reflect, "That person is a human being; I'm a human being. That person can do it; so can I." To that extent, you need conceit in the practice. If you believe that you can't do the practice, or if it seems way beyond you, you end up giving up, you set your sights low. And as we all know, you never hit higher than you aim. So to that extent, conceit is helpful. | ||
+ | |||
+ | But it has its fangs. Ajaan Maha Boowa calls it the "fangs of ignorance" | ||
+ | |||
+ | First, there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | | ||
+ | |||
+ | So try to think in those terms: Realize that even though it's hard, this is part of being a good friend to yourself. One of the definitions of a good friend is someone who is able to give what's hard to give, to do what's hard to do, to endure what's hard to endure. If you meet friends like that, associate with them. Value them. Treasure them. These are the people you really want as your friends. And you want to be able to make yourself your own best friend in just the same way. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Ask yourself, " | ||
+ | |||
+ | Do what is hard to do. Meditate longer than you might want to. Do walking meditation longer than you might want to. Put more effort into the practice than you want to, and you'll find that you benefit. This ties in with enduring what's hard to endure. Pain is hard to endure. Other people' | ||
+ | |||
+ | A good way to learn these lessons is to force yourself into situations where you've got to face this difficulty head on. Okay, it's there, it's a problem, and try to use your ingenuity to get around it. It's when you're cornered that you realize that you've got to find a way out. And that you can. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So learn to be your own best friend. It's not a matter of being pessimistic or optimistic. It's a matter of learning to be heedful. Heedfulness involves an interesting combination of qualities. On the one hand, you're confident that your actions //do// make a difference, so heedfulness is not negative or pessimistic. On the other hand, you realize that there are dangers out there, dangers inside as well. There are difficulties you've got to work with. You respect those difficulties but you don't get overwhelmed by them. In other words, you've got to drop the element of conceit from your grasp. Don't bring your //" | ||
+ | |||
+ | One of Ajaan Fuang' | ||
+ | |||
+ | And learn to develop your discernment. Watch out for those fangs of ignorance: the "I am this" or "I am that" or " | ||
+ | |||
+ | So even though it may be hard, you can do it. The things that are hard to give, you can give. The things that are hard to do, you can do. The things that are hard to endure, you discover you can endure. It may not be easy the first time. You may find yourself running into a brick wall, but even brick walls can be battered down. They have their cracks. There are ways around them, under them, over them, through them. All you have to do is find where they are. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So learn the proper use of conceit: the confidence that, yes, you can do this; other people can do it, it's something human beings have done — you're a human being, you can do it too. Once you've got that amount of conviction, drop the " | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== A Sense of Adventure ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === October 20, 2007 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | As you embark on the practice — and as you stay with the practice — it's best to think of it as a voyage of discovery. After all, the Buddha says that the goal is to see what you've never seen before, to realize what you've never realized before, to attain what you've never attained before. So you're going into the unknown. This means that you're going to have to deal with risk and uncertainty, | ||
+ | |||
+ | Some people want to have all kinds of guarantees before they embark on this training, but you can't really guarantee anything. You can guarantee that when you reach the goal it's going to be good, but how much is that guarantee worth for someone who hasn't experienced it yet? Just one more thing to take into consideration. The Buddha, when he embarked on his quest, had no guarantee that all the sacrifice was going to be worth it, that he was going to find the deathless, or even that he was going to survive. But he had reached a point in his life where he realized that if he didn't at least try it, he would feel that his life had been wasted. And so for him it was a huge experiment. There was a lot of risk and a lot of uncertainty. And yet he was willing to take the risk and to face the uncertainty. | ||
+ | |||
+ | For us, it's not quite that drastic. We have people who've gone before. There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Earlier today we were talking about the maps for the jhanas. When you try to apply the map to your actual experience, it's going to be uncertain for a while. You read the description of directed thought and evaluation, rapture and all, and the question is: What do those terms correspond to in your actual experience? You may have some ideas, but they may be wrong. Is that going to stop you from practicing? It shouldn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | The sense of adventure also means that you may have some anticipations of what's going to work and what things should be like in the practice. But right anticipation is not part of the path. Sometimes your anticipations can push things in the wrong direction. The Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | It's like sharpening a knife on a stone. If you're in too much of a hurry, you can ruin the blade. So you sit there very carefully rubbing it against the stone, rubbing it against the stone, making sure that the pressure is even all along the blade. Then you realize that you may be at this for a while. Part of the mind says, "Well, I'd like to have it done fast so I can go off and do something else." But there also has to be another part of the mind that says, "If you try to speed it up, you could ruin it. So keep doing what you're doing." | ||
+ | |||
+ | This evening I was reading a study guide to some of the suttas that raised questions about different passages in the suttas that just didn't sound right to the author, or didn't seem to fit in with his preconceived notions. But there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So what you are asked as you read the Dhamma — and as you approach the practice as a whole — is to stretch your imagination a bit. It's not the case that the Buddha will be able to prove everything to you beforehand — before you're willing to act — so that you can act with confidence and full awareness of where you're going to go and how you're going to get there. You have to be willing to live with uncertainty and to put question marks against a lot of your assumptions. Remind yourself that your assumptions are the assumptions of a person with defilement, the assumptions of a person still suffering. Perhaps it would be in your best interest to put them aside for the time being instead of demanding that everything fit into your preconceived notions of how things should be. | ||
+ | |||
+ | And you should be willing to embark on this without a 100% guarantee that everything is going work out the way you want it to. Have a clear sense of the precariousness of your own position, of where you are right now. Where do you get your sustenance? Where does the mind gain its pleasures? Are those things solid and secure? When you go into the uncertainty of the path, are you leaving an area of true certainty and assuredness to go off into figments of someone' | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is why one of the basic principles in the practice is practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma — in other words, not in accordance with your preconceived notions, not in accordance with your ideas of what you want before you're going to commit yourself to the practice. Instead of reshaping the Dhamma to fit your notions, maybe you have to reshape yourself to fit the Dhamma. There is bound to be a period of discomfort, bound to be a sense of frustration when things are not quite working out the way you wanted them to. But you need the maturity to learn how to deal with that. This is not a path for immature people. It's a path for people who know that they are in a very precarious position already, and that their ideas and assumptions are especially precarious. But the ideas and presumptions of a materialistic worldview, which is what we were brought up in, offer a very limited range of happiness, whereas the Dhamma offers a lot more. It's simply up to us to decide whether we're willing to make the sacrifices and take the risk to see if the " | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== On the Path of the Breath ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === February 11, 2008 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | Once the Buddha was extolling the advantages of breath meditation, the benefits that could be derived from keeping the breath in mind, and one of the monks said, "I already do breath meditation." | ||
+ | |||
+ | So he proceeded to teach breath meditation in a much fuller way. And it's important to look carefully at how the Buddha taught breath meditation, because you begin to realize how proactive his method was. You also realize that many of the steps contained in his method are more like questions. He said, "Do this," but without fully explaining how you might go about doing it, which means that you have to test and explore. | ||
+ | |||
+ | The first two steps are exercises for gaining practice in discerning the breath — discerning when it's long, discerning when it's short — to help sensitize you to how the breath feels. When you do that, you begin to notice which kind of breathing feels best. He simply mentions long or short, but there are other qualities you can look for as well: deep or shallow, heavy or light, fast or slow. In other words, you want to get in touch with the physical sensations of the breath. When you breathe in, where do you feel the sensation of breathing? When you breathe out, where do you feel it? The Buddha doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Because the Buddha doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is where the breath meditation gets more proactive. The first training — which is the third step — is to learn how to breathe in and out sensitive to the entire body. In other words, you try to create an expansive state of mind. You're conscious of the breath but you're also trying to be aware of the body as a whole, from the top of the head down to the tips of the toes. The question is: How do you do that? Some people find it very easy to go straight to the whole body. Other people have to work gradually up to it. One way of doing that is to go through the body section by section, noticing how the different parts of the body feel as you breathe in, how they feel as you breathe out. And to help yourself along, you might try making the breath more comfortable wherever you focus. For example, as you focus on the back of the neck, notice: Is there tension there? When you breathe in do you build up tension there? When you breathe out are you holding on to tension? What can you do to relax it? | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is actually moving into the fourth step, which is to calm what's called " | ||
+ | |||
+ | This moves on to steps five and six: training yourself to breathe in and out with a sense of refreshment, | ||
+ | |||
+ | You begin to notice that your ideas about the breath will have an effect on how calm it can get. You can perceive the breath in different ways. For instance, you can hold in mind the perception that it's a whole-body process. Think of the breath coming in and out every pore of the skin. And there is oxygen exchange happening at the skin. The more wide open your pores, the more oxygen gets exchanged. If you think of the skin as being wide open, the muscles of the rib cage can do less work. Just make the mind still and hold that perception in place: The breath can come in and go out from any direction through all the parts of your body, all the pores of your skin. It all connects on its own, without your having to massage it through the body. | ||
+ | |||
+ | You'll notice that there are subtle sensations in the body as you breathe in, as you breathe out, that correspond to the grosser sensations of the movement of the rib cage, the movement of the diaphragm. Allow those subtle sensations to blend together in a way that feels harmonious. Think of every part of the body being connected, all the energy channels in the body being connected, so that the breath energy spreads through them instantly and automatically, | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is where you get sensitive to what the Buddha calls mental fabrication: | ||
+ | |||
+ | What you're doing here is learning both calm and insight at the same time. The Buddha never treats these two qualities of mind as diametrically opposed. He points out that they can develop separately, but ideally they should be working together. As you calm things down mindfully, you at the same time gain insight into the workings of the mind. Here you begin to see, on the one hand, the impact the breathing can have on the mind. The more soothing the breath becomes, the more the mind is willing to settle down in the present and feel soothed by it. At the same time, you see the impact of the mind on the breath. The way you perceive the breath is going to change the way the body actually breathes. Your mental picture of the breath, of the breathing process, will have an impact on which parts of the body actually get involved in the breathing process. | ||
+ | |||
+ | As things grow more and more calm, they lead to a point where you can sit here just looking at awareness — the awareness of the mind itself as it's watching the breath. This is an important ability in the meditation: learning how to observe the mind. It's almost as if there are two minds: the mind being observed and the mind doing the observing. You can watch the state of the mind as it stays with the breath. Then you begin to notice that sometimes it's steady and sometimes it's not. Sometimes it can maintain its concentration; | ||
+ | |||
+ | For instance, how do you gladden the mind when it's feeling a little bit down, a little bit bored by the process? What can you do to make it more interesting? | ||
+ | |||
+ | As King Asoka once said in one of his edicts that if the people who worked for him were going to please him, they had to know what he wanted even before he knew. You have to learn how to be that quick at reading your own mind. What does the mind need right now? What is it going to need with the next breath? Sometimes it gets bored with the breath, so you can give it other things to think about. You can develop qualities of goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, or equanimity. You can think about the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha. All of these are valid topics of meditation. They' | ||
+ | |||
+ | The same with the issue of steadying the mind: When the mind is feeling kind of wobbly, how do you get it fully and firmly fixed here in the present moment? You might want to go back and review some of the steps in the meditation: Which ones are you forgetting? Have you forgotten to stay with the whole body? Have you forgotten how to give rise to a sense of rapture, refreshment? | ||
+ | |||
+ | I knew an old woman in Thailand when I was first getting involved in meditation. She was a retired schoolteacher and she said that one of the quickest ways of getting the mind to settle down and stay really focused in the present moment was to focus on the sensations in the head and the sensations at the base of the spine at the same time. Think of those as two breathing centers. And you may find that the effort involved in keeping two things going at once — thinking of a line connecting the two to make it a single sensation — really steadies the mind, focuses it, gets it to settle down and stay still. | ||
+ | |||
+ | The next step the Buddha recommends is learning how to release the mind. Here he's not talking about the ultimate release, but simply about how you refine your concentration. One of the important ways of gaining insight while you're in the process of developing concentration is to be able to notice the differences among the various levels of concentration as you go through them. Sometimes you settle down and you're still sort of hovering around the breath as you try to adjust it. Other times you can let yourself simply dive into the breath, to be bathed by the breathing, without having to analyze much at all. What you've done is that you've moved from using directed thought and evaluation to help with the concentration to the point where you don't need them anymore. You can let them go. There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Once you've learned these ways of dealing with the breath, the workings of your mind become a lot more transparent, | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is how you can get great benefit, great rewards out of the practice of breath meditation. It's not simply a means for calming the mind down. The breath itself becomes a way of understanding the process of fabrication in both body and mind. And it ultimately allows you to develop a sense of dispassion, not because you come into the meditation with a negative attitude, but because you've learned how to outgrow the exercises that the Buddha has set out for you. It's like a child outgrowing a game. You've played the game enough so that you know everything the game has to offer. You've mastered all the challenges and are ready for something more. So the dispassion here is more like the dispassion that happens when you naturally grow up, when you mature. It's the dispassion that comes when you realize there must be something better. | ||
+ | |||
+ | You sometimes hear that the point of meditation is to learn simply to accept things as they are and not to be too demanding of what you need to be happy. That principle works on an outside level, teaching contentment with your external situation, but it doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | What this means is that you maintain a high standard for what it means to be happy. In fact, you heighten your standards for what's going to count as true happiness as you grow in the practice. You begin to realize that in the past you've been looking in the wrong place. You've been settling for a crude and unreliable happiness. You've been looking for all your happiness in things that are fabricated. Is it possible for there to be happiness in something totally unfabricated, | ||
+ | |||
+ | It's like tuning in on a radio. The more sensitive your ear, the more you can tell whether you're tuned into the radio station very precisely or you're off a little bit. If you're off a little bit, there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is how the breath leads you all the way to nibbana. Of course the breath doesn' | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== A Post by the Ocean ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === September 21, 2007 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | We live in a stormy world, a world of constant change. As in that passage we chanted just now about aging, illness, death, and separation — which, when you think about these things only that far, gets pretty depressing. But fortunately we don't have to think about these things only that far. We can think a little further. As in the other chant: "May I be happy." | ||
+ | |||
+ | Even though our actions may change, we try to develop a certain amount of constancy in the mind. This is why we're practicing concentration, | ||
+ | |||
+ | Another way of making it easier to stay here is to have the right view about what you're doing. It may seem a little thing, just keeping the mind in one spot. You can think of all the other things you might be doing right now, all the other responsibilities you have, all the other problems you could solve. Those things can pull you away — because it's not just gross manifestations of greed, anger and delusion that pull us away. Your misinformed sense of responsibility can also pull you away: that sense of, "Well, I've really got to think about this. I've got to prepare for that. I've got all these other responsibilities out there in the world, things I've got to prevent, things I've got to encourage." | ||
+ | |||
+ | It's like a post at the edge of the ocean. If your post is planted firmly down in the sand — or even better, if it's firmly planted down into the rock below the sand — then when the waves come in, the waves go out, the post doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | But if you take your post and lay it down at the edge of the ocean — thinking that by laying it down there you can prevent the waves from coming in much better than if it's standing in one spot — what happens of course is that the post gets washed in, washed out, and after a while, it gets smashed against a rock someplace. If anything is tied to the post, it'll get smashed, too. In other words, if you take on too many responsibilities out in the world but don't have a firm foundation for the mind, the mind ends up getting smashed to pieces. And it's of no use to anybody. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So while you're focused on one small point right here — just the breath, just the body — it may seem like you're neglecting your other responsibilities, | ||
+ | |||
+ | Because there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | After all, it //is// our responsibility. We were the ones who chose to be born here. It was because of our desires and our cravings that we took birth as human beings. When you're responsible for your birth, then you also have to be responsible for how you handle your aging, illness, and death. They all come as part of the same package. And the point from which you're going to learn how to handle these things is this point right here — as you're focused on the breath, focused in the present moment, learning how to let go of all your other wrong views, all your other distractions, | ||
+ | |||
+ | So try to maintain this spot. Think of it as a post planted against the waves of the ocean. Even though the post gets knocked over, you realize you shouldn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Kierkegaard once commented that we live life forward but we understand backwards. In other words, there are a lot of decisions we have to make right now, but we don't really know how they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Like tonight' | ||
+ | |||
+ | The prime means for developing these qualities is by giving the mind one place to stay still, and then maintaining that stillness regardless of whatever else may come to knock it over. In some cases, that requires just being mindful and alert to what's happening. In other cases, it requires more discernment, | ||
+ | |||
+ | So remember the post at the edge of the sea. If it's just lying down there on the sand, the waves will come up, and the post will get washed back and forth. If there are people standing on the beach, the post might hurt them. If there are rocks on the beach, the waves might wash the post up against the rocks and smash it. You don't want that. If your post is planted firmly there at the edge of the water, it's a lot more useful for yourself and for the people around you. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So have a sense of the value of staying firmly planted right here, focused right here, developing this stillness as a skill, getting the mind to be as constant as possible. We know that the constancy you create through concentration like this cannot be totally constant. After all, you're building your path here out of what are called aggregates. And as the Buddha said, all these aggregates are inconstant, stressful, and not-self. When we're resisting that to some extent, we know that we can't ultimately make our state of concentration permanent. But what we //are// doing is giving the mind the strength it needs to let go of things that cause harm, of things that cause suffering, because we're letting go from a position of strength. We don't let go out of weakness. If people let go out of weakness, there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | But if you let go out of strength, you let go for sure. When you've let go of things outside your concentration, | ||
+ | |||
+ | The image in the texts is of a stone post sixteen spans tall, planted into the solid rock of a mountain. Eight spans are buried in the rock; eight spans are aboveground. No matter which direction the wind comes from, it can't make the post shake at all. But until you can get to that point, use your post at the edge of the ocean. It may get knocked over now and then, but you know well enough once it's knocked over how to plant it down in the sand again. Even just this much can help you through a lot. It can help eliminate a lot of suffering even before you come to the end of suffering. And that's quite an accomplishment right there. | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== The Buddha Didn't Play Gotcha ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === August 28, 2007 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | Sometimes when you hear the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | That's not the way he taught at all. The ease and pleasure that come from jhana, he said, are totally blameless. As he was struggling to find Awakening, he spent six years practicing different austerities and finally realized that austerities were a dead-end. So the question arose: Is there an alternative way? He thought of the time when he was a child sitting under a tree while his father was plowing, and his mind entered the first jhana. So he asked himself: "Why am I afraid of that pleasure? Why am I afraid of that rapture? Is there anything blameworthy about it? Anything harmful about it?" And the answer he came up with is No. After all, it's a pleasure that can arise simply by focusing your mind on the breath. You're not harming anyone at all. And in following this pleasure, you're not getting intoxicated with youth or health or life or the other things that intoxicate the mind. So it's a good pleasure to pursue. | ||
+ | |||
+ | In this way, jhana was the first factor of the path that the Buddha realized in his quest for Awakening. And as with all the other factors of the path, he said it's something to be developed. So when states of ease and pleasure arise in your meditation, try to develop them. Try to master them as a skill. | ||
+ | |||
+ | A similar principle applies to nibbana. The path to nibbana does include desire, even though nibbana itself is the ending of all desire. If you had to drop all desire in order to get on the path, nibbana itself would be the path to nibbana. That would put you in a double bind. But the path actually includes desire. On the one hand, there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So the Buddha is a very straightforward teacher. He points out that there are good things in the path and it's okay to desire them, simply that your desire should be mature. Immature desire is the kind that wants to get the results without putting in the effort, or focuses so exclusively on the results that you neglect the effort. As the Buddha said, you focus on the causes, and when the causes are ripe, they yield the results. Through developing the path, you come to realize the cessation of suffering. So you focus on the path and the goal takes care of itself. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Sometimes you may hear that the path and the goal are one. And the one way in which that teaching makes sense is if you realize that in the doing of the path, the goal gets realized. In other words, you're not supposed to sit there just going through the motions of the path, passing the time saying, "When is the goal going to appear?" | ||
+ | |||
+ | So focus on bringing the mind to stillness. If the mind hasn't yet come to stillness, ask yourself: What's getting in the way? Use your ingenuity. It's not just a matter of desire. You use desire, you use persistence, | ||
+ | |||
+ | There are lots of good reasons to want to bring the mind to concentration, | ||
+ | |||
+ | That means you can treat them more fairly. You can go into a situation and base your actions, your words, and your thoughts totally on goodwill and compassion — because you realize you don't need anything from those people. It's when you need something from others that your actions are tilted in terms of bias or prejudice: in terms of things you desire, things that irritate you, things you're deluded about, or things you fear. This is because your hopes for happiness are focused on something outside. But when your desire for happiness is focused inwardly, you place less of a burden on things outside. You need less from the outside world, which means your compassion for other people can be more clearheaded, | ||
