Doing the Practice

First, get your body in position. Right leg on top of the left, your hands in your lap, right hand on top of the left. Sit up straight, comfortably straight. Face forward and close your eyes. It’s relatively simple. The hard part is staying in position. This applies even more to the mind. Tell yourself to focus on the breath, and you can immediately do it. The issue is staying with the breath, staying with each present moment as it comes. That requires practice. You need to know how to encourage yourself to stay, as well as the various techniques for staying.

Encouragement comes from the chanting we did just now. As the chant on goodwill says, we all want happiness, and not just for ourselves. Ideally, we’d like to have happiness for everyone. But then you look at human life. That was the other chant: We’re all subject to aging, subject to illness, subject to death, subject to separation. A happiness that’s based on things that age, grow old, and die, and get separated is a very precarious business. We’re looking for something that’s more solid, grounded, more reliable, more dependable. That’s where that fifth reflection comes in: All living beings are the owners of their actions. Whatever we do, for good or for evil, to that will we fall heir. It’s in our actions that hope lies for true happiness. If we just had those first four reflections, it’d be pretty depressing. But we have the potential to find true happiness through our actions, and particularly the actions of the mind, because the mind is what lies behind everything we say and think and do.

We have to train the mind so that it’s skilled in giving the orders, so that it can see what’s the skillful action in any particular set of circumstances and follow through with that. That requires mindfulness, it requires alertness, discernment, persistence, all of which are qualities we can train in, we can develop in the mind.

Staying focused on the breath, staying with the body in the present moment, is a good way of developing these qualities. To begin with, it’s very basic. Breath is something you always have as long as you’re alive. The body is something that’s already there. You don’t have to go out and buy your meditation object or borrow it from anybody. You’ve got it right here. And it doesn’t require a great deal of book learning or theorizing to understand what we’re doing, or actually to do the practice here. You learn a lot in the course of doing the practice. And although it’s good to have background, the real understanding that comes, comes from actually doing it.

So you stay focused on the breath as it comes in, you stay with it as it comes out, and in the process of staying with the breath, you develop a lot of good qualities. One, mindfulness is needed to keep reminding yourself that this is where you’re going to stay right now, because the mind can shift its frame of reference very quickly. You have to keep reminding yourself, “Stay here, just with the breath. You don’t have to go wandering off to what you’re going to do tomorrow, what you did yesterday.”

The mind may wander off, but you don’t have to follow it. See the thought as one thing, but your awareness of breath is still there. The fact that there is a thought in the mind doesn’t destroy the breath. It may create a little world in which, if you enter into that world, you blot out a lot of your awareness of the body. But just keep reminding yourself, come back to that basic awareness, it’s right here. That’s mindfulness.

Alertness actually watches what’s happening. When the breath is coming in, you know it’s coming in. When it goes out, you know it’s going out. Whether it’s comfortable or not, you know that, too. If it’s not comfortable, you can change. You can vary the rhythm of the breathing, you can vary the depth, make it longer or shorter, heavier or lighter. Experiment to see what works.

This element of experimentation is extremely important. You have to admit as you start out that you don’t really know all that much about your own mind, or what’s going to happen if you stay with the breath. You don’t want to anticipate too much and say, “This is going to have to work, that’s going to have to work.” You stay with the basic sensation of the breathing and watch what happens. If you begin to notice that this doesn’t feel very comfortable, okay, you can change it.

Think of the breath coming in and out through the whole body. When we actually look at the experience of breathing, it’s hard to draw a line between the sensation of breathing and the rest of the energy flow in the body. And it’s best not to try to draw that line, because if you start drawing lines, you create blockages. So think of the energy flowing through the whole nervous system, all the blood vessels throughout the body. If you notice any tension or tightness in any part of the body, allow it to relax. Think of things gradually opening up, so that the whole body breathes in easily, breathes out easily. And as for what rhythm will feel best or how deep it should be, that’s something you find out on your own.

