Ripples Go Far

We develop the sublime attitudes every evening as a way of opening up and airing out the mind. When you’re focused on your troubles, your suffering, your issues, you suffer a lot because the range is small and the pain is big. So of course it seems overwhelming. When you expand your range, you begin to realize that the pain is a lot smaller.

This is one of the basic principles the Buddha uses in contemplating aging, illness, death, separation, and the fact of karma. You’re not the only person who ages or has pains and illnesses. You’re not the only person who dies. You’re not the only person who’s separated from those you love. It happens all over the world. You might think that the fact that it’s everywhere would make the pain even greater, but actually it takes the weight of the focus away from you. You’re not the only victim, you’re not the only person suffering. It’s not as if the universe is dumping on you and nobody else right now. It’s dumping on everybody at one time or another. That takes the concentration of pain away.

There’s a story about King Pasenadi. He was visiting with the Buddha one day, and one of his ministers came up and whispered into his ear, “Your favorite queen has just died.” The king broke down and started crying. After he was finished, the Buddha said, “When have you ever heard of anyone who was born who didn’t die? When have you ever heard of any relationship where there wasn’t separation?” That was his way of comforting the king. He went on to say, if there’s any sense that you feel that something is accomplished by expressing your grief through eulogies, through honoring the dead, honoring those who you’ve been separated from, go ahead and do it. But when it starts getting self-indulgent, that’s when you have to stop.

Grief is something that comes mainly from your sense of loss. We think that we’re sympathetic for the person who’s gone, but so much of our grief is our own sense of loss. So to lift the burden on that “I” that’s suddenly weighed down by so much suffering, try to realize it’s not all concentrated on you.

The same principle applies to more ordinary pains. If you’re sitting with pain in your body, sometimes you wonder why you’re doing this. The answer is that this is something that happens to everybody, and if you can’t face pain now when you’re relatively strong and your mind is relatively clear, how are you going to face it when it comes a lot stronger, a lot heavier, and the mind is not quite so ready to deal with it unless you’ve trained it?

The other reason you’re doing this is because you realize that your actions have an impact not only on you but also on other people. If you’re feeling weighed down by your pain, you don’t have much time or energy for other people. This is why we extend thoughts of goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy. It’s part of our motivation for the training, so that it’s not just our story or our pain or our issues. You realize that the state of your mind has a ripple effect out to others as well. You want the ripples to be good.

So it’s an important part of the meditation that you get out of the little narratives you have about yourself, yourself, yourself. Think in larger terms. After all, that’s how the Buddha gained his insight into karma. He had that first knowledge on the night of his awakening, knowledge of his past lives many, many eons back. As long as he was just focused on himself, he couldn’t see the larger pattern, didn’t understand what was going on. As he said, sometimes you look at one life, you do something really, really harmful, and the next life you’re up in heaven. Or you do something really good, and the next life you’re down in hell. If you’re just following one thread through the whole tapestry, it’s a pretty crazy thread.

But then when you see the larger pattern, you understand what’s going on and where to focus your attention. That’s the second knowledge that he gained on the night of his awakening: seeing all beings in the cosmos being reborn in line with their karma. And that’s when he began to focus in on the karma his mind was doing in the present moment.

This principle is a really important one. You’ve got to take the larger view, both of your own life and of the lives of all the people around you. Otherwise, the meditation becomes very self-indulgent, very narcissistic: “This is what I’m doing for myself right now, and that’s it.” That gets old really fast. When you take the larger view, it’s a lot easier to depersonalize what’s going on in the mind. So if a thought that comes up isn’t just your favorite thought or your favorite attitude, it’s just a thought and attitude. Then you can watch it.

Or if, while you’re meditating, you realize that a particular thought is not where you want to go, you can learn how to put it aside and not get so entangled in the content.

It’s like walking past a TV and a show is on. You have the choice of just walking right past and not getting involved or of sitting down, and all of a sudden you find yourself concerned about this character or that character. The question is why? It’s just dots of color on the TV.