+ | |||
+ | In this way, the pursuit of happiness through developing strong concentration for the pursuit of total freedom is not a selfish thing. As long as your concentration is imbued with the other factors of the path — right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness — it's perfectly safe. They sometimes talk about getting stuck on concentration or becoming a concentration junkie, but those are cases where the concentration lacks the other elements of the path. Your understanding of why there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | You have to realize that it's not the world that's bothering you; you're bothering the world with your demands. A weakness in your concentration and a weakness in your discernment make you think that way. If your concentration is really solid, you can stay in all kinds of difficult situations and maintain your balance. Or even if you get knocked off balance in the areas where you're still attached, you can get back into balance a lot more easily if you've got right view and the other elements of the path. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So the dangers of concentration come when it's pursued to the exclusion of the other factors of the path. But right concentration, | ||
+ | |||
+ | But if you stay in right concentration imbued with right mindfulness and right view, it's //in// the concentration that you start seeing the stress of clinging to the aggregates. What the Buddha does, basically, is to teach you how to take these aggregates — which we normally cling to in an unskillful way — and learn how to cling to them in a more skillful way, pointing out that, Yes, it is possible to attain happiness here. As you get more and more sensitized to the grosser suffering outside, your hopes for happiness get more and more focused on the concentration. When they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | In other words, your taste for happiness has grown more refined. Repeatedly, the Buddha talks about analyzing the concentration in and of itself, seeing what in the concentration is form, feeling, perception, thought fabrication, | ||
+ | |||
+ | So the Buddha' | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== Seeing with the Body ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === January 6, 2006 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | One of the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | To work around this problem, the Buddha has us focus simply on the problem of suffering without asking who's causing this, or who you are, or what you have to do to your sense of self to make it better. He says, "Just look at the suffering in and of itself." | ||
+ | |||
+ | So it's important to understand this process: that you're clinging to, identifying with, the very things that cause you to suffer. Even though that's what defines you, it's simply a definition you've imposed on things. You don't really need it to function. You don't really have to worry about being annihilated if you stop the suffering. | ||
+ | |||
+ | For many people that's a scary idea, because the connection between their self and their suffering is so strong. This is why the Buddha focuses you back on just the suffering in and of itself. Don't ask who's doing this. Don't ask how // | ||
+ | |||
+ | Start with the breath in and of itself. That's pretty neutral. And ask yourself, " | ||
+ | |||
+ | Fortunately for us there are not too many elaborate theories about the deeper meaning of breath. Just the fact: The breath is now coming in; the breath is now going out. You can't watch your future breaths; you can't watch your past breaths. You've just got the present breath. And it's impersonal. You know that everybody has the same breathing. You simply ask the question of whether it feels good or not. That's all you've got to ask right now. As for other larger issues, you can put them aside. Get used to dealing just on this level, the immediate experience of the breath, in and of itself. | ||
+ | |||
+ | In doing that, you help to de-personalize the issue of suffering. From this point you can begin to spread your attention to other problems that need depersonalizing as well. But make sure you've got this foundation strong. Simply stay with the issue of how the breath is coming in, how the breath is going out. Are you enjoying it? Even though the breath moves between two different types of pain, if you adjust it properly you can make the experience of the breath in between, the //feel// of the breath in between, really gratifying — as it feels good coming in, coming in, down to the lungs, down to the abdomen. It can feel refreshing, gratifying. And just that fact of how it feels in the present moment, without your having to get involved in thoughts of identity, the narratives of your life, your worldviews: Get used to looking at things simply on this level, just the experience in and of itself. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This gives you a new foundation. You get in touch with the ability, in the midst of the potential for pain, to make the present moment pleasant. And it's not threatening. It's gratifying. You shift your center of gravity away from the sense of self that needs to suffer in order to maintain its identity, to a different sense of self: one based on a sense of pleasure, combined with a greater sense of competence. You're developing a skill and you see the results immediately. This new center of gravity then acts as the fulcrum from which you can pry loose your other attachments, | ||
+ | |||
+ | They' | ||
+ | |||
+ | A lot of the Buddhist texts, when they talk about the knowledge you gain from meditation, express it as a form of vision, something you see. You're working toward knowledge and vision, they say. The first experience of Awakening is the opening of the Dhamma Eye. Full Awakening comes with knowledge and vision of things as they have come to be. But there are also passages that describe this knowledge as something sensed not through the inner eye, but through the body. All the teachings about jhana are concerned with gaining a sense of ease and wellbeing from the breath and then allowing it to permeate the whole body. Some of the texts talk about " | ||
+ | |||
+ | So one of the things we want to do as we practice is to get out of our heads — where we have all these notions about who we are and how we relate to other people, how we have to maintain our identity, which is centered on suffering, in the face of the onslaughts of the world outside — and learn how to fully inhabit the body. As we inhabit it, the body itself becomes an organ of vision, an organ of sight. You see things going on in the body you didn't see before. You re-sensitize the body. As a meditator you work from a new center of gravity so that when you start taking apart your habits of creating your sense of self — the habits that make you suffer but that you cling to so tightly — it's a lot less threatening. You don't feel that you're going to be obliterated by the process. Taking apart these old habits becomes something you really like to do, because you're looking from another point of view. You're looking from the point of view of full-body awareness, full-body competence. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is why it's so important to get in touch with the breath and to learn to breathe with the whole body: whole body breathing in, whole body breathing out. It develops a sensitivity and a foundation you need to do some really radical work on how the mind is causing itself to suffer, and how you can uproot all the ways that cause you to suffer. It's only from this different point of view that the work can actually be done. | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== Oneness ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === August 2, 2007 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | Once, when Ajaan Suwat was here, he asked me to give the Dhamma talk in Thai. I had been translating Ajaan Lee, so I used one of Ajaan Lee's images: comparing the practice to digging a well. Generosity was like a very shallow well, virtue a deeper well, whereas concentration was a well down to the water table. Afterwards he told me that the Dhamma talk had been too interesting. It was distracting people from their meditation. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So don't listen to me. Focus on your breath. The talk is here in the background to catch you if you wander away from the breath, like the catcher in the rye. I'm standing at the edge of a cliff in case those of you who are running around in the rye aren't really looking at what you're doing. If I see that you're heading to the edge of the cliff, I'm here to catch you, to make sure you don't fall away from your meditation object. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Or you can think of the talk as a fence. When you start leaving the meditation object, the first thing you'll run into is the fence formed by the sound of the talk. That's to remind you to go back. The word //desana,// the word we usually translate as " | ||
+ | |||
+ | There are two words with " | ||
+ | |||
+ | So you start out trying to do that. But in the beginning, there are two ones. There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So just keep the topic of conversation on one thing, on the breath, and evaluate how it's going. What kind of breath would you like to breathe right now? You're perfectly free to choose. You may not be able to think about other things right now, but they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Ajaan Lee talks about using your awareness of the breath to wake up the different properties of your body. This is what he means: having a sense that there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Then, after a while, when you've been evaluating the breath, and it really feels good as you're breathing in, breathing out, there comes a point where you don't have to evaluate it any more. As Ajaan Fuang once said, as you fill up the breath energy in the body it's like filling up water in a jar. There comes a point where the jar of water — here we're talking about those big jars that they used to line up along the sides of houses in Thailand to catch rainwater off the roof, enormous jars, sometimes bigger than a person: After a while the jar is so full of water that no matter how much more water you pour into it, it can't hold any more. The excess just flows out. | ||
+ | |||
+ | The same principle holds with the breath. You get to a point where the breath energy feels full throughout the body. The legs feel full, the arms feel full with a pleasant buzz of energy. They feel energized. Awake. And you don't need to do any more evaluation, for they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is where the other word for oneness in the descriptions of jhana, // | ||
+ | |||
+ | This helps to induce a sense that awareness is fully one with the breath; the breath is fully one with the awareness. Then you simply maintain that. Any thought that spills out from that, you don't want. Totally throw yourself into the breath. There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Ajaan Lee makes the comment that this breath, if you're totally immersed in it, will take you through all the levels of jhana, up to the fourth. The difference is simply a matter of how steady you are in staying one with the breath, and of how still the breath grows in response. Ajaan Fuang noted that this sense of total oneness or unification with the object can take you all the way up to the dimension of the infinitude of consciousness. It's simply a matter of the perception you hold in mind. After the fourth jhana, you drop the perception of the form of the body — the still breath allows you to do this — and you can focus on the sense of space permeating the mist of sensations that remains. After that perception of space is unwavering, you turn to focus on what's aware of the space. That puts you into the dimension of the infinitude of consciousness. To get beyond that, to the dimension of nothingness, | ||
+ | |||
+ | It takes some energy to do this. You've got to throw all your energy into being one with the breath. But you find that by giving all your energy, you get a lot of energy back. That's when everything in the body is really awake. Your sense of awareness permeates every cell. The breath permeates every cell. It flows so well that the in-and-out breath can grow more and more still. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is when your preoccupation with the object of your meditation really does become one, not simply in the sense that it's the one thing you're talking about to yourself. Actually, you're not talking about it much any more. You're just in with it. And it fills the whole range of your awareness. | ||
+ | |||
+ | When you do this, you find that any movement of mental chatter in the mind becomes very obvious. When you see it, just drop it, drop it, drop it. When a little stirring happens in your awareness, zap it before you even know what it's going to talk about. This is not the time for chatter. You've got something much better going on here. The mind is snug with the breath like a hand inside a glove, totally surrounded in the breath. The breath has you surrounded on all sides. You're not pulling back to watch it from outside. You're totally immersed in it. To use a phrase from the Pali, this is // | ||
+ | |||
+ | Once you can do this, just try to maintain it in a very balanced state. Part of the mind might object: "This is stupid. You're not thinking about anything." | ||
+ | |||
+ | Ajaan Lee talks about this as the point where all four frames of reference — the body in and of itself, feelings in and of themselves, the mind in and of itself, mental qualities in and of themselves — all become one. You could look at this sense of oneness as any one of the four. From one perspective it's body, from another it's feeling, or mind, or mental qualities. But they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | But in the meantime, keep trying to make them one. Get really good at this. This is an essential skill in the meditation. As for the insight that will arise from this, you don't have to worry about it, at least not yet. Just make sure the foundation is solid. | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== The Skill of Restraint ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === December 20, 2007 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | People often ask how to bring the practice into daily life. The answer is relatively simple. It's one many people don't like to hear, but it //is// simple: restraint. There are basically two kinds of restraint. There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Take restraint of the senses: There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Try to notice when you look at something: Does your attention go flowing out? Do you lose your sense of the body? If you do, it's a sign that your looking isn't all that skillful. You want to be able to stay in the body as you look, as you listen, to maintain your sense of the breath energy throughout the body. If you can't, that's a sign either that you're looking for the purpose of forgetting the body — in other words, you're looking for the purpose of greed, anger, or delusion — or you're simply careless, and the sight, the sound, the smell, or the taste, whatever, happened to catch you off guard. | ||
+ | |||
+ | That's how most people look and listen and smell and taste and feel and think about things. They forget their inner center and suddenly find themselves centered outside, trying to get some pleasure from grabbing onto a sight or a sound and then elaborating on it — either to make it more attractive or to make it seem more meaningful than it actually is. If the mind is in a mood for a little bit of anger, you focus on the things that would provoke the anger and then you can elaborate on it, proliferate as much as you like. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Those are where our skills tend to be. We're great at proliferating. But if you think of input at the senses as a kind of food for the mind — which is how the Buddha sees it — you have to ask yourself: Are you preparing good food for the mind or junk food? Or poisonous food? That's the kind of cooking we're used to. We think we're cooking up great meals, but they can make us sick. So you've got to learn a new way to cook for the mind. | ||
+ | |||
+ | The Buddha counts sensory input among the four foods for consciousness. It actually includes three of the four: contact at the senses; intentions at the senses — why you're looking at these things, listening to these things to begin with; and then consciousness of the act of sensing. These three aspects of sensory input are what the mind is feeding on all the time. | ||
+ | |||
+ | The basic skill in learning new ways to cook this food is to focus on the breath and get the mind centered inside. You're actually changing the level of the mind when it's inside the body in this way. Instead of being on the sensual level, it's suddenly on the level of form, which is a higher level than the level of sensual desire. Even though there may be the desire to stay here at the level of form, it's a skillful desire because it raises the level of the mind. You're not so dependent on things outside for your happiness, so you're in a position where you can look at sensual pleasures from above. | ||
+ | |||
+ | At the same time, you're learning how to make the most of what you've already got. As Ajaan Lee says, it's like learning how to grow food on your own property rather than invading the property of others to plant crops on their land. Learn how to develop a sense of ease, a sense of fullness and refreshment right here in the body. Make that your food. Try to preserve and protect that level of the mind. That's the skill in how you look at things and listen to things: maintaining this sense of the center in the body, a sense of ease, refreshment, | ||
+ | |||
+ | When you handle restraint of the senses in this way, you're not depriving the mind. You're simply learning how to give the mind better food, to nourish it in a healthier way, a way that's totally blameless. Sometimes you hear people talking about the dangers of getting attached to jhana, as if it were a huge monster waiting to ambush you on the side of the path. But the dangers of jhana are relatively minor. The dangers of being stuck on the sensual level, though, are huge. When your happiness is dependent on sensory pleasures being a certain way, it can lead to all sorts of unskillful behavior as you try to keep on feeding the mind the kind of sights, sounds, etc., it likes. This is why we see so much killing and stealing, illicit sex, lying, getting drunk around us in the world. All the precepts get broken because of people' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So even though this is an attachment, it's a better one. And when your happiness is not dependent on things outside being a certain way, people outside have less power over you. We see this so much these days. All they have to do is wave the red flag: " | ||
+ | |||
+ | In this way, your ability to find nourishment inside is protection for the mind. The pleasures of the world outside hold a lot less poison because you're not trying to feed on them anymore. They' | ||
+ | |||
+ | For instance, there will be times in your meditation when things aren't going as well as you'd like. In cases like that, it can be helpful to go outside and look at the beauty of nature around you — the clouds, the sunset, the moon and the stars at night — to help clear and refresh your mind. There are passages in the Canon where MahaKassapa, | ||
+ | |||
+ | What this comes down to is that, as the Buddha said, even something as simple as looking or listening can be developed as a skill. You look and listen while at the same time trying to maintain your sense of being centered inside. This is one of the best measurements for how much greed, anger, or delusion is lurking in the mind and pushing it around. If you catch the mind flowing out to a particular object, there you are: You've found a defilement. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Many of us in the West don't like the word " | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is where you find that being inside the form of the body really is a higher level of food for the mind, a higher level of happiness, a better place to be. You want to do everything you can to stay here, regardless of what happens outside. When a wildfire swoops down the mountainside at you, you want to stay right where you are. You may want to move the body, of course, but you want your center to stay right here inside the body. When disappointments come in life, you still want to stay here and not let the disappointments from outside make inroads into the mind. When a cold wave comes, a heat wave comes, you want to be able to find your refreshment, | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is why restraint of the senses is not deprivation. It's actually a way of feeding the mind better food, giving it a higher level of pleasure. But you can't have everything. If you go for the more dangerous food, you miss out on the better food. You've got to make the choice: health food or junk food. In that sense, restraint //is// a form a deprivation. But it's actually a trade. You're getting something better in return. | ||
+ | |||
+ | As you go through the day, keep asking yourself that question: "What am I feeding on right now? And what is it saying about the mind? What am I learning about the mind by watching the way I feed?" In this way, the simple act of looking or listening is part of the practice. If you do it skillfully, it's nourishment for the practice. It keeps it going. | ||
+ | |||
+ | The path doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So think of everything you do throughout the day as a skill, including the way you exercise restraint. Sometimes that means not looking at or listening to the things you don't know how to deal with yet — like a beginning boxer who knows enough not to take on a world champion. But you won't have to go through life with blinders on all the time. You can teach yourself how to look at things that used to set off your anger or set off your lust, but you do it in a new way, a way in which they // | ||
+ | |||
+ | And furthermore, | ||
+ | |||
+ | Restraint is what provides continuity to the practice. If you do it skillfully, your looking and listening all become part of the practice. They can keep you on the path all day long. | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== Walking Meditation: Stillness in Motion ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === July 20, 2006 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | In Thailand, it's common that when an ajaan arrives at a monastery he's never been to before and wants to check out how serious the monks are about practicing, he looks at the walking meditation paths. If they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | But that's not the only purpose for the walking. In the Canon, when the Buddha talks about the benefits of walking meditation, some of them are health benefits, but in terms of the mind, he says that the concentration developed while walking is not easily destroyed. This is an important point to ponder. When we sit quietly, we're trying to get the mind still, and we try to keep the body still as a way of helping the mind along. But you also want to be able to keep the mind still in the midst of movement, in the midst of activity. That's where walking meditation comes in. | ||
+ | |||
+ | When you get up from your sitting meditation to walk, try to maintain the same center you had while sitting. You might think of it as a bowl full of oil that you're carrying with you as you get up from the seat and walk over to the path and continue walking. You don't want to spill a drop. That requires a readjustment in where you keep your focus. Normally, when you open your eyes, the first tendency is for your awareness to go flowing out the eyes, out into the world of your visual sphere. You lose some of your sense of being inside the body. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So remind yourself not to lose that sense. Maintain it even as you open your eyes. You may find that this can knock you off balance the first time you try it, for it means finding a different kind of balance from what you're used to. But it's important that you develop this new sense of balance, this sense of being fully inside your body, fully in the breath, even while walking, even while moving, even while negotiating with the surroundings in which you walk, because eventually you want to get to the point where you can maintain that same sense of center in the midst of all your activities — talking, working, eating, whatever — wherever you are. And this is a good first step in that direction. Walking meditation is a means of connecting your sitting meditation with mindfulness throughout daily life. | ||
+ | |||
+ | If, when you get on your walking path, you find that your center has slipped, immediately bring it back. Then walk to the end of the path at a normal pace — or slightly slower, if you find it helps your concentration — but don't walk at an abnormally slow pace or you won't get the practice you need in bringing centered mindfulness to your normal activities. Don't glance around at the trees or the other sights around you. Keep your eyes downcast, focused on the path several steps in front of you. You can hold your hands in front of the body or in back, the important point being that you don't swing your arms around. When you get to the end of the path, stop for a brief second to reestablish mindfulness in case it slipped away while you were walking, and then turn, stop for a second, and walk back in the other direction. Always try to turn in the same direction, either clockwise or counter-clockwise, | ||
+ | |||
+ | Aside from that, try to maintain the same sense of center you had while sitting with your eyes closed. In other words, focus on the breath. Even though you're walking and looking ahead to make sure you don't trip over things, you want to maintain the sense of being centered in the breath as much as possible. Don't let the looking and the walking pull you away from your center. This requires practice, maintaining a center in the midst of movement. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is important for two main reasons. One, as I said just now, is that it gets you used to maintaining your center in other activities as well, so that even when you're engaged in complex activities, even when you're thinking about things, you can still have a sense of inhabiting the body, being centered within the breath. You may have so many other things going on that you can't keep track of when the breath is coming in or going out, but you should be able to maintain a sensitivity to the energy tone in the body — where it's relaxed, where it's tight, what you can do to keep it relaxed and comfortable in all situations. You're inhabiting the body. You're not going off entirely into some other thought world. This keeps you grounded. It gives you a place to return to as soon as you've done whatever work needs to be done in that thought world. Otherwise, you hop trains, from one train of thought to the next train of thought, like a hobo, and you end up in Lincoln, Nebraska. Whereas, if you're grounded here, as soon as the thought world has done its work, you're back here with the breath again. That way you can stay grounded in the midst of your different activities. You don't get lost in the course of the day. | ||
+ | |||
+ | The other reason why it's important to develop this ability to stay centered in the midst of activity, is that while you're doing walking meditation, you begin to observe how the mind slips out. It's often the case that you gain insight into the movements of the mind a lot more easily while you're walking than while you're sitting, because when you're sitting, everything is supposed to be totally still. You don't have to pay attention to anything else at all. You can clamp down on everything and get very, very centered, very, very still. But while you're walking, you still have to watch; you still have to move; there are decisions to be made even in the simple matter of walking. Where you're going to place your eyes, where you're going to step, noticing how close you are to the end of the path: simple things, but they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Luang Pu Dune talks about this in his short definitions of the four noble truths. The mind that goes flowing out, he says is a cause of stress. It's good to be able to catch that flowing out in action, to see the current, to see how and why it moves, and to get practice in not flowing along with it. Ajaan Lee also talks about this in his discussion of mind as a frame of reference. You start, he says, with a sense of awareness that's still and bright. Then a current flows out from that awareness and goes to sense objects. Sometimes it's looking for something to get angry about, sometimes for something to get greedy about. The reason we don't notice what's happening is that we tend to go with the flow. But if you put yourself in the same position as when you're doing walking meditation — that you're going to stay still even though other things have to move — you can develop the skill needed to stay still while the current of the mind is flowing out, and you don't go with it. You watch it go for a little ways, and because you're not inhabiting it, it just falls short of its mark and dies. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So you get to see the mind in action and yet not get carried away by the action. This way it's a lot easier not to go along with everything that comes flowing through the mind. You get a stronger sense of the observer that can watch the movements of the mind as events, not as worlds to inhabit. If you got into those worlds, they'd turn into all kinds of stories and take you to a dark place on the outskirts of Bangkok, shoot you, and dump you out of the car. But when you see them simply as events, you don't get involved unless you see clearly that they really are useful. This puts you in a much better position not to get carried away by things. | ||