Remember, this is what meditation is: a process of finding out. You’re not putting the mind into a machine and just hoping it’ll come out okay at the other end of the machine. It’s a process of developing sensitivity, which means that you observe and then you act and then you observe again. You don’t want to jump to conclusions. If you do have an observation, put it to the test. This is how discernment is developed, through watching the process of cause and effect right here in the mind.

When you learn to be more observant like this, you start seeing more things. You start understanding the patterns of the mind: how things like greed, anger, and delusion get started, how they grow, how they take over, how they can be dropped, what happens if you don’t drop them, what happens if you do. You may have some general ideas about this, but if you want to see really clearly so that these things don’t overcome you, you want to stop and watch very carefully. This is why concentration is such an important part of developing the mind: staying focused, watching things over time.

Most of our understanding about the mind is like connect-the-dots. We have a little dot of knowledge here, a little something we’ve observed over there, and then we connect the dots. And what do we connect it with? We connect it with our ignorance: “This must be like that, that must be like this.” A lot of time with the dots, if you actually saw how they were connected, there would be a dog, but you turn them into a frog. It might be meant to be an airplane, but you turn them into a horse. In other words, it’s possible to have a few accurate observations here and there, but then when you connect them in the mind, they get all distorted. So you want to watch very carefully.

There’s a story about one of the famous Thai ajaans, a student of Ajaan Mun, the founder of the forest tradition. When Ajaan Mun had passed away, this particular ajaan was very upset, because he had depended so much on his teacher to help him through difficult periods in his meditation. Now his teacher was gone, and he didn’t see anyone else who could help him in the same way. So he started reflecting: What were the things that Ajaan Mun taught? One theme that came back again and again and again was that if anything comes up in the mind that you’re not totally sure what’s happening, or even if you think you’re sure about what’s happening, just stay with a sense of awareness, the knower, the observer, and just watch. That’ll see you through, so that you’re not jumping to conclusions and you’re not anticipating too much.

Notice that when the Buddha describes the path, there’s no factor of right anticipation. Right mindfulness and right concentration are the main elements in the practice of meditation. Right view means seeing where there’s suffering right now, where there’s stress right now, and then seeing the craving, the ignorance that caused it. That’s part of right view as well. You want to see these things as they’re actually happening. This way, you begin to sort out the patterns of the mind, and you begin to see that some areas of the mind are more solid than others, more steady. As I said, we’re all here looking for happiness. And as the Buddha once said, there is no happiness other than peace. Peace requires something steady. Even if you’re living in a turmoil, you can be peaceful as long as you have something steady inside that you can stay with. That’s what you’re looking for. So you’re peeling away all these different processes in the mind to see what really in here is steady.

That’s what we’re exploring to see. First you develop states of concentration, which provide a temporary platform that depends on conditions. Anything that depends on conditions is going to have to change, but at least a state of concentration is relatively stable compared to other things. It allows you to form a foundation from which you can observe what’s going on in the mind. Then, as your powers of mindfulness and concentration get stronger, you see things more and more precisely. Ultimately, you can see through to what really is changeless here in the mind, something that doesn’t depend on causes. We don’t create it through the path, we find it.

A traditional image is of a mountain. You follow a road to the mountain. The road doesn’t cause the mountain. The mountain is already there. It was there even before the road was put through. But by following the road, you get to the mountain. That’s what this path of practice is. It’s the road to the mountain, developing good qualities in the mind that open up to something that’s better than even the good qualities. But they can be found only when you really look.

So you’re developing within you the qualities that allow you to see into your own mind, providing a place of relative stability so you can see all those currents in the mind that you used to ride along. And because you were riding along, all you could see was a blur, such as the trees on the riverbank as you were sailing past: They were all a blur. But now that you stand still, you can see precisely what the leaves are like, what’s going on. You can watch the river itself more carefully.

It’s in the actual seeing, rather than in the anticipation or our guesswork, that you can really find the basis for true happiness, that inner peace—the potential for which was already there, simply that you have to locate it. Once you’ve contacted that inner peace, then the aging, illness, and death of the body, the separation from people you’ve learned to love, don’t dig so deeply into the mind. They can’t touch that peace.

But now we have an hour to meditate, an hour to observe. Make the best use of your time.