Learn to look at your thoughts as dots of color in the mind, little dots of words that have a quality of intention underlying them. You want to look at that quality to see what it is. Is there lust? Is there passion? Is there aversion? Where do these things lead? What’s driving these thoughts? When you see the forces driving a thought, that’s when you begin to realize it’s not really worth getting involved in.

Again, like watching a TV: What drove that TV show? There’s a lot of greed in the industry, and there’s somebody out there who wants you to believe something. Do you trust those people? You don’t even know them. The amount of greed that drives the media is scary. But then you look at your own mind, the amount of greed, aversion, and delusion that drives your own mind is pretty scary too. Can you trust the little shows that the mind makes for itself, driven by these factors?

We tend to trust the shows because these things come from within us, but that’s one of the reasons why we have to develop that teaching on not-self, so that we can learn how to look at the various forces that drive the mind and realize that we don’t have to identify with them.

It’s like all those different committee members in the mind, the ones that want to meditate, the ones that don’t want to meditate. Where did they come from? They came from strategies you had in the past for finding happiness. Some of those strategies are things that you cooked up way, way back when your powers of observation were pretty poor and the strategies seemed to work. But then your standards for what counted as happiness were pretty crude.

So you’ve got these crude, ignorant members, and then you’ve got the devious ones, the ones where you’ve got some pleasure, but there was a huge amount of pain and difficulty that followed on that pleasure. These are the ones that are constantly in denial, telling you that they’re not responsible for the pain. Somebody else was. So you’ve got all these unreliable members in the committee of your mind.

The purpose of the meditation is to sort them out, so that you can realize that these are the ones you can’t trust, as in that Dhamma talk by Ajaan Lee: How do you know that every thought that comes popping up into your mind actually comes from you? Maybe it comes from the germs in your bloodstream. Maybe it comes from spirits who are hanging around you.

You’ve got to sort out these different committee members, which is why it’s good to get out of your narrative for a while, so that you can look at who’s making up the narrative and what purpose they have. Who’s the team of writers? Who’s producing? Which members are they? Are they the skeptical members? The lazy members? The forgetful members? The scatterbrained ones? The really ignorant ones? These are the ones who are going to weaken you as you’re forced to face up to the inevitable problems of aging, illness, death, and separation.

You want to strengthen the good ones, the ones that have conviction in the principle that your actions really do make a difference, and that you have to be careful about them. You can’t just say, “Hey, I want to be spontaneous and have a good time.” There are ways of having a pleasurable time without having to say, “I’ll give in to whatever thing comes popping into the mind.” You’ve got to be responsible. You’ve got to be persistent. You’ve got to put effort into this. You’ve got to be mindful to remember what you need to do and what you really have learned from your many years of experience.

Develop the members that are focused, the members that are discerning. These are the strengths in your mind. These are the committee members that you really want to encourage. These are the ones that do best when you’re not just watching TV shows in the mind, watching old movies in the mind. They’re the ones that are strengthened when you learn how to deconstruct those thought worlds.

So learn how to step back, take the larger view, have a larger perspective. It’s not just you in there, it’s not just you in the world. Taking that larger perspective is what helps to sort everything out as to what’s really important and what really needs to be done, so that you don’t spend your life watching old movies and then suddenly find that the plug is pulled and you don’t know what to do.

If you’ve been watching the process, you’ll know precisely what to do. That’s one of the reasons the Buddha teaches us to train the mind, because if the mind isn’t trained, it’s just going to give in to its old drives as it tries to find another life, and then another life, and then another one. We meditate and focus right here because the processes that lead to this constant wandering on are in operation right here, right now.

Sometimes we’re told that all we have to do is focus on the present moment, that we don’t have to think about the Buddha’s teachings on other lifetimes. But if you don’t understand the impact that your choices in the present moment have, both now and over the long term, your understanding of the present moment is not going to be deep enough. Your understanding of how deeply you have to dig to root things out is going to be pretty superficial.

So even though we’re focusing here primarily on the present moment, the ripple effect goes out into the future. Even though you’re training your own mind, the ripple effect from the training goes out to other people. So make sure that it’s for the good.