+ | |||
+ | The same ability to watch movement but not move along with it, helps you analyze your own concentration. The Canon talks about developing an ability to step back a bit from your concentration after you've mastered it. In the first stages of concentration practice, the Buddha recommends learning how to indulge in the concentration, | ||
+ | |||
+ | In the same way, you can learn how to observe the mind while it's still. You aren't so totally implanted in the object, but at the same time you don't totally leave concentration. The reason you can do this is because you've developed the skill through walking meditation for the observer to be still even though there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | The Buddha recommends lots of ways you can observe it. Look for whatever you can recognize as form, feeling, perception, thought construct, or consciousness within the concentration, | ||
+ | |||
+ | One of the classic analogies the Buddha gives is of a mirage. You see a tree in the mirage, even though the actual tree is much farther away than the image of the tree in the mirage. The tree in the mirage is one thing; the actual tree is something else. They' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Ajaan Lee points this out in his breath meditation instructions. The way you perceive the breath in the first jhana is going to be different from the way you perceive it in the second, the third, or the fourth. In the fourth jhana, you perceive the breath as a still energy field. What you've done is to tune in to a still energy field that's already there in the body. The way you can tune in is through this perception. What do you have in your current range of awareness that's breath energy but still? If you can't focus on that just yet, focus on the perception of breathing in, breathing out, trying to get the right length of breath, the right quality of breath. That will help you to get centered and to settle down. But there will come a point where the understanding of the breath that got you into concentration gets in the way of your moving to more subtle levels of concentration. So you need alternative ways of perceiving breath in the body. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Instead of focusing on the in-and-out breath, try focusing on the subtle breath energies that flow through the blood vessels, flow through the nerves. They' | ||
+ | |||
+ | You've done this by focusing on your perceptions as events, testing their results, and then changing them to give better results. As you grow more proficient at this, you can start observing the entire process, to see how perceptions shape your experience as a whole. That's one way of developing a sense of disenchantment and disengagement, | ||
+ | |||
+ | This all depends on that ability to observe the mind in action and yet not get caught up in the action. And this is why walking meditation is so important, because it helps give you practice in perfecting that ability. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So don't think of the walking simply as something you do when you get too tired to sit, or as something where you simply go through the motions until you're ready to sit again. It's not a meditation break; it's an essential part of the meditation. It develops an added skill, the skill to be centered in the body not only while the body is still, but also while the body is moving. Walking meditation teaches you to be still in the midst of movement, to get a stronger sense of the mind as the observer that doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Remember that chant about respect for concentration. It doesn' | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== Guardian Meditations ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === June 8, 2007 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | If you've ever opened a book to look at dependent co-arising, your first impulse was probably to close the book because the topic is so complex. But actually there are some good basic lessons you can learn, even from your first impressions. The primary factor is ignorance. That's what starts suffering in motion. When you replace the ignorance with knowledge, that cuts the chain of causes and conditions leading to suffering. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So it's good to know precisely what kind of knowledge is called for here: knowledge of the four noble truths. This is why right view is always given as the first factor in the noble eightfold path. It starts with conviction in your actions: that your actions are real, that they really do have results, and that the quality of the results is determined by the quality of the mental state engendering the action. It's within this context that the four noble truths make sense. After all, suffering is a result of a particular mental action, or a series of mental actions — craving and ignorance being primary. If mental actions didn't have an impact on your life, the four noble truths would be meaningless. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This, of course, directs us to where we have to practice: We've got to train the mind. Notice that each of the four noble truths entails a particular duty, each of which is a skill to be mastered. You're trying to comprehend suffering so that you can let go of its cause. You develop the path so that you can realize the end of suffering. Those are the duties you have to master as skills. This is why in the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | The image in the texts is of the continental shelf off of India. It's a gradual slope and then there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | The other point that will immediately strike you if you look at dependent co-arising is how many of the factors come prior to sensory contact. Things don't just begin with sensory contact. You bring a whole load of preconditions to any experience, and working on those preconditions is what's going to make all the difference. For instance, building right off of ignorance there are what they call fabrications. The way you breathe, if it's done in ignorance, can contribute to suffering. That's physical fabrication. Verbal fabrication consists of the way you direct your thoughts to things and then comment on them. If this is done in ignorance, it's going to lead to suffering. Mental fabrication consists of perceptions and feelings: If you fabricate these things out of ignorance, they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is why a large part of the practice is focused on the issue of perception: the way you label things, how they fit into the larger picture of your thoughts. And this is why the Buddha didn't just sit people down, and say, "Okay, just be in the present moment and don't think about anything else." He would often start his instructions by leading up to an understanding of //why// we're in the present moment, exactly what we're trying to look for in the present moment, what we're going to do about it when we see it. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is why there are so many analogies and images in the Canon. They give you a framework for understanding what you're doing. And again, many of the images and analogies have to do with skills: Being a skillful meditator is like being a skillful cook, carpenter, or archer. There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So you want to look into your baggage to see how much straw you're carrying around, so that you can lighten your load. Then you can replace it with better things, things that really will be useful. And the guardian meditations are a good way of sorting things out in your baggage. | ||
+ | |||
+ | The first guardian meditation is recollection of the Buddha, keeping in mind his Awakening, reflecting on it as a central event in the history of the world. The fact of his Awakening shows that through human effort true happiness can be found. It's an important point to keep in mind because so much of our modern culture tries to say, "Hey. You can't have an ultimate and deathless happiness, but you can have the happiness that comes from our eggbeater with an MP3 player built right into the handle," | ||
+ | |||
+ | So it's important to keep in mind that there was someone in the past who found true happiness and it was through his own efforts. And, as he said, it wasn't because he was a special god or anything. It was simply through developing qualities of mind that we can all develop — man, woman, child, lay or ordained: ardency, resolution, heedfulness. We all have these qualities to some extent. It's simply a matter of developing them. The same with virtue, concentration, | ||
+ | |||
+ | So when you're tempted to go for the quick but short happiness, remind yourself, "The Buddha says that true happiness is possible, and that it can be gained through human effort." | ||
+ | |||
+ | In this way, keeping the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So these are good perceptions to hold in mind. Especially when you're getting discouraged or tempted to give up on the practice, or if you think, "Well, maybe I'm not up to this": Remember that the essential qualities for Awakening are qualities that everybody can develop. But we have to develop them ourselves. We can't depend on anyone outside to come and do it for us. That's the other part of the message of the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | The second guardian meditation is goodwill. You want to bring an attitude of goodwill to everybody around you. When the Buddha talked about goodwill in the // | ||
+ | |||
+ | So to protect yourself from that kind of unskillful action, you've got to learn how to make your goodwill all-around, 24/7. That doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | The third guardian meditation is of the foulness of the body. A lot of people don't like this one. If we took a poll of meditators here in the West, we'd probably find this at the bottom of the list of popular meditation topics, yet it's very useful. Some people say, "Hey, I've already got a negative body image. Why do you want me to make it even more negative?" | ||
+ | |||
+ | This sort of contemplation really goes against the grain, which is one of the reasons why it's useful to reflect on over and over and over again. Ajaan Maha Boowa keeps making the point: Don't count the number of times you've reflected on the foulness of the body. Just keep doing it until it's done its job. After all, our lusting after the human body is what led us to be born. This is what keeps us wanting to come back, and it makes us do really stupid things. So this contemplation is a useful tool to have in your arsenal. It's a useful new set of perceptions to develop. Our perceptions of beauty are dangerous, so it's good to learn how to see that beautiful bodies are not really beautiful. All you have to do is look inside a little bit and you see all kinds of stuff that can kill the lust if you really allow yourself to look at the body as a whole, and not just at the few parts you tend to focus on as being attractive. | ||
+ | |||
+ | The fourth guardian meditation is recollection of death. For most people this is pretty disturbing and depressing, but it's meant to be used in a way that's inspiring, that helps us to follow the path beyond death to the deathless. Remind yourself that we've got this practice that allows us to prepare for death and transcend it. Have you fully developed it? Are you really prepared? And the answer is almost always No. Okay, then, you've got work to do. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is a good antidote for laziness. There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So your attitude is what's going to make the difference between whether the circumstances you've got right now are reasons for laziness or reasons for diligence. When you remind yourself that you don't know how much time you've got, it should stir you to action — so that when the time comes, when you really do have to go, you're ready, prepared. You've got the concentration, | ||
+ | |||
+ | If you sit around saying, " | ||
+ | |||
+ | So these four contemplations are guardian meditations to bring wisdom into your perception of things, the labels and ideas you bring to your experience. The more you develop them, then the better the set of associations, | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is why we train the mind. This is why we practice — so that when the time comes to perform, you can perform well, in a way that doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So learn how to develop these topics along with the breath. They help put the whole practice into the right narrative, into the right perspective, | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== Cleanliness is Next to Mindfulness ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === February 10, 2006 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is a principle you find throughout Thai culture. Back in the old days, people would learn about each other by the way they did things, by the things they made. If you were a young man and wanted to appeal to a young woman, you'd carve a pole for her to carry over her shoulder when carrying gifts to the monastery. And she'd get a very good sense of what kind of person you were both by the fact that you made a pole for that purpose, and by your handiwork in the way you carved it. Most of us nowadays would be hopeless in a situation like that. We're not used to making things. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is one of our problems as meditators. We don't have many physical skills; we haven' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Ajaan Lee devotes almost a whole Dhamma talk to the topic of cleanliness. The title of the talk is " | ||
+ | |||
+ | I remember Ajaan Fuang telling me about his time with Ajaan Mun, how Ajaan Mun was extremely meticulous, very clean about everything. Even living out in the forest in the dry season when there was a lot of dust, his hut and everything around it was very neat, very clean. Everything was in its right place. Even the rags he used to wipe off his feet: He always kept them well washed. If they got torn, he would sew them up. He didn't let anything go to waste. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So try to have this attitude in all your activities. When you're training the mind, the mind is there not only when you meditate. It's the same mind that goes through the day: what you do, what you say, how you do your chores. Those are the areas where you show the qualities of your mind. Those are the areas where they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | The complete training has to go all around. It has to deal with the way you treat other people, how you handle difficult situations. Your whole life is part of the training, and in the course of the whole-life aspect of the training, you need to learn how to see how you've been sloppy, how you've been stupid, how you've been ignorant, how you've been thoughtless and careless. If you don't see those things, you're not going to learn anything. The experience is chastening instead of pride-inducing. When the training is complete, every aspect of the mind has been trained, so that you're skilled at all kinds of activities, with an attitude nicely balanced between humility and pride. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Once, during my very first year with Ajaan Fuang, the time came for the // | ||
+ | |||
+ | But if you make up your mind that whatever chore falls to you, you're going to try to do it skillfully, then you develop what are called the four bases for success: the desire to do it skillfully; the persistence that sticks with it till you've mastered it; intentness, paying a lot of attention to what you're doing; and analysis, using your powers of discernment to see what's not yet right, trying to figure out how to get around problems, how to solve them. This fourth factor also involves ingenuity — all the active qualities of the mind. The texts talk about these four bases of success specifically in conjunction with concentration, | ||
+ | |||
+ | So see every aspect of your life as an opportunity to train the mind. If you want to develop good strong powers of concentration, | ||
+ | |||
+ | Don't think that the important insights are going to come only when you're sitting with your eyes closed. There are many references to this point in the Canon. One nun's mind finally came to a good solid concentration while she was washing her feet. And the poem in which she tells of how this happened is interesting. After she washes her feet, she goes into her hut and does all the things you're told to do in the Vinaya. She checks the bed first before she sits down on it and then she takes a pin and pulls the wick out of the lamp to put out the light. And as soon as the fire went out, she said, that was the moment of her Awakening. She said the liberation of awareness was like the liberation of the fire. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So it's not only when you're sitting with your eyes closed that important things can occur to the mind, important insights can come, or that the mind can gather into one. It's amazing. Sometimes the mind can really get concentrated while you're just doing a chore if you approach the chore with the proper respect. So remember that this tree of ours has lots of branches and they' | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== A Sense of Entitlement ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === April 12, 2004 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | Some of the chants we recite in the evening are meant to inspire us, and others are meant to warn us, to keep us grounded, to make sure we don't get lost in abstractions, | ||
+ | |||
+ | Like the chant on the requisites. It's there to remind us — day in, day out — that when you're born, you're born with a big lack. You've got this body that needs food, needs clothing, needs shelter, needs medicine, and you're not born with an entitlement to those things. If you were really entitled to them, they would come on their own. The fact that they //seem// to come on their own when we're children is because our parents are looking after us, but that means //they// have to go out and do extra work just to provide for this big, gaping hole they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Part of the reason for that chant is to give a sense of // | ||
+ | |||
+ | So we come to the practice with a huge debt. And the Buddha encourages us to have a sense of gratitude to everyone who's provided for us — materially and in terms of the Dhamma — because otherwise we get complacent. | ||
+ | |||
+ | There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Look at the monastery we have here. It's come about through the generosity of lots and lots of different people. They' | ||
+ | |||
+ | At the same time there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | When you read Buddhist history, it can sometimes be a pretty depressing project, seeing how people take the Dhamma and bend it to other needs, other agendas, other ideas. And yet there are always people who have a sense of the Dhamma' | ||
+ | |||
+ | At that time the Thai Buddhist hierarchy had decided that the way to nibbana was closed. Nobody seemed to be going that way — that was the official line. They even had made a survey of meditation temples to prove it. And Ajaan Mun had to prove single-handedly that it wasn't true, so you can imagine what he was up against — not only his own defilements, | ||
+ | |||
+ | Ideally we should come to the Dhamma not with a sense of entitlement, | ||
+ | |||
+ | Ajaan Fuang once told me that one of his prime motivations in practicing was that he was born into a poor family. He didn't do well in school, he was orphaned at an early age, and as he was growing up he just didn't have anything to show for himself as a human being. If you want to make your way in Thai society, you've got to have a lot of good connections. Well, he had no connections, | ||
+ | |||
+ | As we come to the Dhamma we need a strong sense of its importance — and a strong sense of our need for the Dhamma. We come to it not because we're entitled but because we're in debt — to our parents, to all the other living beings who've contributed to the fact that we now have a body and are still alive. Lots of people talk about interconnectedness as a wonderful thing, but it carries a lot of IOU's. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Try to think about this in a way that makes you willing and happy to repay those IOU's — understanding the need to repay them, and happy that you've found a way to meet that need. Use that as a motivation to keep your Dhamma practice in line, to keep yourself devoted to the practice. That way you benefit. You get the full set of benefits that can come from the practice, and the people around you get a fuller sense of its benefits as well. | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== Right Livelihood ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === December 21, 2007 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | We're often impatient at the practice. We want to go straight to insight, straight to the solution of all our problems, so we can then go back home and get on with the rest of our lives. But you first have to put the mind in good shape before you can gain any insight. You have to feed it well: That's what concentration is all about. As the Buddha once said, if you don't have the pleasure and rapture that can come from at least the first jhana, you're always going to be tempted by sensuality. Even if you understand the drawbacks of sensual pleasures and sensual desires, if you don't have this alternative way of finding happiness you're going to go back to your old ways. No matter how much Dhamma you may have read or how precise your understanding of the intricacies of the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | It's like Ajaan Chah's simile: Westerners, he once said, are like vultures. When they fly, they fly very high, but when they eat, they eat low. That's one of those quotes you don't normally see in books about Ajaan Chah, but it hits home. We in the West tend to overlook our need for the groundwork provided by concentration. The Buddha himself compared the happiness, pleasure, and equanimity that come from concentration to kinds of food. His image was of a fortress at the edge of a frontier, and different qualities in the path correspond to different aspects of the fortress. There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | The first jhana is like water and grass. When you work up to the fourth jhana, you've got honey, butter, and ghee. These are ways of nourishing the mind and providing for its right livelihood. Even if you're not gaining any higher levels of insight, at least you're finding pleasure in a blameless place. This qualifies as right livelihood in the path. The more pleasure, the more a sense of wellbeing and stability you can develop from within, then the lighter your kammic footprint on the rest of the world, the less harm you're causing as you search for your livelihood, both physical and mental. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So as you're practicing concentration, | ||
+ | |||
+ | Part of this may have been simply a question of etiquette. There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | There are two cases where people of questionable professions come to him. One is an actor; the other, a professional soldier. They say pretty much the same thing. "Our teachers who taught us to be actors," | ||
+ | |||
+ | The Buddha twice refuses to answer, but the actor keeps after him, and asks him a third time. So the Buddha finally says, "Well, it looks like I can't get anywhere with you by saying I don't want to answer that. So I'll answer you." He goes on to say that if, as you're acting, you give rise to greed, anger, and delusion in your audience, and your motivation for acting is greed, anger, and delusion, then after you die you're going to go to the hell of laughter — i.e., not the place where people laugh //with// you, but where they laugh //at// you. So the actor breaks into tears. The Buddha says, "See? That's why I didn't want to answer your question." | ||
+ | |||
+ | Similarly with the soldier. The soldier says, "I was taught that if you die in battle, you're going to go to the heaven of heroes. What does Master Gotama have to say about that?" Again, the Buddha twice refuses to answer. When pushed for the third time, he finally says, "When you're in the midst of battle, giving rise to the desire for the killing of other beings — 'May these other beings suffer, may they be harmed, may they be killed' | ||
+ | |||
+ | The Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | But there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | The chant reminds you of the ideal motivation: Wear clothing to protect yourself from the elements, to cover up the parts of body that cause shame. Take food not to put on bulk, not for the fun or the flavor of it. After all, those who provided the food that you're eating — the farmers who worked, the animals who gave up their lives — didn't provide it in fun. You take the food simply so you can continue practicing, so you can eliminate hunger pains and yet at the same time not overstuff yourself until there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | When you think about these things, it forces you to look at your impact when you eat, when you buy clothing, when you buy any of these things and use them: What is your impact on the world? The fact that you're alive and breathing means that you have a lot of needs, and the needs can be met only by relying on others. What way can you rely on others so that you're not harming them or causing them unnecessary pain? | ||
+ | |||
+ | This reflection ties in with one of the important principles of what are called the customs of the Noble Ones, which is contentment with your material possessions. When you think in these ways, you find that you're buying less, using less, because you're looking elsewhere for your happiness. I.e., you're looking inside. This is where the concentration comes in. This is why concentration is an important element of right livelihood. It provides you the honey, the butter, the grain, and the other foods you need for the mind, for your true happiness deep down inside. At the same time, this happiness provides you with a good foundation for the insights that are going to come as you start looking at the various ways in which you keep on taking birth. Because, again, the fact you're taking birth is placing a burden on other beings, a burden on the world. | ||
+ | |||
+ | The insights you're going to need to stop that process can be pretty harsh. As the Buddha said, when you take food, think about the story of the couple who were going across the desert with their only child. They got more than halfway across the desert and ran totally out of food. They realized that if they didn't eat anything, all three of them would die. So they decided to kill their child and make jerky out of the baby: baby jerky. That way at least two of them would survive and then they could start a family again when they got to the other side of the desert. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Now, the Buddha said, what would be their attitude toward the food while they were eating it? Would they be eating it for fun? No, they'd be thinking with sorrow of what they had to do in this horrible circumstance. That, the Buddha said, is how you should regard physical food: not something you eat out of joy or for the flavor, but simply to keep life going, realizing that your having to eat causes suffering, causes pain. | ||
+ | |||
+ | That's a harsh contemplation — one of many harsh contemplations in the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So as the foundation for your practice, you want to keep working on these skills. Appreciate the simple quality of getting the mind still, finding a sense of ease simply by the way you breathe; gaining a sense of wellbeing, rapture, equanimity when you need them. In this way, you nourish the mind with good food. That's right livelihood in the highest sense. It puts you in a position where, while you're still alive this time around, you weigh lightly on the world around you. And you're developing the skill so you don't have to come back and weigh the world down again. This is why the Buddha' | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== Factions in the Mind ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === September 14, 2003 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | When you stop to look at your mind, you begin to realize that there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | You can do this in lots of different ways. First, you can remind yourself of why you're here, of all the good things that can come through staying with the breath: You develop mindfulness, | ||
+ | |||
+ | Think about it: The Buddha could have said a few last words about something wonderful or grand: nibbana, limitless compassion, or emptiness. But instead, he focused on heedfulness — the principle that your actions are important and you have to be careful about what you do because actions can take you in all sorts of different directions. They have results. | ||
+ | |||
+ | And so, as you meditate, remind yourself that you're here to learn how to be a lot clearer about what's going on in your mind. The more steadily and consistently you can stay with the breath, then the more you see in terms of all the subtle politics going on in the mind: the part of the mind that wants to be heedful and the parts of the mind that don't. There are many different voices in there, after all, many different sides to any question, not just two. So, when you settle down to be with the breath, be prepared: Lots of other voices will be pulling in different directions. And it's normal. Don't get discouraged. Try to strengthen the good voices by making the breath comfortable, | ||
+ | |||
+ | As you do this, you get more and more sensitive, which means that you can get more and more precise in what you're doing. The more precise and sensitive you are, the more absorbing the breath becomes. The easier it is to stay here so that this mindful, alert faction of the mind gets stronger. It doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | You notice this when part of the mind wants to do something unskillful, something it knows it shouldn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is why it's important to keep hanging on to the breath and allowing the breath to feel good, to feel clear in the different parts of the body. This is how you exercise mindfulness and alertness so that they grow strong. Wherever you can sense the breath, focus on that. Then let the different breathing sensations connect so that they feel all-around good. This gives mindfulness and alertness a really solid place to settle in. And in this way you can turn the fact that the mind is a committee to your advantage. In other words, when greed, anger, and delusion threaten to take over the mind, they don't get the whole mind. You have another faction of the committee that says "No. We don't want to go there, because we know better." | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is called having a sense of shame, a sense of compunction: | ||
+ | |||
+ | The same with compunction, | ||
+ | |||
+ | So when mindfulness and alertness have developed this beachhead here in the present moment and can stay right here with the breath, then these qualities of shame and compunction come and help, strengthen your heedfulness, | ||
+ | |||
+ | In the past, the good members of the committee were all separated. They didn't work together. Like the hummingbirds at the feeder who can't band together to fight off a bigger bird, they got beaten out by the other more forceful factions, the unskillful factions of the committee. But now you've given them a corner of the mind where they won't budge, where they grow stronger and begin to take over. When they take over, it's not that they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Having this corner of the mind helps you step back and see the mind for what it is, to see what's going wrong. Without this corner here, you're totally immersed in unskillful states and can't see a way out at all. But if you remind yourself that the mind is a committee, then even though unskillful things are coming up in the mind, you remember that there can still be a part of you that keeps watching, keeps mindful, alert. By standing on the breath, you gain a better perspective: | ||
+ | |||
+ | As the Buddha said, training the mind is something you have to do for yourself. Other people can't do it for you. They can point out the way, but the actual work is something //you// have to do. There would seem to be a paradox there. If the mind were one solid unit, it wouldn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is how you can bring the mind to a sense of unity, when all the different factions realize that it's in their best interest to undergo this training. They all start working together instead of at cross-purposes. This gives the mind strength. If it decides to work on a project, it'll see the project through. If it's faced with pain and difficulty, all the parts of the mind work together so that you don't cause yourself suffering. | ||
+ | |||
+ | These are some of the advantages that come from training the mind to stay with the breath. If you find it difficult to stay with the breath, if you can't quite get it comfortable yet, at least remind yourself that you're headed in the right direction. You're working on important skills here. Even though they may take time, whatever amount of time that it takes is well invested, well spent. That sense of conviction will see you through the difficult patches and remind you that they' | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== A Warrior' | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === November 10, 2006 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | Sit with your back straight, facing straight ahead, and your eyes closed. Place your hands on your lap, right hand on top of your left, and notice your breathing. Where do you feel the breathing? What are the sensations in the body that tell you now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out? Focus on those sensations. Allow them to feel relaxed. There will be a certain amount of tension when you first meditate, because you're not used to focusing on one thing for long periods of time, especially something as subtle and immediate as the breath. For the most part, we're more used to focusing on our ideas and emotions, or on things outside. So it takes a while for the mind to get used to being at home, focusing on something inside the body. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Allow the sensation of the breathing to be as relaxed as possible. Think of the breath energy as something that already fills the body. As you breathe in, you're simply adding more breath energy, infusing it into the energy already there. When you breathe out, you're not trying to squeeze everything out. If all of the breath were squeezed out of the body, you would die. So try to find the right balance. At what point does an out-breath start feeling uncomfortable? | ||
+ | |||
+ | Without that sense of ease, the mind starts flailing around, grasping at all kinds of other things. The idea may seem strange, but the more ease you can create for yourself inside, the more you're actually creating a gift for the world around you. If you don't have this inner sense of ease and wellbeing, the mind starts grasping at things outside, latching on to things outside, hoping to build some kind of happiness there. That places a burden on other people. But when you're more self-sufficient like this, you're less grasping. You're creating less of a burden. | ||
+ | |||
+ | One of the images of a well-concentrated mind is of a lotus saturated with water. Some lotus flowers don't ever get up above the water. They just stay immersed under the surface, saturated with water from their roots up to the tip. Try to think of your body as being saturated in the same way with a cool sense of ease. That lotus can be your gift, both to yourself and to the people around you. At the same time, you're establishing a good basis within the body for a clear, mindful state of mind, an alert state of mind. All too often our emotions take over the body. When fear comes in, there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | When there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | They start by taking over the body. So your first tactic in learning how to counteract them is to get the body on your side. Get familiar with how good breathing feels. Then when another emotion comes in, you can realize that although the emotion may create a certain reaction in the body, it doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Ordinarily, we tend to be unskillful in how we relate to our emotions. One of the important skills in meditation is learning more skillful ways of handling them. For the most part, we think we have to either give in to the emotion or else to deny that it's there, just totally repress it out of existence. Of course, repressing it doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | But as you meditate, you're learning alternative ways of dealing with these emotions, so that you don't have to give in to them, but at the same time you don't pretend that they don't exist. You admit that they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | But you have other desires as well, such as the desire not to do something foolish and unskillful. That's a desire to be cultivated and strengthened. One way of strengthening it is to give it its corner of the body as well. The hormones may be racing through your bloodstream, | ||
+ | |||
+ | This also means developing the proper attitude when things are not going the way you'd like them to. Problems come up, and you'd rather not have those particular problems. Saunas get set on fire. You'd rather not have the sauna set on fire, but you don't give in to your regret for the sauna. You do what has to be done to put the fire out and keep it from spreading. Storms come in, knock down trees. You don't go running around outside trying to push the trees back up in the midst of the storm. You find a safe place to stay and wait until the storm is over. You tell yourself, " | ||
+ | |||
+ | We've had a couple of really bad storms here at the monastery: so much wind and so much rain, and all you could do was find a safe hut where you were fairly sure the hut wouldn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Try to develop the same attitude toward emotional storms in your mind and your body. Keep thinking of the mind as a committee. There are lots of people in there, lots of ideas, some of which are helpful, some of which are actually destructive to your own wellbeing. You can't regard the destructive ones as your own true emotions or your own true ideas. They may be real, but they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Ajaan Lee has a good way of thinking about these things. He says you have lots of germs and worms and other things in your body, so maybe these thoughts coming through your brain are actually //their// thoughts. After all, they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Your meditation may not be going as well as you'd like it to, but you don't give up, you don't just throw it away. You just lower your immediate expectations. You lower your demands on the meditation. Again, like a skillful warrior: When you find that you can't defend the whole territory, you find one little corner that you //can// defend, and you take that as your stronghold. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is why it's very useful to have a very fluid sense of yourself. As a meditator, you're not asked to give up your sense of self totally right from the start. You just learn how to use your sense of self more skillfully. Make it more adaptable. When some parts of the body are really painful, establish your stronghold in the parts that you can make more comfortable, | ||
+ | |||
+ | Learn how to make the distinction between feeling sensations and body sensations. Body sensations are things like warmth, coolness, solidity, energy — what are called the four elements or the four properties. Feeling sensations are the fleeting sensations of pleasure and pain. Those are very different sorts of things — the feeling sensations and the body sensations — but we tend to glom them all together. In particular, if there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | But when the mind is in the right position, with the right attitude, you can look into the pain, not with the idea of making it go away, but with the idea of understanding it: "Okay, which sensations in here are pain sensations, which ones are earth, liquid, fire sensations?" | ||
+ | |||
+ | If you don't have the energy to do this kind of questioning, | ||
+ | |||
+ | So, learn to be a warrior. Sometimes warriors have to admit temporary defeat, sometimes they have to go into retreat, but they don't totally give in. They simply adjust their tactics to deal with the situation as it presents itself. Just like the situation in Thailand when England and France were gobbling up colonies: Thailand had to give up some of its provinces. It was either that or else give up its independence entirely. So the Thais were willing to make sacrifices in order to maintain at least something of their sovereignty. As a Thai saying goes, if you have to give up your arm to save your life, choose your life over the arm. There are times when the body is sick and you have to give up your sense of yourself as being strong and healthy — at least for the time being. "Okay, I'm sick. I've got to deal with this sickness with the tools I've got." Don't totally give in. | ||
+ | |||
+ | The same with your emotions: Sometimes your emotions get really strong, and you have to lie low. The emotion is there, but you don't have to identify with it. This is your alternative. You don't have to act on the emotion and you don't have to squeeze it behind a mental partition and deny that it's there. You admit that it's there and then just lay claim to another part of the mind, another part of the body, as your stronghold for the time being. That way, even though you're in reduced circumstances, | ||
+ | |||
+ | The Buddha never promised us that everything was going to be lovely in the present moment, or that all you have to do is think nice thoughts and the world will be nice in return. He keeps having us reflect on the fact that aging, illness, and death are normal. The world is swept away, he says. It does not endure. It offers no shelter. There is no one in charge. But, he says, here are the tools for finding happiness in the midst of a world that's getting swept away all the time. These are your weapons; this is your stronghold. Just make sure that you maintain that heart of a warrior and the wisdom of a warrior who knows which battles are worth taking on, which are worth dropping, which ones are worth avoiding. That wisdom is what will see you through. | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== How to Be Alone ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === December 7, 2007 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | As a culture, we don't have much practice in being alone, even though modern Western culture is unusual in the amount of privacy it offers in its homes. Ever since the 19th century, people in the West have slept in private bedrooms more than at any other time in history, or any other culture in history. You'd think that that would help us develop some skills in being by ourselves. But that's very rarely the case. When you're alone in your room, you're not really alone. Back in the 19< | ||
+ | |||
+ | That passage we chanted just now: "May I look after myself with ease." It doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Several years back when the book //Into the Wild// came out, I was struck by how much the protagonist had to reinvent the Dhamma wheel in figuring out how to live an authentic life, how to be alone facing the wilderness with just the company of his own mind. He didn't have many good resources to draw on: a few books — a little bit of Thoreau, a little bit of Tolstoy — and a lot of ideas, most of which were untested. I couldn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So it's good to look into the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Working with the techniques of breath meditation is one way of cutting those vicious circles, giving you a handle on your state of mind. But it's also important that you use right view in learning how to step back from your state of mind and evaluate it. To begin with, right view allows you to see where your thinking has gone off course. And second, it allows you to realize that you don't have to be immersed in a mood. One of the basic principles of right view is the principle of kamma, and one of the principles of kamma is that we have freedom of choice in the present moment. Yet this is an area where the wrong views of our culture get in the way. We tend to think that our moods are our real self. We tend not to trust our thoughts because we know we've picked up a lot of ideas from the media and other people around us, but our moods and emotions seem to be genuinely ours, who we //are// in the present moment. This is where the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Again, the meditation is helpful in this regard because it teaches you to create a state of mind and then step back and look at it. As in Ajaan Lee's analogy of learning how to make baskets: You make a basket, then you step back and look at it. Is it too long? Too short? Is the weaving coarse and irregular? See what's not right and then bring that observation along when you make another basket, and then another one. If you can learn to look at your moods as baskets — i.e., not who you really are, but simply things you've created — then you can start working on the raw materials and make better ones. But it's important that you have this ability to step back. | ||
+ | |||
+ | One of the images in the Canon is of a person sitting down looking at someone who's lying down, or a person standing who's looking at someone sitting down. In other words, you step back a bit, you're slightly above what's just happened, and you evaluate it. | ||
+ | |||
+ | That's the second part of the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | During my first years as a monk, this was a very important part of the training: not only having the breath meditation technique to deal with whatever was coming up, but also having the opportunity to talk with someone sane — Ajaan Fuang — who had a lot of experience in being alone and learning to gauge what was a healthy mood and what was an unhealthy one. He had learned that regardless of how true you might think the mood is, you've got to look at its effects. Where is it leading you? After all, we're here to follow a path. So you can ask yourself, what kind of path is a depressed mood? What kind of path is an unhealthy mood? It's not a decent path at all. It's a path downward, not the path you want to follow. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So again, remind yourself that these moods are not necessarily true; they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | All the skills we tend to associate with a healthy ego are also helpful in the path. For example, anticipation: | ||
+ | |||
+ | Another important ego skill is sublimation, | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is why the Buddha, in his instructions on breath meditation, included the ability to gladden the mind when it needs to be gladdened — both in terms of the way you breathe, and in terms of the way you learn to think and talk to yourself. This involves your ability to step back and use the breath as a vantage point on whatever the depressed mood might be, and in developing a set of values that help you to recognize that this is something you don't want to get involved with. Actually, there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | There are also the skills of steadying the mind when the new mood you're trying to create is still unstable. What can you do to make it more and more solid? And then there are the skills of releasing the mind, knowing how to free the mind from a relatively skillful mood to reach an even more skillful one. Even when you've developed a skillful mood, you can then say, "Okay, this can take me only so far. What kind of mood would take me further?" | ||
+ | |||
+ | There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So when you find yourself overtaken by a mood, or if you're not really sure about how you should approach the meditation when things are going poorly, keep these points in mind. And you should also keep them in mind when things are going awfully well. We sometimes feel embarrassed to congratulate ourselves on how things are going, but that embarrassment doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So to be able to look after your own mind and to thrive at being alone, you need a whole set of skills. You need a spot where you can step back and look at things, the right set of attitudes that help you gauge the situation for what it is, and then skills in creating and maintaining a better mood. This is how you look after yourself with ease. The skills that enable you to be more mature in general, also help make you a more mature meditator. In this way, as you meditate, you become your own best friend, instead of your own worst enemy. You learn how to handle being alone. And it's only when you can handle being alone that you can really handle being with other people. You don't get swept away by their ideas or their moods, and you can actually become a source of stability in their lives as well. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So keep this in mind when, say, in the middle of an afternoon, things don't seem to be going so well. Get up and walk around a bit. Clean out the tool shed. Hike up the mountain. Anything that works. One of my students, a monk in Thailand, once said that he'd get restless sometimes when he was staying alone in the wilderness, so he'd hike over a few mountains, just to get rid of the restlessness. Anything that works in getting you out of an unskillful mood and into a more skillful one — one that's ready to settle down — is an important part of the meditation. | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== Love for the Dhamma ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === October 7, 2003 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | Back when Ajaan Mun was alive, scholarly monks would say of meditating monks, "What can they know? They sit with their eyes closed. What can they see?" They' | ||
+ | |||
+ | What do you see when you look outward? You see aging, illness, and death. You see other people' | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is why contentment is such an important principle in the practice: contentment in terms of where you are, the situation in which you find yourself; contentment in terms of your various physical comforts and discomforts. However, in terms of the people around you, you need to find a group of admirable friends. Even if you find just one admirable friend, you've got a lot right there. That's important. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Don't practice contentment with your friends. If they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Think again of the time of Ajaan Mun. He was way out in the forest. People who wanted to study with him had to go walking on foot, many times not even sure they were going to find him, because he was frequently on the move. When someone showed up to practice with him, he was sure that that person really wanted to practice with him because that person had already put up with a lot of hardships, not only in finding him but also in staying with him. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Ajaan Fuang once expressed a similar idea. Back in the very earliest days of Wat Dhammasathit, | ||
+ | |||
+ | A willingness to put up with hardships is an important part of the practice, but it's not just a matter of gritting your teeth and bearing with them. The hardships are essential in helping you gain understanding. When things aren't going well outside, where are you going to focus your attention? Well, you could focus outside and just get upset about things outside, but that doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | We tend to have a romantic idea of the forest — peaceful, green, beautiful forest — because our idea of forest life has become awfully sanitized. Actually, there are a lot of difficulties there. There are dangerous animals — not just the tigers that seem romantic and exciting, but also the day-to-day things: the bugs and snakes and other animals that carry diseases. When you're surrounded by things like that, where will you turn? Our natural tendency is to want to look for happiness in terms of sounds, sights, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations, but when these things aren't all that pleasant, where do you turn? When you get sick and there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | This forces you to choose your priorities: What's really important in your life? Physical comfort or the comfort of the Dhamma? Pleasant people who do things the way you like, or people who teach you the Dhamma, people who exemplify the Dhamma? A happiness that's based on things outside, or a happiness that comes from within? Difficulties on the outside really force these issues in a way that pleasant surroundings don't. Your realization of this, and your willingness to act on that realization: | ||
+ | |||
+ | The Buddha gives the image of an elephant going into battle. The elephant fights with his front feet, fights with his back feet, fights with his front quarters and back quarters, but he protects his trunk all the time. He isn't willing to use his trunk because his trunk is his most sensitive part. The elephant trainer sees that and realizes that this elephant hasn't really given himself to the king. It's the same when you balk at discomfort: It's a sign you really haven' | ||
+ | |||
+ | We miss out on these results because our minds keep flowing out. The Buddha talks about //asavas//, which can be translated as " | ||
+ | |||
+ | They' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Sometimes, taking a stance where you are requires making some sacrifices. But that's where you make your choice: whether you want to make that sacrifice or just continue going with the flow. Going with the flow seems easy because it's more habitual, but actually there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So, it requires powers of resistance. We usually use our powers of resistance to resist things, people, situations, outside. What we've got to do is learn to resist the push that comes from within, the push that makes us want to focus on things outside, that distracts our attention from the real issues bubbling up in the mind. That's the other translation for //asava//, " | ||
+ | |||
+ | As you begin to take your stance, you come to see the value of not following through with those fermentations — and you see the value of contentment. You see that once you make your choice, you're going to maintain your stance here as a person who loves the Dhamma more than you love comfort or whatever the defilements are clamoring for. That's when the Dhamma really shows what an excellent thing it is, what a worthwhile thing it is, why it's the sort of thing you can give your whole life to. Ultimately the teaching asks nothing less than that: that you give yourself totally to the practice. But what it gives in return is more than a life, far more than worth the effort you give it. | ||
+ | |||
+ | The Buddha once said that if you could make a deal that someone would spear you with a hundred spears three times a day — morning, noon, and night — for a hundred years, with the guarantee that at the end of the hundred years you would gain Awakening, that would be a deal worth taking. Otherwise, think of all the eons of endless sufferings involved in repeatedly coming back again and again. He said that when you attained Awakening as a result of that deal, you wouldn' | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== Universal Truths ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === June 13, 2007 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | When you meditate during the Dhamma talk, 99% of your attention should be with your breath. Let the talk be in the background — because the Dhamma is found inside the mind. The Dhamma in words is just pointers. As you listen to the talk, remind yourself that the words are pointing inside your mind. If you're inside your mind paying attention to what you're doing, you're already at the right place. You don't need the talk. If you find yourself wandering outside, you'll run up against the talk and it'll point you back in, to where the real problem is: ignorance. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Real ignorance is not ignorance of words or principles. It's ignorance of what's going on in the mind. In particular, it's ignorance of how you're causing yourself suffering. In a broader sense, it's ignorance of four noble truths: ignorance of where there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | What this means is that the four noble truths are not some abstract teaching whose truth is peculiar to India 2,600 years ago. They' | ||
+ | |||
+ | These principles are universal. That's why the Buddha called them // | ||
+ | |||
+ | Most of us like to think of ourselves as exceptions to the rule. We like to think that it's going to be different for us somehow, especially when you hear of all the effort that the various ajaans put into the practice. We'd rather not have to do all that work. We think that maybe things should be easier for us because we're better educated, or maybe we know more in our culture. Well, no, we don't. Our problems are just the same as theirs. They may be dressed up a little bit differently in each case, but at their root they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Like the chant we had just now. Aging, illness, death, and separation: These are things we all have in common. The chant is a little bit lacking in that it simply reminds you that //you// are subject to aging, subject to illness, subject to death. Or as in the Thai translation, | ||
+ | |||
+ | As the Buddha said, thinking about these truths as they apply to yourself keeps you from doing unskillful things. You realize, "My gosh, if I allow myself to think a lot of unskillful stuff today, the results are going to seep out into my words; they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | But the original sutta in which this chant is found doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | That's meant to give rise not just to restraint, but also to a sense of // | ||
+ | |||
+ | But if you accept that these truths are universal, then the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So it's up to us to decide whether we still want to dabble around, to roll around in a few dead squirrels, or whether we've had enough and want out. If we want out, then the path is all laid out, from right view on through right concentration, | ||
+ | |||
+ | So as you focus on the breath, try to do it in a virtuous way. In other words, do it with restraint. Remind yourself, you can't go wandering off, dabbling in this, dabbling in that. You've really got to be true to the theme of your concentration. And your concentration should be discerning: Which ways of focusing on the breath make the mind uncomfortable? | ||
+ | |||
+ | So you give it all of your mind. The word for " | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== Stupid about Pleasure ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === September 27, 2007 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | When it comes to the issue of pleasure, we prefer both/and. We don't like either/or. The more ways we can find pleasure, the more types of pleasure we can find, the better. After all, that's a lot of what pleasure is about: the variety. We don't like the idea of having to be stuck with one particular type of pleasure, or of having to abandon some of the things we already like for the sake of something else we also like. We want to have it all. As the Buddha once said, even if it rained gold coins we wouldn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Psychologists have shown that even when people know the drawbacks of a certain activity they like, they still go back to it again and again and again. Even when they know they have better things to do — more lasting, more solid forms of pleasure they can work toward — there are still some fleeting pleasures they can't let go of. So it's not the case that when you find a better pleasure, your attachments to your old, lesser pleasures simply fall away like leaves off a tree. The tendency in the mind is to keep trying to gather more and more: adding new pleasures to the stock of old pleasures we want to keep in store. | ||
+ | |||
+ | You can see this even among some of the least advanced of the noble ones: the stream-enterers. The Buddha had to counsel them to be heedful. That was his last instruction. Of all the monks gathered at the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is why we also need discernment to remind us that there are a lot of important areas where things are either/or. In particular, discernment is needed to see the drawbacks of many of the old pleasures we've been wallowing in. This is a lesson we resist. One, we don't like to be told that we've been engaging in harmful or unskillful behavior. And two, the mind has an incredible tendency to put up walls to screen out the negative sides of our pleasures. Because we like our pleasures so much, we resist acknowledging their drawbacks. | ||
+ | |||
+ | I was talking recently to a monk who had been to the police morgue in Bangkok, where they allow monks to come and observe autopsies. He saw the doctors working in the morgue very efficiently, | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is the duty of discernment: | ||
+ | |||
+ | Ajaan Chah, in one of his talks, refers to the knowledge of the three characteristics not as a truth, not as a form of discernment, | ||
+ | |||
+ | So this is a theme you have to contemplate over and over again: the theme of either/or, together with the theme of the connections between the pleasures you enjoy and the drawbacks they carry in their wake. This is why the path has right view right at the very beginning, and why the Buddha said that of all the various strengths in the mind, the strength of discernment is what holds the others together. The image he gives is of building a house. You're putting up the beams to form the roof, but only when the ridgepole is in place are the other beams secure. Up to that point they can still sway back and forth. They' | ||
+ | |||
+ | The ridgepole is discernment. Until discernment is strong, everything else — your conviction, your persistence, | ||
+ | |||
+ | So while we practice, we need to develop this added strength, the strength of discernment. It helps us see connections between our pleasures and their consequences — and it also helps us to see where there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So while it's important that we develop concentration, | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== The Taste vs. the Reality ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === August 1, 2007 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | In India they have an interesting theory about why people enjoy art. It's based on a distinction between an actual emotion and the taste of the emotion. They say that people enjoy art — this includes drama, music, literature, all the fine arts — because in looking at the depiction of a particular emotion they don't actually experience the emotion. They taste it. The taste is always pleasant even when the emotion being depicted is very unpleasant: fear, anguish, or sorrow. If it's well portrayed, the audience likes the depiction because they like the taste. They taste, for example, the taste of grief, which is not grief itself, but compassion. The taste of fear is not fear, but excitement. So we enjoy art not because we're actually experiencing the emotion being depicted, but because we like the taste. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This distinction is useful to keep in mind when you contemplate your thoughts, especially when you're sitting here meditating. Sometimes focusing on the breath starts to lose its appeal. You lose interest. Even when you get nice long periods of bliss and wellbeing, part of the mind gets bored. It wants some action; it wants to taste some emotions. So you start thinking about all kinds of other things. But you have to remember that no matter how attractive and tasty those alternatives — all the different worlds that you can create in your mind — may seem, actually living in them would be pretty miserable. So don't get beguiled by the taste. | ||
+ | |||
+ | We had an incident of this in my own family. A relative of mine was a novelist, and her novels were pretty melodramatic. She liked stories filled with scandalous surprises: murder, incest, intrigue, infidelity. They made for very interesting stories. But when in her own life she encountered some marital infidelity, it was the end of her. The sorrow caused her death. So it's one thing to imagine these things, but it's another thing to live them. Always keep that in mind. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Even the stories, the narratives we like to make about our own practice, about the progress we expect, about how we'll attain concentration, | ||
+ | |||
+ | So you've got to keep a perspective on your thoughts, on the stories you like to tell even about your own practice. We're here to train the mind, and part of training the mind involves doing things over and over and over again: pulling the mind away from distraction over and over again, keeping the mind with its object over and over again, taking a skill that you develop while you're meditating and learning to apply it in daily life over and over again. That may not be exciting or compelling, and the mind will have a tendency to rebel sometimes, but you have to ask yourself when you're rebelling, "Where are you going?" | ||
+ | |||
+ | There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | That's when reality sets in. The daughter of a nobleman is probably very delicately brought up, yet for the family to survive she would have to work. So she gets a job, and she has a child, but with the stresses of work and pregnancy she dies soon after childbirth. He's left with the kid, and her parents want nothing to do with him. So he hires a woman to be the wet nurse. At first, she's good with the kid, and after a while she works herself into his affections. They eventually get married. But then she has her own child and she starts playing favorites. That's when it gets really bad. He comes home from work at night and the mother has one version of the day's events, the first child has another version, and the second child has still another version of the story. They' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So this is one way of dealing with the allure of distracting thoughts. Ask yourself, "If I really lived in that situation, what would it be like? What would the constraints of that situation be?" When you think of the different worlds you could be going to, the worlds of lay life, the worlds of being a monk in the forest in Thailand: While you're thinking of those worlds, they seem like open opportunities. But you have to realize that each of those worlds has its constraints, | ||
+ | |||
+ | So if a particular thought is really beguiling, ask yourself what it would really be like to go to that particular state of being. You'd probably find yourself wishing you had some quiet time to be by yourself. But here you already have quiet time to be by yourself, so make the most of it. If thoughts of boredom come up, question those thoughts. This desire for playing around: There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So these irresponsible thoughts: Watch out for them. Remind yourself that when suffering comes, it's real. After all, it's a noble truth, and it really is painful, it really does hurt. And as for the anguish of the mind that's stuck in a particular situation, you're outside of those situations right now, so don't let yourself slip back in. This is why the Buddha says we should reflect day after day after day on the reflections we chanted just now. We're subject to aging, subject to illness, subject to death, subject to separation. These things are real, and the suffering they entail is real. In the original sutta, the Buddha advises reflecting not only on that, but also on the fact that all living beings are subject to these things. No matter where we go — in the deva realms, the brahma realms, whatever — we're all subject to death. That should give you a strong sense of //samvega// and a desire to be heedful. Samvega means a sense of dismay, a sense of urgency in trying to get out of being trapped in a situation. And heedful means watching over your actions very carefully, realizing that your actions do have ramifications. | ||
+ | |||
+ | They' | ||
+ | |||
+ | The way most people live nowadays is based on the premise that it doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So remember the difference between the taste and the actual emotion. The taste of the emotion is always pleasant, which is why we enjoy art, why we enjoy works of the imagination, | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== Levels of Addiction ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === November 11, 2006 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | What is attachment? It's basically a kind of addiction, trying to find happiness in things that have never given a true happiness, in things that aren't worth the effort. And we do it again and again and again. Partly, this is from a lack of imagination. We can't imagine other ways of finding happiness. Partly, it's from a lack of skill. We haven' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Let's start with the knowledge. When you find yourself addicted to a particular pleasure and yet you know it has its drawbacks, look to see when the felt need for that pleasure arises. What sort of dis-ease is there in the body, what sort of dis-ease is there in the mind, that incites you with a sudden urge to try to alleviate that sense of dis-ease in the same old way you've tried before? Exactly what are the triggers, what are the feelings? Watch them arise; watch them pass away. You'll begin to realize that the need you have, say, for a particular kind of food or particular kind of pleasure, a particular kind of object, a particular kind of relationship is not permanent. In other words, if you don't give in to that old impulse, the need is not going to stay there. It goes away. If it's a basic hunger, you may need to feed the body, but you don't necessarily have to feed it with something that's going to cause trouble later on. | ||
+ | |||
+ | But so many of our other " | ||
+ | |||
+ | The Buddha also says to look for the actual gratification you get out of trying to fill that need in the old way. After all, if there wasn't any gratification at all, you wouldn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | If you can't think of any other way of alleviating that need or desire, that's where you need to develop skill and imagination. A lot of the training is aimed at expanding your range of imagination. It's possible to find happiness in life without giving in to your old attachments. The more you see the drawbacks of the attachments, | ||
+ | |||
+ | The Buddha himself said that as he was practicing, the idea of having to give up his sensual pleasures didn't appeal to him. But then he allowed himself to imagine that a higher type of pleasure was possible. And he realized that to find that higher level of happiness, that more gratifying and more rewarding level of happiness, he'd have to give up his sensual pleasures. So, for the time being, that's what he did. He didn't totally undercut sensual passions at first, but for the time being he told himself to put them aside. That's how he was able to get the mind into states of concentration that provided an even deeper and more gratifying pleasure than sensual passion could provide. | ||
+ | |||
+ | You'll notice this as you work with the breath. There come times when just the process of breathing can feel really gratifying. There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So in the beginning it's a matter of learning to imagine yourself accessing the pleasure of concentration, | ||
+ | |||
+ | In many cases, this will involve abandoning some of the factors that got you into concentration to begin with — such as directed thought and evaluation — so there may be a resistance to letting them go. Other times there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | In this way you find that there //are// alternative ways for finding happiness in life, finding pleasure in life. You look back at your old addictions, and they seem not to make much sense any more. From your new perspective, | ||
+ | |||
+ | In so doing, you expand your imagination to other levels as well. You begin to see your old ways of doing things as not so fixed or necessary as you once thought they were. You begin to loosen up your sense of who you are and where you find your happiness, and that alerts you to the fact that you can change even further. You feel more inclined to try out new things in the meditation, even though they seem to go beyond your old ideas of what you thought was possible. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is why the Buddha talks about nibbana primarily in metaphorical terms: to excite your imagination. He's not totally silent on the topic, and he's not — contrary to what most people say — willing only to discuss it in negative terms. He has some very positive things to say about it, calling it " | ||
+ | |||
+ | Our sense of self is basically our strategy for happiness. In the course of the practice we learn how to develop new strategies. That means we develop different senses of ourselves as we go through the practice, as we expand our repertoire. | ||
+ | |||
+ | A lot of people feel threatened by the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Sometimes you hear people treating your sense of self as an obvious fallacy that causes nothing but harm and stress. If that were the case, it wouldn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | At the same time, he refuses to say whether there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So there comes a point where you have to put issues of self and not-self aside, and just look at where there' | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== Antidotes for Clinging ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === October 7, 2007 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | There are some places in the Pali Canon where the Buddha says that the five aggregates are stressful, and others where he says the five // | ||
+ | |||
+ | When we practice, our main focus is on the stress in the four noble truths, the stress that weighs on the mind. If you don't cling to the things that are stressful, then they can be as stressful as they want, but the stress doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Always try to be clear about this distinction. The real problem isn't the aggregates, it's the clinging. And the word // | ||
+ | |||
+ | So it's important to understand clinging so that you can put an end to it. As the Buddha said, there are four kinds. There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Sometimes you hear that the deepest, most underlying form of clinging is the sense of self identity that you build around things. If you learn how not to have any sense of self identity, there you are: You've taken care of all the other forms of clinging. Sometimes you hear that clinging to views is the basic form of clinging. If you can deconstruct all your views, you'll be done with all the other forms of clinging as well. So you reason your way to seeing how you can't say that things exist, you can't say that things don't exist, or both, or neither. They' | ||
+ | |||
+ | For example, clinging to sensuality: When the Buddha talks about sensuality, he doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | And what are these plans like? For the most part, they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So the antidote here is to broaden your view, to see that your pursuit of pleasure in this way carries a lot of pain along with it. When the Buddha talks about the drawbacks of sensuality, he starts with the fact that in order to lead a sensual lifestyle, you've got to work. The work in and of itself is painful and wearisome. You work and work and work to build up wealth. Sometimes you gain it; sometimes you don't. Even when you do gain it, there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | The Buddha goes down a long list of all the pains and sufferings tied up with this pursuit of our dreams of sensuality. So as you look at the pursuit of sensuality in its entirety, you realize how much pain and suffering it involves. You don't have to look too far. This contemplation we have of the requisites every day, thinking about food, clothing, shelter, and medicine: Just the fact that we have a body makes us a burden on other people. So think about that. Every time your mind starts spinning a web of sensual desire, tell yourself: "If you're going to spin a web, spin the full web. Try to encompass the whole picture." | ||
+ | |||
+ | Like that daydream that Ajaan Lee reports in his autobiography, | ||
+ | |||
+ | Or you can contemplate the body, in all its parts. You can think of a beautiful body, but when you think of the parts inside, you say //wuuh//. Just a few micrometers below the skin there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So when you think in these ways, you begin to realize that your sensual plans and desires are really unrealistic, | ||
+ | |||
+ | As for clinging to views, the Buddha has you follow a similar process, but with different details. The process is that he has you look at the drawbacks that come from clinging to a view, one of the major drawbacks being that you inevitably get into arguments with other people. But more than that, the Buddha has you look carefully at the things you have views about. This is where the details differ, and the analysis goes into more technical terms. Your views come down to the question of what exists and what doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | As for habits and practices, he first has you look at the actual habits or precepts and practices you're attached to. The attachment here is to the idea that if you follow certain rules and you're a good little boy, a good little girl, that's all you have to do. God will be happy with you or the universe will approve of you or whatever. So the Buddha has people look directly at their habits and practices together with their results, some of which are actively harmful. Back in his days, sacrifices were believed to be a way to find true happiness. So he talked about looking at the misery that comes through the sacrifices, not only for the animals sacrificed but also for the people forced to labor in getting the animals killed. Self-torture as a form of austerity was also a popular practice in some circles. So he had you look at the pain that comes from it, to see that it doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So in this way he'd get people to abandon harmful habits and practices, and replace them with good habits and good practices: the habits we adopt as part of our virtue, the practices we follow in the practice of meditation. But eventually he says to watch out: If you're not careful, you're going to create a sense of conceit around these things, the pride that comes sometimes when "I follow the precepts and you don' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Finally there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So when you find the mind clinging, weighing itself down with its attachment to the aggregates, try to be clear about exactly which kind of clinging you're suffering from and what the antidote is, what the medicine that the Buddha prescribed, because it's different in each case. There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So try to keep this list of medicines in mind and apply them as appropriate. That way you put yourself in a position where you're living in a world that's stressful but you're not pulling the stress inside. You can live surrounded by inconstancy, | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== Fear of Death ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === October 11, 2005 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | The Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Prominent in the path is right effort, the kind of effort that leads to the type of happiness that he had been looking for. It starts with desire: generating desire, upholding your intent to let go of unskillful qualities that have arisen, to prevent unskillful qualities that have not arisen from arising, to give rise to skillful qualities, and to maintain them and bring them to their culminations. Desire is what animates those activities. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Notice that these efforts are internal activities. These qualities are qualities of the mind. They will manifest themselves outside — in your thoughts, words, and deeds — but they come from within, so that's where the main effort is focused. This is why the section of the noble eightfold path that deals with concentration starts with right effort: the effort to give rise to skillful qualities, like mindfulness, | ||
+ | |||
+ | He called these qualities noble treasures — things like conviction in the principle of action, the belief that all of your intentional actions will bear fruit in line with the quality of the intention; virtue; a sense of shame at the idea of doing evil things; a sense of compunction or fear of the consequences of doing evil things; a desire for learning; the ability to relinquish what gets in the way of your path; and discernment. These seven qualities are called noble treasures because, as the Buddha said, fire can't burn them, thieves and kings can't steal them, death can't kill them, water can't wash them away. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So death is not the end. Some things carry over, but you have to focus your energies on the mind if you want to have good things to carry over. Otherwise the things you carry over are bad. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is why our effort here is aimed in two directions. One, if you can gain total release, this is the path to total release. Two, if you don't gain total release within this lifetime, you've got things to carry over as you continue your quest in your next lifetime. But you have to desire those qualities. Otherwise it's hard to gain them, for they do require work. We may be attracted to the idea of a path that doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Right effort doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | It's built on the desire to find something that goes beyond aging, illness, and death, something you can really rely on. To help generate that desire, the Buddha has us look long and hard at aging, illness, and death — and at our fear of these things. He says that our fear of death is based on four things. Either we're attached to the body, we're attached to sensual pleasures, we realize that we've done cruel and harmful things to other people, or we haven' | ||
+ | |||
+ | For example, the realization that we've done cruel things in the past: The Buddha doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | As you think about it, what good do you get out of other people' | ||
+ | |||
+ | As for attachment to the body and to sensual pleasures, the Buddha has a double-pronged attack. One prong is to see the drawbacks of being attached to these things. If you're attached to the body, where is it going to take you? It's going to take you to aging, illness, and death, for sure, no matter how much you exercise or beautify the body. It may take you to other places in the meantime, but the ultimate end is something we all share, and we all know for sure that it's going to happen. | ||
+ | |||
+ | The same holds true for sensual pleasures. Where are the sensual pleasures you were enjoying last week? Right now all you have is a memory of them. Sometimes that memory is tainted by the realization that you did unskillful things in order to gain those pleasures or to keep them. Not only do they tend to slip away on their own, there are also times when other people want what you've got and they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is why the Buddha recommends right concentration as the second prong in his attack, to provide you with an alternative source for happiness so that you're not so hungry for sensual pleasures. You can sit here and bathe the body in a sense of ease, in a sense of rapture, simply by focusing on the breath, adjusting the breath so that it's comfortable, | ||
+ | |||
+ | But the ultimate step in overcoming fear of death lies in seeing the true Dhamma. This means realizing that there is something deathless that can be touched by the mind right where you've been experiencing the body. It comes not just through concentration, | ||
+ | |||
+ | The Buddha calls these strategies the process of " | ||
+ | |||
+ | That's what right mindfulness and right concentration are for: to provide you with a framework in which you can do the deconstruction. The deconstruction is the four noble truths, just looking at things in terms of stress, the cause of stress, what you're doing to put an end to that cause. And the actual end of stress comes as you get more and more precise, more and more skillful at following the path. Your precision and skill lead you to detect even more and more subtle levels of fabrication going on in the mind. When you see the stress that comes with even the subtlest fabrication, | ||
+ | |||
+ | When all intention finally ends, that's when you realize that there is something deathless. The Buddha was right. There is something that can be touched in the mind that doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Once you've touched that, you realize that there is something that doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Right now these are all just ideas, possibilities, | ||
+ | |||
+ | So keep this possibility in mind, because this is what gives energy to the desire to stick with right effort, to stick with the path, so that the deathless is not just an idea or news of somebody else's claims. Ultimately it becomes an actual experience based on your actual efforts. It's not just news about what somebody else did in the past. It's your news. Of course, nobody else has to know. As the chant says, it's // | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== The Raft of Concepts ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === August 3, 2007 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | When you start out meditating, you have to think — but in a skillful way. In other words, directed thought and evaluation are factors of right concentration on the level of first jhana. Even if you can get into concentration really quickly, it requires some thinking to get you there. And if you get into concentration slowly, you've got to learn how to think your way into the concentration. So think about the breath; visualize the breath in the body. Think about how to make the breath more comfortable. Once it's comfortable, | ||
+ | |||
+ | The Buddha once said that after all his years of false starts and dead-end alleys, he finally got onto the path when he realized that he should divide his thoughts into two types: skillful and unskillful. This meant that he judged his thoughts by the results they gave. He didn't say that all thinking was bad. He did say that if you thought skillful thoughts for 24 hours, the drawback would be that the body and mind would get tired, so you want the mind to learn how to rest from the thinking. But he never said that the conceptual mind is bad. It's simply a matter of learning how to use your concepts properly. That's the path. It's part of right view and right resolve. These factors of the path involve thoughts. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So we can't condemn thoughts entirely. We just need to learn how to think in new ways, in ways that are actually skillful, that help free the mind. Ultimately you do get to a place that's beyond concepts, that goes beyond words, but you need concepts and words to help get you there. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is a point that a lot of people misunderstand. They think that in order to get beyond concepts, you just drop concepts immediately. It's like the old simile of the raft. The version in the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | This issue goes way back to the time of the Buddha. There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | The sectarians saw Anathapindika coming and said, "Hey, let's be quiet for a while. This person is a follower of the Buddha. The Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So they told him their views. One man said, "The world is eternal. Only this is true; everything else is false and worthless." | ||
+ | |||
+ | Anathapindika' | ||
+ | |||
+ | According to the story, this left them abashed. They just sat there with their heads drooping, at a loss for words. So he got up and left. When he told the Buddha what had happened, the Buddha said, "This is a good way to deal with those people." | ||
+ | |||
+ | So this is the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | People often come to the Dhamma thinking that we're here to get beyond concepts. But they run into concepts in the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Many people in the modern world come to Buddhism suffering from their conceptual framework. They' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So they look for a way to be free of all concepts. When they come here, though, they run into concepts. They see the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | That's what right view is all about. It's there for you to judge the concepts you're bringing to the path, to see which ones fit into the strategy of the path to that dimension — nibbana — and which ones don't. The Buddha never says that he can offer an empirical proof of the teachings on kamma, rebirth, or nibbana. But he says that if you do adopt these ideas, they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Then as you sit down here to meditate, you can put the concepts that are not immediately relevant to your meditation aside. If you find that you're having trouble sticking with the meditation, you can call up those concepts again to remind yourself of why you're here, to induce a feeling of // | ||
+ | |||
+ | In this way, you can use the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | The early Buddhists often made the point that their teachings on kamma were what set them apart from all the other teachings available at the time. For instance, the Buddhist take on kamma isn't the deterministic view that some people held to at that time. And it's not a view of total chaos, either. It's a nonlinear pattern. And the important element in that non-linear pattern is that part of your experience is shaped by past intentions and part of it's shaped by your present intentions. You can't do anything about past intentions, but you //can// change your present ones. So you focus there. That's why we're focused on the present moment: to look at our intentions. When you have right view, you realize that that's why we're here. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This helps give focus to your meditation. Once the mind is still, you intend to //keep// it still. That's a skillful intention. Then you can start looking at the process of intention in a deeper way, to see exactly how intention happens, how much it shapes your present experience, how you fabricate your breath, how you fabricate thoughts, how you fabricate feelings and perceptions. You want to look into that. That's how discernment is developed. You're not going to maintain this kind of focus unless you have a real appreciation that, yes, your actions really are important in this issue of creating suffering — not only now but on into the future. This is how the proper use of concepts gives focus to your meditation. | ||
+ | |||
+ | A while back, I was giving a talk to a group of people on kamma. They'd been meditating for quite a while, so I tried to make the point that an understanding of kamma really focuses your meditation in an important way. It helps focus you on the issue of what you're doing that's skillful and what you're doing that's not skillful, and realizing how much your " | ||
+ | |||
+ | They all gave me a blank look. Then I realized that they'd been taught that there is no such thing as skillful or unskillful, good or bad in the meditation. It's simply a question of hanging out in the present moment, squeezing as much non-conceptual intensity out of the present moment as you can — which is an idea the Buddha never advocated. That's not what we're here for. I mean, there //will// be times when you notice that being very mindful in the present makes experiences more intense. You're less caught up in your thought worlds, and the pleasure in the breath grows stronger. Everything becomes more immediately felt. But that's not why we're here. You want to look deeper: What is it about intention that makes the difference in the present moment? Always look for that, because that's where freedom is going to be found — in being sensitive to your intentions. When you're totally sensitive to them and totally understand how they cause stress, you can let them go. This is what the Buddha calls the kamma that leads to the end of kamma. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is why an understanding of causality is so essential. If everything were deterministic, | ||
+ | |||
+ | So when we come to the practice, we learn to adopt new concepts that have a good impact on the mind. That's the test — a pragmatic test. In the beginning, you begin to see that this belief does help here, it does help there, so you pursue it more and more persistently. Then ultimately you discover that it's a big help in putting an end to suffering. That's your real proof that the concepts work — and only then do you get beyond concepts. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Even when you're in concentration, | ||
+ | |||
+ | So the practice is a matter of learning how to use your concepts wisely, picking and choosing which ones are helpful and which ones are not. Knowing when you need to think discursively, | ||
+ | |||
+ | If you learn how to make your views right and then apply those right views to understanding how the mind creates suffering, that's how views ultimately take you beyond views. Your right view will show you how to let go of right view when you need to. But don't be too quick to drop it. Don't be the sort of person who leaves the raft on the near shore and tries to float through the air over the river. Use the raft when it's helpful. That's why the Buddha left it behind for us. That's what it's for. | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== Kamma & Rebirth ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === February 29, 2008 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | We're born into this world without an instruction booklet. There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So there are a lot of things we don't know, and we have to make a lot of decisions based on uncertain information. What are the important issues in life? And what is this life, anyhow? Is it part of a longer story or is it just this story, the whole story right here, right now: birth, aging, death? And how about our actions? We seem to decide what to do. We seem to make choices, those choices seem to have results, and there seems to be some sort of pattern to the results. Some actions seem to lead to good results, other actions to bad results. But are things as they seem? We don't really know. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So we find ourselves acting on assumptions as to what leads to happiness and what leads to pain, those two things that we do know when we experience them. But the question is, is the quest for happiness really worthwhile or should we be looking for something else? There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | When you come to meditate you're already acting on certain assumptions. One is that the training of the mind is worthwhile. That means you believe that your actions are important and that knowledge and training will make a difference in how you act. Those are big assumptions right there, but when you look at your life, you've seen that acting on those assumptions has brought you at least some happiness. | ||
+ | |||
+ | That's called a pragmatic proof. It's not an empirical proof. An empirical proof would be able to trace the energy that goes from our decision to act to the actual action, and from the action to the results that we experience. You'd have to run experiments with controls and actually be able to measure happiness in a very precise way. But you can't do that. All those tests that they say they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | There were also people who said that your actions didn't really lead to happiness or pain. Happiness and pain were self-caused and very arbitrary. And yet those people had a theory all worked out as to why this was so, and why it was important to believe this, and how to live in response to that belief. In other words, they still believed that knowledge was important, actions were important, and one way of action was preferable to another. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is how the Buddha recommended that you look at the issue of action. What series of beliefs about action lead you to act in a skillful way and give good results? There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So the Buddha never tried to offer an empirical proof for his teaching on kamma or the teaching on rebirth. The people who claim that science has proven either of these, or that they have proven these principles to themselves in an empirical way, are not doing the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | For instance, the question of rebirth: If you believe that this life is all we've got and the end of life is uncertain, would you be sitting here meditating? Maybe, maybe not. It's all pretty arbitrary. Would you be kind to other people? Maybe, maybe not. But if you did go on the assumption that this is part of a longer story shaped by your actions, and that your actions are shaped by your mind, you'd be sure to put more effort into training the mind to be meticulous and careful. You'd take whatever time and effort is needed to get the mind in good shape. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is one of the reasons why the Buddha recommended that we take his teachings on kamma and rebirth as a working hypothesis. He said that he learned in the course of his Awakening that this life is actually part of a longer story of many lifetimes that have been going on for a very long time and could potentially continue going on for a very long time to come. In other words, the principle of rebirth is true. And it's also true that one of the reasons for training the mind is ultimately to be able to put an end to that story, because there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So when you wonder about the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | That's the role of faith in the Buddhist teachings. For many of us in the West, faith has gotten a bad name. We've had it pushed on us as a virtue from some circles: The less a particular proposition or idea makes sense, then the more faith you have in it, the better — which is a real insult to the human mind. It's an insult to be told that we have to take irrational and inconsistent doctrines on faith and that we have to believe them more strongly than we believe the evidence appearing right before our eyes or in our very own hearts. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Fortunately that's not how the Buddha teaches faith. For him, even taking things on reason is a type of faith. Just because something is reasonable doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | The Buddha gives the example of an elephant hunter in the forest. The elephant hunter wants a big bull elephant to do the work he needs done. So he goes into the forest and he sees big footprints. Now, because he's an experienced elephant hunter, he doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | The same holds true with the practice. When you experience the pleasure of jhana, when you attain psychic powers: Those are just footprints and scratch marks. The real thing is when you've had an experience of the deathless. You realize that these assumptions that you acted on — the power of your actions, the truth of causality — are principles that have held good from the time of the Buddha until now. Your assumption that if you act in certain ways, the results tend to follow a pattern; your assumption that it's worth your while in this short and uncertain life to devote as much time as you can to the training of the mind: You've found that those assumptions worked. They' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So the realization that you're taking certain things on faith, but you don't really know them: That's meant to be a spur to continue with the practice. Whatever doubts you might have are not considered a vice or something to be denied, for that would create lots of dishonesty in the mind. Instead, you acknowledge them and take them as an incentive to practice further until you get to the point someday when you really know for yourself. For sure. | ||
+ | |||
+ | It's in this way that the Buddha' | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== The Human Condition ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === January 10, 2005 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | Human life, when you think about it, can be pretty miserable. Think of how few people actually get what they want out of life, and yet how much they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | He talks about the emotions that come from desire. There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Most of us live in householder grief, householder joy, and householder equanimity. Householder grief is the type that comes when you don't get the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations you want. You don't get the ideas you want. Householder joy is when you finally do get what you want in terms of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and ideas. Householder equanimity is when you stay equanimous in the midst of these things, whether they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Most of us muck around in these three types of emotions. We suffer grief and so we look for joy in terms of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and ideas. When we don't get what we want, that brings more grief, but we turn around to look for joy in the same places. | ||
+ | |||
+ | What the Buddha wants us to do is to turn our attention to what he calls renunciate grief, renunciate joy, renunciate equanimity. Renunciate grief is when you reflect on how you haven' | ||
+ | |||
+ | One of the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | One way to foster renunciate grief is to reflect on the limitations of human life. That chant we had just now, "I am subject to aging, subject to illness, subject to death, subject to separation from all that I love," followed by the reflection on kamma: In the full text of the sutta, the Buddha doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is one of the ways the Buddha repeatedly has us approach all our grief and dissatisfaction. He says, "Open your eyes. Are you the only person suffering these things?" | ||
+ | |||
+ | In other words, the Buddha basically wants you to transform your grief into // | ||
+ | |||
+ | The way to work with renunciate grief is not to go looking for sights, sounds, and so forth. You work with it by focusing your efforts on following the path. This is why this kind of grief is a useful grief. It keeps you on the path of practice. Often you hear people saying, " | ||
+ | |||
+ | So whenever you find yourself asking, "Why me?" the answer is always, "Well, why not you? It happens to everybody." | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is why Ajaan Lee focuses so much on what are called the eight worldly dhammas: gain, loss, status, loss of status, praise, criticism, pleasure, and pain. He says all eight of them have their uses. We don't like the negative ones, but they have their uses for developing a sense of direction. When loss hits you, if you can realize, "Oh, this is what happens to human beings everywhere," | ||
+ | |||
+ | Instead of taking these things personally, you use the gains, you use the status, for whatever purposes you find skillful. When you lose these things, you can learn lessons. You can turn loss to a useful purpose as well. At the very least, you learn who your true friends are, both inside and out. If you got complacent when you were wealthy and powerful, you can now see if complacency is really your friend. This way you can reflect on the nature of the human condition and not get carried away by the good things when they come back again. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is how the Buddha has you deal with disappointment. Don't try to assuage it by looking for more pleasure in worldly things, for that, he says, is why most people get entangled in sensuality. They don't see any other escape from pain, disappointment, | ||
+ | |||
+ | That's why we're working on the sense of ease and wellbeing that comes from having the mind in concentration. That's part of the path toward renunciate joy. We don't have to wait until the very end of the path to gain some of this joy, you know. It comes with the sense of wellbeing you gain when you center the mind. That, in and of itself, reminds you that there are alternatives to running after sensual pleasures. There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So when you find yourself wallowing in grief, remember the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | My English teacher, during my senior year in high school, once made a remark that the sign of a great person is that he or she can reflect on his or her own personal problems but then, from that standpoint, can generalize, universalize them to the human condition as a whole. She was talking about great poets, but it's also the nature of any wise mind not to wallow in its own personal issues, but to generalize from them, to see how this is the way it is for human beings everywhere. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This was what the Buddha did on the night of his Awakening. He remembered his past lives over many eons — if you think you're carrying around a lot of narratives, imagine what he saw — but then he broadened his gaze to encompass the cosmos as a whole. He wasn't the only one suffering rebirth after rebirth. Everybody has been doing this. But only after seeing this as a universal story was he able to see the underlying pattern: People are reborn in line with the quality of their intentional actions based on right or wrong views. That universal insight was what enabled him to turn and look at the present moment, and to look at the right place in the present moment: his own views, his own intentions. Only after looking at the universal picture was he able to depersonalize the issue of suffering and its causes. When he had depersonalized it, he could look at it simply as a process. When he viewed it as a process, he was able to find the way out. | ||
+ | |||
+ | You're not the first person to suffer and you're not going to be the last. If you don't set your sights in the direction of renunciate grief and joy and equanimity, you'll never find a way out. But if you learn to broaden your gaze to encompass the whole human condition, that's the beginning of the road to freedom. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So broaden your gaze. Don't just look inside. Look around yourself as well, for there are lessons to be learned there, too. | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== The Path Has a Goal ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === February 12, 2008 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | When the Buddha taught the practice as a path, one of the implications is that the path goes somewhere. You follow the path because it takes you where you want to go. That would seem obvious, yet you read so many times that the path is the goal or that it's a path without a goal. What kind of path is that? It's not really a path. You wonder what's going on. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Think about the story of the Buddha in his quest for Awakening: It was nothing but a story of paths and goals. First he mastered some very high levels of concentration that his early teachers taught as the goal. One was the dimension of nothingness; | ||
+ | |||
+ | So he tried the path of austerities for a while and that didn't work, either — tried them for six whole years. Imagine the amount of investment he had in hoping they'd work. You don't put yourself through that kind of torment unless you think there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | That's when he remembered the time when he was young and, while his father was plowing, he sat under a tree and entered the first jhana. The question came to his mind: Could this be the path? And his mind gave an intuitive response: Yes. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So he followed that path and he found that it involved more than just the practice of jhana, which is just one of the factors of the path. When he finally reached the deathless, he realized that the path leading him there had seven other factors. And he knew this because these factors, acting together, brought him to the deathless. It really did go where he wanted to go. So the first thing he taught was the path, and that was his central teaching for the rest of his life. | ||
+ | |||
+ | At one point in his later years he compared himself to a man who had gone through the jungle and found an old path. It was all overgrown, but he followed it and found that it led to an old capital city that had once been prosperous. The buildings were somewhat fallen down, but they were still livable. It was still a glorious city. So he went out of the jungle and told the king: Get your men to clear this path and it will take you to this wonderful, glorious city. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So the imagery throughout the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | But some people have raised the question: What about the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | First, remember that the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | It's like somebody scrambling through a forest and finally arriving at a good road. But instead of following the road to a good place, he just lies down in the road. That's what the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So when you get to the road, you follow it. You develop your concentration together with all the other elements of the path, and then you find that it really does lead to something special. So whatever you hear about goal-less paths or paths that are goals... Just recently I read about a meditator who has been meditating for 30 years. He calls himself an experienced meditator and he says that he hasn't gotten anywhere but that's perfectly fine with him because that's the whole point of meditation: realizing there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | You can't take people like that seriously. You can't take them as guides. The Buddha taught skills that get results. That, he said, is the test for any kind of practice: the results it leads to. When he taught the Kalamas, he told them that when you see for yourself that following a certain practice leads to a blameless happiness, follow that practice. If you see that a practice is praised by the wise, follow that practice. If a practice leads to unskillful behavior rooted in greed, anger, and delusion; unskillful behavior in taking life, breaking any of the precepts, having wrong views, having greed, ill will, any of these things: Realize that that path of practice leads you to a bad place, so don't go there. Follow the path that actually gives good results. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This whole pattern of cause and effect, action and result, is our guideline. It's our test for what's a good path and what's not. So when someone is bragging that they have a path that doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | I was reading a while back about a teacher who said he wouldn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | People often have immature attitudes about goals, which is why some teachers say to drop all idea of goals when you meditate. That may be a useful attitude for short-term meditation, but for the long term it leads to experienced meditators whose experience of meditation is of going nowhere, and who develop a perverse pride around their nowhere as well. The long-term solution is to develop a mature attitude toward your goal, one that realizes that even though the path may take time, you can take comfort in the fact that it's a good path and it's headed in the right direction. This is the mature kind of attitude that really does yield results. There is a deathless happiness, and it can be found through your efforts. Don't let anyone else tell you otherwise. | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== Not What You Are, What You Do ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === August 24, 2007 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | When you first look at a teaching like dependent co-arising, it seems very abstract and very far away from anything you might be doing in the practice. But if you look at it more carefully, you see that it makes a whole series of important statements that have an immediate bearing on what you're doing right here. | ||
+ | |||
+ | To begin with, when the Buddha talks about the causes of suffering, he doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | To the extent the Buddha does talk about what you are, it's far along the path of dependent co-arising, way up there in what's called //bhava// or becoming. It's not a question of what you inherently are, good or bad. Very simply, your being comes about from what you do. That's the reverse of the way most of us think. Most of us think that our basic nature is a certain way, and we act in certain ways because of our basic nature. The Buddha says instead that what you are — in the sense of how you identify yourself on a sensual level, on the level of form, or on a formless level — can be traced back to what you do. You can learn to do things in a more skillful way, which will lead to a change in your sense of what you are, and that in turn will be less and less likely to cause suffering. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is why the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | It's in this way that the teachings of dependent co-arising are directly connected to what you're doing right now. You're focusing on your breath. You're directing your thoughts to the breath and evaluating the breath. You use certain perceptions, | ||
+ | |||
+ | But if you bring knowledge to these processes, they can actually become a healing kind of fabrication. After all, the path is a path of fabrication. The Buddha doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So instead we bring more and more knowledge to the process of breathing and how we use our thoughts around the process of breathing. Sometimes you hear that our thinking, which is based a lot on language, is the reason why we suffer, that we picked up these bad social influences that taught us to think in dualistic terms or whatever, so we've got to drop language entirely. But again, that's not the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | I was talking to a Hindu monk a while back, and he told me his response to someone who came up to him and asked, "How can we get beyond duality?" | ||
+ | |||
+ | The mind has to make distinctions. We feel distinctions. We have a sense of right and wrong not simply because we're taught them by society. It's a deeply ingrained habit that comes from our sense that some things are painful and some things are not, and you've got to do something about the things that are painful. This goes deep into our sense of feeling and perception, mental fabrications that are often pre-linguistic. Deep down inside, we know that anything that threatens our existence is bad, anything that helps it is good. Even lizards know this much. That's why it's embedded in the lizard brain, a very strong sense of lizard good and lizard bad. The hatred of pain, the love of pleasure, the ability to perceive an enemy, to perceive an escape from an enemy: These are really basic to the mind, much prior to any kind of social conditioning. Our social conditioning, | ||
+ | |||
+ | So instead of throwing out language or throwing out our social conditioning, | ||
+ | |||
+ | In this way they get to communicate with one another. The process of focusing on the breath in a skillful way is really a healing process. Each time you sit down to meditate, don't think of it as a chore. Think of it as an opportunity to do some more healing work. And don't think of it as a time when you're obliged to stop thinking. In the beginning, you have to use directed thought and evaluation to get things to settle down, to adjust things, to get everybody together. And when everyone is together like this, interesting things come up. Hidden feelings, hidden perceptions suddenly show themselves. And you can work through them. | ||
+ | |||
+ | It's almost like dealing with a person who's possessed. The possessed person from the point of view of Western psychology is a schizophrenic: | ||
+ | |||
+ | We have the same sort of problem even though we may seem normal. Our directed thoughts and evaluations tend to work at cross purposes. The way we feel and our different perceptions can be running off in every direction at once. This is why we have to meditate. To work with the breath is to create a space where all the different parts of the mind — all the different members of the committee, all the different levels of sensation and activity going on — learn how to be with one another in a peaceful spot, working on a common goal. You're showing goodwill for one another because you're cooperating. In that way, interesting things come up and you can deal with them. You can learn new habits in how you relate to your body, new habits in how you think, how you frame an issue in the mind, and how you work through the difficulties in whatever issues you encounter. When you learn how to deal with all the parts of yourself in a healthy way like this, it's a lot easier then to start dealing in a healthy way with other people, too. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So the breath meditation not only helps you. It also helps everybody else you live with, because it gives you paradigms. For one thing, it gives you immediate training in how to employ the // | ||
+ | |||
+ | And then there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | In this way, as the members of your committee work together on the breath in a skillful way, you're gaining some training in what are essentially social virtues, the brahmaviharas. Then you can apply the same lessons to your dealings with people around you. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So instead of being a process of lobotomizing the mind so that you don't think, meditation is actually training in learning how to think in more skillful ways, how to act in more skillful ways — with knowledge, with an understanding of actions and their results. In particular, it's training in learning how to distinguish the types of activities in the mind that would cause a particular situation to produce suffering or not. | ||
+ | |||
+ | In the course of this training, the question of who you are gets put aside. The question of who you've been gets put aside. You can focus purely on what you're doing, what you can do to train yourself to be more sensitive and more effective in bringing about an end to suffering, and what you can do to master activities that lead more and more to true happiness. After all, the issue is not what you //are,// it's what you //do.// And if what you do is not skillful, you can learn to make it more skillful with each in-and-out breath. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Those are some of the lessons that you can derive from what seems like a very abstract teaching on dependent co-arising. It //is// abstract. It's put out as a list and it's a very convoluted one. As the Buddha himself admitted, it's not simple. It's like a tangled bird's nest, he said, or a knotted ball of string. But you can pull on a few strands, pull out a few of the twigs, and you find that even the individual strands and twigs are really helpful in putting an end to suffering, teaching you how to think and act and even breathe in ways that can bring suffering to an end. | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== The Regularity of the Dhamma ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === May 22, 2006 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | That school of thought leaves you pretty high and dry when things get difficult. It throws you into the present moment with no lifesaver at all. Fortunately, | ||
+ | |||
+ | In one analysis of dependent co-arising, he describes these factors as name and form on the one hand, and consciousness on the other. These two influence each other. Form is the form of the body. For example, you're sitting here right now with the form of the body, your sense of the body, how it feels from within. That sense of form is made up of solidity, warmth, liquid sensations, and energy: the four elements or four properties. As for name, it includes feeling, perception, attention, intention, and contact. Consciousness, | ||
+ | |||
+ | Under the heading of name, the two most important factors are intention and attention. Other ways of describing dependent co-arising draw out this importance. Sometimes, prior to name and form, they list fabrication, | ||
+ | |||
+ | Prior to fabrication comes ignorance. Ignorance means not seeing things in terms of the four noble truths — in other words, applying inappropriate attention. When you look at things in an inappropriate way, you frame issues in an inappropriate way, which means that your fabrications are going to lead to suffering. All the other elements of name and form and consciousness will tend toward suffering and stress as well. But you can change that way of attending to things. You can look at things in terms of the four noble truths: Where is the stress, what are you doing to cause it, where is there freedom from stress, and what kind of actions lead to that freedom? When you look in these terms, then the fabrications of your intentions go in a different direction; name and form and consciousness, | ||
+ | |||
+ | We tend to think of dependent co-arising as an extremely complex and abstruse teaching, and as the Buddha pointed out it //is// complex; it's not easy. Still, it does give us guidance in how to approach each present moment, where to look, how to look. One of the interesting things about dependent co-arising is that all these factors come prior to sensory contact. Even before you see sights, listen to sounds, and so forth, there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | When things come up in the present moment, how do you look at them? Try to look at them simply in terms of stress and lack of stress. Which intentions and ways of attending to things lead to stress; which ones bring it to an end? Try to put aside any ideas of yourself or what lies outside of yourself. Put aside questions of what lies behind all of this. Just look at things as they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | The Buddha calls this mode " | ||
+ | |||
+ | Our normal reaction when we feel stress and strain is to say, "This is happening to // | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is why we practice right concentration: | ||
+ | |||
+ | Years back I went on a camping trip to Powell Point, which is the southern tip of a plateau in Utah, over 10,000 feet in elevation. The guidebook said that you could see a good third of southern Utah from that spot. We thought we were following the right directions, but we made a wrong turn and ended up in an outlook over Henderson Canyon. Still, we thought we were at Powell Point. The book said the road would end and then from there you had to walk out on a point. Well, we found a point that we could walk out to. From there, the book said, you could look out and see this, that, and the other thing. So we identified the sights: This was this, that was that, and this was the other thing. But then there was a huge plateau looming up to our east, which wasn't mentioned in the book at all. Only after a good while did we realize that that was Powell Point. We had made a wrong turn. We were standing somewhere else. So, the next day we made our way up to Powell Point, and then we saw what the guide book was actually referring to. We realized that the this, that, and the other thing were not the this, that, and the other thing we thought we saw yesterday. We had labeled things wrong because we were standing in the wrong place. | ||
+ | |||
+ | If you want to understand what the Buddha is talking about, you have to put yourself here, right at the present moment, where the mind is immersed in the form, the breath energy, of the body. That's where the Buddha stood. If there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | In other words, from this point you can see stress, and you're in a position where you can really comprehend it because you don't feel so threatened by it. You're not compelled by your old imperative, which was to get rid of it. You attend to things in the right way. You see things simply in terms of stress, its cause, the path leading to its ending, and its ending. This is the framework you're supposed to bring to each present moment. In other words, you see things in terms of the four noble truths, and your intention is to perform the duties appropriate to each. When you develop that intention, it's bound to lead you to the end of all suffering and stress. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So this is the regularity of the Dhamma. You may not be able to bring purely appropriate attention to every moment of your life, but you can get used to looking at each moment in terms of identifying your intention and examining how you frame the events of your life. Do the narratives get in the way of your seeing things in terms of skillful and unskillful intentions? Or do they actually help? You should approach each situation with these thoughts in mind: Where is the stress here? What can you do to at least minimize the stress, the harm, the disturbance, | ||
+ | |||
+ | In this way the Buddha doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | The ability to keep all this in mind is mindfulness. That, combined with appropriate attention and the right intention, is what turns each moment into a moment of the practice, regardless of the situation. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So this is how the complexity of dependent co-arising gives you tools for the present moment, tools that you can use for the sake of your own wellbeing and the wellbeing of all the people around you. Each moment may be new, but it follows a pattern. Always keep that pattern in mind. | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== The Path of Mistakes ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === March 26, 2007 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | An essential aspect of Buddhist practice is that we have to learn how to make use of things we'll eventually have to learn how to let go of. We know that at some point the practice involves letting go of desire. But we need to cultivate skillful desire to get to that point. Ultimately the practice leads to the total end of fabrication, | ||
+ | |||
+ | These all have to play a role in the path, which means we have to learn how to change our attitude toward the aggregates. Instead of just clinging to them as us or ours, we learn how to use them as elements in the path. The important point here is to realize that these things have to be used in a skillful way. | ||
+ | |||
+ | When you come to the path, it's useful to reflect on skills you've developed in the past — as an artist, a cook, a carpenter, or a musician. Whatever skills you've worked on in the past, it's good to reflect on how you became skillful, and particularly how you learned how to deal with mistakes. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Learning from your mistakes is essential to developing any kind of skill. It's expected that you're going to make mistakes. The teacher tries to help you avoid the really unnecessary ones by pointing them out in advance. In other words, some mistakes are more avoidable than others. But a large part of the practice lies in learning how to learn from your mistakes and not get knocked off course by them. | ||
+ | |||
+ | We all like to hear that there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | What's different about arahants is that they continue to learn from their mistakes. They don't get knocked off course by them because they have no conceit that's going to be challenged by the mistake, destroyed by the mistake, or feel threatened by the mistake. But for those of us on the path, that's an issue we still have to deal with: this issue of conceit, our narcissism. We don't like the thought of having to make mistakes, but there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | And as for learning from the counsel of others: We sometimes assume that the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | At the same time, you take into consideration the counsel of the wise. That, of course, requires you to learn how to recognize who's wise and who's not. So in one way it does throw the whole issue back on you, but it's not that you have to totally reinvent the Dhamma wheel as you practice. There //is// guidance, and when you learn how to make the best use of guidance, it gives you quite a leg up. | ||
+ | |||
+ | There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is why the Buddha taught in a different way. He taught that these activities are unwise. They should be avoided because they cause harm. You look at what you've done and you realize you've made mistakes like this. So what's the proper attitude to develop toward those mistakes? It's to resolve not to do them again. At the same time, you realize that if you let yourself get tied up in remorse about your past mistakes, it's not going to undo the old mistake and it's going to make it less likely that you're going to do well in the future — because remorse saps your strength. The proper attitude is to learn how to recognize a mistake and simply resolve, " | ||
+ | |||
+ | The next step is to develop the sublime attitudes: limitless goodwill, limitless compassion, limitless empathetic joy, limitless equanimity. Learn how to cultivate these emotions, because they help keep you on the right track, strengthen your resolve not to be harmful, and also teach you where your limitations are: what you can do, what you can't do in terms of correcting the situation within yourself and the world around you. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Again, these attitudes, too, are fabrications. It's not that our nature is innately kind or innately bad. These attitudes are things you have to learn how to cultivate. They' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So, to begin with, you want to learn how to take your unskillful emotions apart. When you find yourself thinking in an unskillful way, when an unskillful emotion comes up with regard either to yourself or somebody else, ask yourself, "What kind of breathing is going on here? How does the breathing affect that emotion? What if I were to make the breath more skillful — making it smooth, making it full, making it restful: Will that help get the body out of the grip of the emotion?" | ||
+ | |||
+ | Then look at how you're thinking about the issue. Is there some way you could change your thoughts about the issue? Look at it from a different perspective. A lot of the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | As for the feelings that come up, learn not to identify with them. Just watch them: "Okay, these feelings are results of actions. They, in and of themselves, are not skillful or unskillful, but the way you perceive them and the thoughts you build around them — //those// can be skillful and unskillful." | ||
+ | |||
+ | In this way you use your understanding of fabrication to deconstruct unskillful emotions, unskillful mind states, and then to develop skillful emotions and skillful mind states in their place. We don't usually like the idea of constructing an emotion, or fabricating an emotion: It seems too artificial. But we do it all the time. It's simply that we're not conscious of it. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So as you're meditating, what are you doing? You're working with the breath. That's one form of fabrication. Try to make the breath comfortable. When there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Then there are feelings. You try to work with the breath in such a way as to develop feelings of ease and fullness. There are also perceptions. How do you perceive your breath? What mental picture do you have of the breath? How does that mental picture affect the way you actually breathe? Can you think of the breath as an energy field in the body, that your whole awareness of the body right now is all breath, different levels of breath energy? If you apply that perception, hold that label in mind, and explore the way you feel the body from the inside, what does it do? You can think of the body as a big sponge — lots of holes for the breath to come in and out from all directions. The breath comes in and goes out without any sense of blockage, no problem at all. If you perceived it that way, what impact would it have on how you actually experience the breath? In other words, you learn to take these aspects of fabrication and use them to your advantage. | ||
+ | |||
+ | And of course you're going to make mistakes, but you can learn from them — by learning how to notice things on your own, knowing how to seek advice from other people, learning how to apply their advice in a skillful way. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So, on the one hand, the Buddha gives you a lot of instructions on how to avoid mistakes, but he also is very open to the fact that we're still going to make mistakes on one level or another. Instead of forbidding you from making mistakes, he gives you advice: When you make a mistake, this is how you handle it; this is how you learn from it so you can become more skillful. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is how the process of fabrication can take you to the threshold where there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | It's the same with the path: You work on developing these elements of the path. Learn how to notice when you've done it well and when you haven' | ||
+ | |||
+ | This skill, though, is special. It takes you to the threshold of the unfabricated. But you can't use the unfabricated to get to the unfabricated. It can't be used as a cause at all, for it lies totally outside of the realm of causality. But you can get there through causality, through learning fabrication as you learn to fabricate states of mind more and more skillfully. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So don't be afraid of mistakes. Try to avoid them as much as you can, but don't be afraid of the idea that there will be mistakes down the line. As Ajaan Fuang once said, "No matter what happens in the meditation, there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So learn to live with the fact that, yes, we all make mistakes. Even arahants make some mistakes. But a mistake is not the end of the world. It's a start. It's a treasure in that it's your opportunity to learn. | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== Experimental Intelligence ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === August 7, 2007 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | One of the most important principles in meditating on the breath is learning how to experiment with it. Try different kinds of breathing to see which rhythm, which texture of breathing feels best for the body right now, and which is also best for the mind. Some ways of breathing can put you to sleep, other ways of breathing get you irritated, so you want to check and see what kind of breathing is going to make it easiest for the mind to settle down in a state of mindful alertness and want to stay there. If the body is uncomfortable because of the way you breathe, you're not taking advantage of the fact that the breath //can// make it comfortable. | ||
+ | |||
+ | I know a lot of people who are surprised by this aspect of Ajaan Lee's instructions for breath meditation. They come to meditation with the idea that you're supposed to let things simply happen on their own and not do anything to them — that you just watch the breath however it comes in, however it goes out. But even the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | I think it was Aristotle who defined intelligence as the ability to see connections. When you do X, Y happens. When you do Z, W happens. The ability to see that on your own is a sign of intelligence, | ||
+ | |||
+ | This principle permeates all of the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Sometimes we hear that the basic Buddhist insight is into the three characteristics — inconstancy, | ||
+ | |||
+ | But there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | The heart' | ||
+ | |||
+ | All the teachings have their time and place. You have to see each teaching in the larger structure of this pursuit of happiness, and try to apply it in an intelligent way. A large part of this means that you have to be heedful. You can't just assume that anything that comes popping up in your mind, or any idea that you have, is going to lead to true happiness. You can't assume that any teaching you receive from anybody is going to lead to true happiness, or that you can apply it willy-nilly to everything that comes up. You have to test things to learn when and how they work. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So a central part of the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So this is why we work at bringing the mind to concentration. This is why the Buddha said that concentration should be developed. He didn't say, " | ||
+ | |||
+ | I know someone who went to study in Thailand after she'd been doing the Ajaan Lee method. She met a teacher who said: "What is this, improving the breath? You're supposed to let it go and be on its own. After all, it's just a // | ||
+ | |||
+ | Sometimes you hear the teaching that once the mind settles down, you get in touch with your Buddha nature or your Inner Stillness, and you can trust whatever your Buddha nature or Inner Stillness tells you. The Buddha never taught that way. Even stream enterers, he said, have got to be heedful. You can't trust everything that comes out of the mind. He even said that arahants had to be heedful about their actions. Even totally enlightened beings can't totally assume that everything they see or hear is actually the way it is. They have to test it. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Go look in the Vinaya. A couple of the rules were actually formulated because some arahants made some mistakes. For instance, there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | You're developing an experimental intelligence here. You take the passages you read in the texts and you experiment with them. You take the insights you receive from meditation and you experiment with them. There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | What this means is that whether the source of your insight is something you've learned from the texts, something you've thought out on your own, an intuitive feeling you have, or something that comes up in your meditation, you always have to test it to see: "If I adopt this, where does it go? What does it connect with? What are the connections here in terms of cause and effect?" | ||
+ | |||
+ | We've all read the Kalama Sutta, where the Buddha says not to take religious texts as being necessarily true. That's the part everybody seems to remember. The other part though, is that he also says not to take what you like as necessarily being true. Don't take what seems to fit into your worldview as true; don't take what seems to work out logically as necessarily being true. You've got to test things. When you adopt this or that idea, this or that practice, what happens? Check these things out not only against your own experience, but also against the experience of wise people. In this way, you're much more likely to find truths that really, really are true, because they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Of course this means we have to be very careful in how we conduct our tests, which again is why we work at developing concentration, | ||
+ | |||
+ | After all, the purpose of the practice is to see things we've never seen before, to attain things we've never attained before. That means you have to learn how to overcome the limitations of your assumptions. And this is how you do it: You adopt this experimental way of developing intelligence, | ||
+ | |||
+ | So we work with the nitty-gritty of just learning to observe what's going on in the mind, testing it, learning to put away whatever assumptions don't pass the test — because only through working through the details like this do we ultimately break through to something much larger and more lasting. | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== Three Perceptions ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === August 21, 2007 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | Almost any book on Buddhism will tell you that the three characteristics — the characteristic of inconstancy, | ||
+ | |||
+ | Now, it's true that you'll frequently find in the Canon the statements that all things compounded or fabricated are inconstant, that they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | One is that the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So it's good to keep reminding ourselves of this point, because our prime focus in the meditation should always be on the mind. We're not trying to analyze things outside in and of themselves. We're trying to see how the mind's quest for happiness relates to the way things behave. You always want to keep your focus here, on the mind's quest, even when you focus on the breath. When the breath gets more and more refined, with a sense of ease filling the body, you reach a stage where the mind and the breath seem to become unified and one. The mind and its functions become more and more prominent in the meditation, and the breath — as it grows more and more subtle — fades into the background. This is just as it should be, because the mind is the culprit; the breath isn't the culprit. Things that are inconstant, stressful, and not-self: They' | ||
+ | |||
+ | As the Buddha said, the beginning of wisdom is when you go to people who've found true happiness and you ask them: "What should I do that will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?" | ||
+ | |||
+ | In other words, as we look for happiness, we focus first on actions that don't constitute ultimate happiness but can be used as the path: things like mindfulness, | ||
+ | |||
+ | In this way, we're actually fighting the three characteristics as we try to bring the mind into concentration. We push to see how far we can find a happiness based on conditioned things. One reason for this is that if you don't push at a truth until it pushes back, you won't know how strong it is. Another reason is that we're going to need that conditioned happiness, that sense of relatively solid wellbeing, to put ourselves in a position where we can look at things very carefully as they come to be. That phrase, "as they come to be," comes into play when we're no longer pushing. But we've got to push first. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So you keep working on your concentration in all your activities, trying to keep the mind as constantly still as possible no matter what the outside conditions may be. You create the conditions for stillness inside, a sense of ease inside, and try to maintain that stillness and ease in the face of all sorts of conditions around you. You learn to gain more skill, more control. | ||
+ | |||
+ | At this stage in the game, the issues of inconstancy, | ||
+ | |||
+ | This means that there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | And again the focus is not so much on trying to get to the ultimate nature of these outside objects as it is on using the perception as an antidote for a tendency of the mind. After all, these perceptions are not intended to be a statement of the ultimate nature of things out there — for, when you think about it, the ultimate nature of things out there is really not all that relevant an issue. We don't hang on to things because we think that they have an inherent nature, that they inherently exist or don't exist. We hang on to them because we think they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So you apply these three contemplations to things outside of your concentration, | ||
+ | |||
+ | You can also apply these three contemplations to the first stages of concentration when you want to go to deeper stages. When the mind is settled and quiet on a beginning level, is it as quiet as it could be? Or is there still some inconstancy there? If you see that any of the factors of your concentration are stressful or inconstant, you drop them, and that will take you to deeper stages of concentration. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Ultimately, as your attachments to things outside of the concentration drop away, you turn your attention more to applying these three perceptions to contemplating the concentration itself. As this contemplation gets more refined, you see that even the most stable level of concentration you can attain — the one that has formed your highest experience of pleasure and ease — is composed of five aggregates on a very subtle level, and even on this subtle level their behavior displays these three features all the time. You apply the three perceptions to them to pry away even your attachment to concentration. That's when you incline the mind to the deathless — and, as the texts say, that inclination can take you in either of two directions. One is to non-returning, | ||
+ | |||
+ | It's precisely at this fork in the road where the analysis of //sabbe dhamma anatta// — all dhammas are not-self — applies: where you might see nibbana as a dhamma, as an object of the mind. As long as you perceive it in that way, there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So remember: We're not here to arrive at the true nature of things in and of themselves, aside from seeing how their // | ||
+ | |||
+ | Ajaan Fuang once had a student in Singapore who wrote him a letter describing how his meditation had reached the point where it was concerned solely with seeing the three characteristics in everything he encountered. Ajaan Fuang had me write in reply: " | ||
+ | |||
+ | So that's where your attention should always be focused: on the machinations of the mind. Use whatever perceptions and means of contemplation that can cut through the mind's unskillful habits, and apply them in a way that leads to the goal of the teachings: an unconditioned happiness where you can put all perceptions, | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== Disenchantment ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === October 19, 2007 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | We all practice for the sake of happiness, for a happiness that goes deeper than ordinary pleasures. But in coming to the practice we often bring assumptions about happiness — how it works, why we're unhappy, what we can do to be happier — assumptions that we're hardly even aware are assumptions because we assume them so strongly. We just take it for granted that they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Two of the most common assumptions are ones that get most in the way. The first is that we're unhappy because we can't accept the way things are; that the purpose of the practice is to learn more acceptance. In other words, we're essentially neurotic, as in that old distinction between neurosis and psychosis: The psychotic person thinks that two plus two equals five. The neurotic person knows that two plus two equals four, but hates them for it. Our problem is that we simply can't accept the way things are. If we could only learn how to accept that two plus two does equal four and it's perfectly fine, then we'd be happy. And so in that model, the purpose of the practice is to learn acceptance. But even Freud recognized that getting people past their neuroses would not solve the problem of happiness. As he said, it would simply lead them to the level of ordinary, everyday misery. And yet part of the common theory says, well, you have to learn how to accept that because that's just the way things are. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Another model is that we're unhappy because we have a sense of separateness. Inside we're divided. Outside we're separate from other people; we're separate from nature. All we need to learn is how to develop a sense of oneness, a sense of interconnectedness, | ||
+ | |||
+ | What these two ideas about happiness have in common is that the way things are out there is already a given, and we're simply on the receiving end of what's given, so we have to learn how to develop the proper attitude to what's already there: Accept and try to find oneness within the way things are. But the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Now, the present moment is not entirely plastic, entirely responsive to everything we want out of it. Some of it is formed by influences coming in from the past, but part of it comes from our intentions in the present moment. In this way we are both producers and consumers. We produce our suffering and then we consume our suffering. We produce our pleasures and we consume our pleasures. Understanding this point helps to open the road to a deeper happiness, because there is a happiness, the Buddha said, that is not produced and not consumed. It just simply is. But the way we keep feeding on the happiness we produce gets in the way. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So for him, the purpose of the meditation is not to celebrate oneness or to celebrate acceptance. It's to develop two very different kinds of emotions: disenchantment and dispassion. The Pali word for disenchantment, | ||
+ | |||
+ | Now to get to that point, the Buddha does have us develop a certain amount of acceptance and a certain sense of oneness. This is what the practice of concentration is all about. You start by focusing on one object, like the breath, and then you stay with it long enough that you start developing a sense of oneness with it. Your awareness of the breath and the breath itself seem to become one and the same thing. There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Why? Because he wants us to feed on that and then to start comparing this food with the other things we've been feeding on, to see that this is a much more refined pleasure, a more satisfying form of nourishment. The pleasure it gives is blameless: the pleasure that comes from just focusing your mind. The pleasures we get from things outside contain a certain amount of blame in that our taking pleasure means that other people, other animals, have to work, have to suffer in one way or another. An example is physical food. As we eat physical food, we gain pleasure, but to get that food to our plate or into our bowls requires a lot of work and sacrifice. So as the Buddha said, that's a pleasure that contains some blame. Or in Ajaan Lee's terms, it contains some kammic debts. Whereas the pleasure that comes simply from learning how to focus on your breath is not placing a burden on anyone, so it's a type of food for the mind that's really worth developing. | ||
+ | |||
+ | As you develop a sense of oneness with the food of concentration, | ||
+ | |||
+ | In the same way, the Buddha says that once you attain the first taste of Awakening, you look back on your old pleasures and realize how you've been fooled by the mind — that in finding your pleasure, what you've been feeding on is just forms and feelings and perceptions and thought constructs and consciousness — which, when you really look at them very carefully, are not worth feeding on at all. | ||
+ | |||
+ | There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is why we have the contemplation of the 32 parts of the body, the analysis of things in terms of the aggregates, in terms of the sense media, in terms of the properties: so we can realize that the food of lust or possessiveness we've been feeding on with regard to the body is really not based on much. It doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | When you decide you don't want to eat it, you turn around and look at the fact that you've been preparing this food all along, and you realize you don't want to prepare it any longer: That's dispassion. You've had a passion for creating this food out of form, feeling, whatever. That's why it was there as food. But once you gain a sense of dispassion for it, you stop creating it. And when you stop creating it, it's no longer there. That's when you experience cessation. The mind is no longer entangled either in the process of production or in the process of consumption. That's when it's freed. It opens to the happiness that's there when you're not so wound up or enthralled in production and consumption of all these miserable forms of food. | ||
+ | |||
+ | So the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So try to keep this point in mind — that you're both a producer and a consumer — and take a good, hard look at what you've been producing and how you've been consuming it. Look at all the effort that goes into producing happiness out of this body we have, out of feelings and perceptions and thought constructs and consciousness. Start asking yourself: Is it really worth all the effort? Maybe there' | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== Becoming ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === July 23, 2007 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | Try to keep track of the breath. Don't think about the fact that you're going to be here for a whole hour. Just think about this breath, and then this breath, each breath, one breath at a time. Think about it and watch it, see what it does. What do you notice when it comes in; what do you notice when it goes out? What way of coming in feels best for the body; what way of letting it go out feels best for the body? The breath is called the fabricator of the body, or bodily fabrication — // | ||
+ | |||
+ | Can you sense how the body tells you that now's a good time for an in-breath, now's a good time for an out-breath? It has its signals, you know. There are certain feelings in the body that you can learn to recognize over time, and you can explore how best to respond to them. Take their cue in such a way that it leads to a sense of fullness. For example, you can breathe in till the body feels full, and then you don't squeeze it out. Allow it to stay full. Even though the breath will go out, you can still maintain some sense of fullness. When the next breath comes in, add a little bit more fullness. The same with the next and the next. It builds up over time. Simply by approaching the breathing process in a particular way, you can create a state of ease, you can create a state of fullness — even a sense of fullness that's a bit too much. Sometimes people can begin to feel that they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | There was once a senior monk in Bangkok who was learning meditation from Ajaan Lee. He was well read and knew his Buddhist doctrine. After a while of practicing concentration, | ||
+ | |||
+ | And that's what we're doing right now, creating a state of becoming, a state of wellbeing or well-becoming. We do this both so that we can get good at creating it and so that, in the course of creating it, we can put the mind in a good spot where it can watch things more carefully, more clearly. When the mind is comfortable in the present moment, at ease in the present moment, it can stay firmly in the present moment and watch processes transparently as they come, as they go. You get a better sense of your raw materials. | ||
+ | |||
+ | The creating of a state of becoming in the mind like this is the kamma of your meditation, right here, right now. A lot of people believe that kamma is one of those teachings that's not particularly relevant to their meditation practice. But essentially, | ||
+ | |||
+ | So we're here trying to understand what action is all about, what action does, and what it creates. And our state of concentration is Exhibit A, our primary example of action right here. We're creating a state of wellbeing. You can't let go of states of wellbeing until you learn how to make good ones. Ajaan Lee's example, when he was talking to that senior monk, was of having a chicken that lays eggs. Some of the eggs, he said, you can take apart and analyze; some of the eggs you can eat. If you don't have anything to eat, you don't have the strength to take things apart and analyze them. We're feeding on the sense of ease that comes from the concentration because that gives us the strength to analyze things. | ||
+ | |||
+ | How do you analyze things? You take things apart in terms of what you're fabricating and of the raw materials with which you're fabricating them. | ||
+ | |||
+ | For example, we all know the teaching that you create a sense of self out of any of the five aggregates, all of which are activities. Well, you can watch yourself as you meditate: Exactly how do you create a sense of //me// or //mine// around what you're doing? One thing you tend to see very quickly is the way your sense of self gets involved as you watch yourself doing the meditation well or poorly. When things aren't going well, you think you're a hopeless meditator. You get all tied up in knots. When they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | As the Buddha says, we create form for the sake of form-ness. Your sense of the form of the body is something you fashion out of sensations so that you can breathe and move. You can create formless states as well. This is what you learn when you move from the fourth jhana into the four formless states: the infinitude of space, the infinitude of consciousness, | ||
+ | |||
+ | It's as if you have a mist of atoms here. In order to breathe, you applied perceptions — i.e., mental labels — to that mass of mist; you had an image of the form of the body that allowed you to make it move. But when you don't have to move the body around — you don't even have to move the breath around — everything grows very still and you can drop that sense of form if you want to. You can choose instead to focus on the perception of space permeating the mist. That's when you experience the infinitude of that space — and at that point you begin to realize that even the perception of form or the experience of form contains an element of intention. You then begin to see this process in relation to the formless realms as well: When you drop the perception of space, you're left with a perception of " | ||
+ | |||
+ | What you're doing is to take your experience apart, layer by layer, seeing where the different levels of intention get involved and learning how to drop them. As you progressively do away with these layers of intention, you get down to what the Buddha calls knowledge of things as they have come to be. As he said, only when he had gained knowledge of things as they have come to be — in terms of the four noble truths, and the three levels of knowledge about each truth — did he claim full Awakening. That's the kind of knowledge we're working our way down to. And the only way you can get down to that level of unintended, unshaped, unfabricated experience, getting down to the absolutely rawest of the raw materials of the present moment, is first by consciously putting them together into something. Otherwise, you miss a lot of subtleties. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Sometimes you hear people say: "Try to sit with things simply as they are, right from the very beginning of the meditation, and you can get into a state of equanimity or pure mindfulness. And then you realize that that equanimity is unfabricated. Equanimity and mindfulness: | ||
+ | |||
+ | There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | It's as if you've been building houses with what you thought were bricks. But if you look carefully at the bricks, you realize that they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So when you develop dispassion for what's come to be, you find true freedom. You stop this process of fabricating, | ||
+ | |||
+ | It's a subtle skill, which means that you can't go straight to the letting go. First you've got to learn how to build properly. Only then can you see the subtleties of the intentions in the mind and, at the same time, get a felt sense for your raw materials. Otherwise you hold to the intention of being equanimous, and think that that's it. Or to the intention of being totally passive, nonreactive, | ||
+ | |||
+ | So try to be as skillful as you can in staying with the breath, in creating a sense of wellbeing through the breathing, because it teaches you a lot of important lessons about the element of kamma, the element of will and fabrication that goes into the present moment. It teaches you about the raw materials and the many levels of intention there within them. You take these raw materials and turn them into a transparent state that allows you to watch these processes in action, so that someday you, too, can reach that point where, after putting things together, you can take them apart, see things simply as they come into being, develop dispassion for them, and drop them. That way you can test for yourself: When the Buddha said that there is an unfabricated, | ||
+ | |||
+ | It may seem like we're going in the opposite direction as we fabricate concentration here, but the only way you're going to see what's unfabricated is if you're totally sensitive to every level of fabrication possible. So although we're creating a state of becoming here with the breath — a state of wellbeing, a state of rapture, ease, unification of mind — as Ajaan Lee says, you're going to need to eat some of these eggs. You can't take them all apart; you can't destroy all of them. You've got to eat some of them in order to keep going. So feed yourself well. | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== Beyond Nature ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | === August 8, 2007 === | ||
+ | |||
+ | It's good to come back to a place like this where you can hear the crickets chirping in the evening, the sound of the doves in the late afternoon. There' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Think about human history as a whole. The times when people get really romantic about nature are the times when they don't have to live in it. The idea of romanticizing wilderness didn't come into force in America until the frontier had been closed, and nature had been tamed to some extent — to the extent that human beings can tame nature. It's important to keep this in mind as we practice. Coming out here doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | When the Buddha talked about how conditions cause suffering, he wasn't talking just about your social conditioning. He was talking about conditions of nature. That chant we had just now — "the world is swept away" — doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | You sometimes hear people romanticizing the mental life of animals, that they don't suffer because they don't have a sense of self. That's not the case. Animals often suffer more than we do. They live in constant fear, with no real understanding of what's going on around them. All they know is that they' | ||
+ | |||
+ | And you can read the writings of the forest monks: They certainly don't romanticize nature. Even Ajaan Lee, when he talks about the advantages of living in the forest and the lessons you learn there, doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | We don't suffer only because of our social conditioning. We suffer because we live in a world of inter-eating, | ||
+ | |||
+ | So the conditions the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So the ways of nature are not an ideal to which we're trying to return. They exemplify the problem, which is that as long as you have to feed, there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | As we meditate, we're trying to study fabrication as we experience it. This is the conditioning process in the mind and in the body. The basic fabrication in terms of the body is the breath. And as for the mind, there are two types of fabrication: | ||
+ | |||
+ | Normally, the way we put these things together causes stress and suffering. If you do this with ignorance, you suffer. If you can learn how to do it with knowledge, you can turn these processes of fabrication into the path. This doesn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | In fact, you put all three types of fabrication together to get the mind into concentration. You think about the breath — that's directed thought — and you evaluate the breath. You explore to see which ways of perceiving the breath help in the process of making it feel more comfortable, | ||
+ | |||
+ | In this way you're taking the process of fabrication and turning it into a path to the end of fabrication. As you do this, you begin to see how much your intentions really do shape these things. The Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | There are lots of different potentials from your past kamma that you can focus on in any given moment. Your choice of what to focus on is going to determine what you experience. For instance, there are potentials for different kinds of feelings. There are places in the body that, if you focused on them, could get you really tied up in anguish or pain. You could take the germs of a pain and build them into something really overwhelming. There are other places in the body where there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So you have the choice of what you're going to focus on now — which sensations in the body help create a sense of wellbeing, which ones could create a sense of dis-ease, what you're going to think about, what you're going to focus on. Those are choices you make all the time. You take these potentials and turn them into an actual experience. When you realize how you do this, you can learn how to make your choices more skillfully. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This is the advantage of coming out into a relatively natural place like this. It's not totally natural. If we turned off the water, the avocado trees would die and the chaparral would take over. There wouldn' | ||
+ | |||
+ | As a meditator, you have to be wary as well. Even when you create good states of concentration, | ||
+ | |||
+ | It's not the case that the conditioned comes from the unconditioned. The way the Buddha explained causality is that causes and effects influence each other. An effect turns around and has an influence on its cause. So there' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So if something is going to be unconditioned, | ||
+ | |||
+ | So it's not the case that we're returning to a place we've come from. After all, as the Buddha points out, even little babies have their greed, anger, and delusion. It's just that their faculties and bodies aren't strong enough to act on those defilements very powerfully. But they suffer powerfully: You can see that very clearly. As soon as a child comes out of the womb, it cries. A lot of the child' | ||
+ | |||
+ | So instead of returning to something old, we look at this process of fabrication that's going on all the time to see if we can learn something new about it. Learn how to understand it, learn how to take it apart, use it as a path. Learn how, once it's taken you as far as it can take you, you can let it go. That, as the Buddha said, allows us to see something we've never seen before: to attain the as yet unattained, to realize the as yet unrealized. In other words, we're heading into totally new territory. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Keep that in mind as you practice. You can create wonderful luminous states in the mind, but remember that those, too, are fabricated. No matter what comes up in the practice, always learn how to familiarize yourself with it. And then learn to look for where there' | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== Glossary ====== | ||
+ | <div chapter> | ||
+ | <span anchor # | ||
+ | |||
+ | <dl class=' | ||
+ | |||
+ | ? Ajaan (Thai): | ||
+ | :: Teacher; mentor. | ||
+ | |||
+ | ? Arahant: | ||
+ | :: A person who has abandoned all ten of the fetters that bind the mind to the cycle of rebirth, whose heart is free of mental defilement, and is thus not destined for future rebirth. An epithet for the Buddha and the highest level of his noble disciples. Sanskrit form: //arhat.// | ||
+ | |||
+ | ? Brahma-vihara: | ||
+ | :: Sublime attitude, of which there are four: limitless goodwill, limitless compassion, limitless empathetic joy, and limitless equanimity. | ||
+ | |||
+ | ? Buddho (Buddha): | ||
+ | :: Awake; enlightened. | ||
+ | |||
+ | ? Dhamma: | ||
+ | :: (1) Event; action. (2) A phenomenon in and of itself. (3) Mental quality. (4) Doctrine, teaching. (5) Nibbana (although there are passages in the Pali Canon describing nibbana as the abandoning of all dhammas). Sanskrit form: //dharma.// | ||
+ | |||
+ | ? Dhammapada: | ||
+ | :: A collection of short verses attributed to the Buddha. | ||
+ | |||
+ | ? Digha Nikaya: | ||
+ | :: The Long Collection, the first section of discourses in the Pali Canon. | ||
+ | |||
+ | ? Jhana: | ||
+ | :: Mental absorption. A state of strong concentration focused on a single sensation or perception. Sanskrit form: //dhyana.// | ||
+ | |||
+ | ? Kamma: | ||
+ | :: Intentional act. Sanskrit form: //karma.// | ||
+ | |||
+ | ? Kathina: | ||
+ | :: A gift of cloth and other requisites made to the monks at the end of the Rains Retreat. | ||
+ | |||
+ | ? Khandha: | ||
+ | :: Aggregate; heap; pile. The aggregates are the basic building blocks of describable experience, as well as the building blocks from which one's sense of " | ||
+ | |||
+ | ? Khandhaka: | ||
+ | :: A collection of minor rules in the monastic discipline. | ||
+ | |||
+ | ? Luang Pu (Thai): | ||
+ | :: Venerable Grandfather. A term of respect for a very senior and elderly monk. | ||
+ | |||
+ | ? Metta: | ||
+ | :: Goodwill; kindness; benevolence; | ||
+ | |||
+ | ? Nibbana: | ||
+ | :: Literally, the " | ||
+ | |||
+ | ? Pali: | ||
+ | :: The name of the earliest extant canon of the Buddha' | ||
+ | |||
+ | ? Samvega: | ||
+ | :: A sense of dismay, terror, or urgency. | ||
+ | |||
+ | ? Sankhara: | ||
+ | :: Fabrication; | ||
+ | |||
+ | ? Sutta: | ||
+ | :: Discourse. Sanskrit form: //sutra.// | ||
+ | |||
+ | ? Sutta Nipata: | ||
+ | :: A collection of longer poems attributed to the Buddha. | ||
+ | |||
+ | ? Vinaya: | ||
+ | :: The monastic discipline. | ||
+ | |||
+ | ? Vipassana: | ||
+ | :: Insight. | ||
+ | |||
+ | ? Wat (Thai): | ||
+ | :: Monastery. | ||
+ | |||
+ | </dl> | ||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | </ | ||
+ | |||
+ | <!-- CHANGELOG: | ||
+ | 20120823: Removed epub, mobi versions | ||
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