True Friends & False

Take a few deep, long in-and-out breaths, and notice where you feel the breathing. You may feel it in the chest, down in your abdomen, anywhere you feel the motion of the body that brings the air into the lungs. Allow your attention to settle there. It’s easy to get there, but not necessarily easy to stay. It’s the staying, though, that makes all the difference. You can focus on the breath for a few seconds and it doesn’t seem remarkable, it doesn’t seem special, so you move off to something else. But the mind needs a place to stay if you’re going to see what’s what in your mind and what’s what in the world around you. You need this sense of settling in, a place where you can stay comfortably.

Now in the beginning, the body may not be all that comfortable, so try to adjust the breath to see if you can make it more comfortable. You might try shorter breathing or more shallow, heavier, lighter. Experiment for a while to see what kind of breathing feels good.

And take an interest in this, because the effect that the breath has on the body is important. A lot of traditional medicine in Asia focuses on the breath energy in the body as an important element in your health, which means that if you breathe in a way that’s good for the body, it’ll have all kinds of good effects. And it turns out that comfortable breathing—energizing and relaxing at the same time—is the kind of breath that’s best for you. It’s also a good breath to settle down with, because as you create a greater sense of ease and well-being in the body, it’s easier to stay here.

There may be pains in different parts of the body, but for the time being you have to learn how not to get worked up about them, not to pay them any attention. Pay attention to the areas that you can make comfortable. Ajaan Lee’s image is of going into a house where you know that some of the floorboards are rotten. If you’re going to lie down on the floor, you don’t lie down on the rotten spots. You lie down on the spots that are sound. In the same way, even though you may not be able to make the whole body comfortable, try to find at least one part of the body that you can make comfortable.

At the same time, you have to be careful about this sense of ease, because if it’s too small, it’s very easy for you to drift off. Things feel comfortable, the breath feels nice, and everything becomes a blur. That’s why it’s important to be aware of as much of the body as you can. If you can manage being aware of the whole body from the top of the head down to the toes, so much the better. Try to keep your range of awareness as broad as possible, because you have to watch out both for the pleasure and for the pain.

One of the things we learn in the meditation is that there are uses for pleasure and uses for pain, but they’re like nasty little animals. You really have to have a lot of control over them if you’re going to get the most use out of them. Otherwise, they’re going to turn around and control you. In other words, the pain will force you to do things that you know are wrong, but you hate the pain, so you’ll do anything to get rid of the pain or to run away from the pain or to deny the pain. And you’ll do anything you want to run toward the pleasure.

You can’t take these things as your true friends or reliable friends until you develop the mindfulness and the alertness so that you can be in charge. So you have to be aware that both pleasure and pain have their good side and their bad side, and you’re trying to develop that stillness of mind and the clarity of mind that allow you to see exactly how much you can trust the pain, how much you can’t, how much you can trust the pleasure, and how much you can’t, where you have to be wary of them.

With pain, eventually you’re going to be looking into the pain to try to understand: Why does pain have so much power over the mind? And the same with the pleasure: Why does pleasure have so much power over the mind? You want to look into these things so that eventually you can get beyond their power. But in the meantime, before you can get to that point, you’ve got to develop this foundation where you can watch things carefully.

And it’s good to listen to the Dhamma, too. This is why we have Dhamma talks during the meditation. Because if the Dhamma isn’t here to listen to, you’re going to start listening to your own opinions: “I like this, I don’t like that”—whatever the mind has to say. An important part of the meditation is to get out of your own mind, to get out of your own opinions for a while. Take a fresh look at them.

This is one of the reasons why we have communities of people practicing together. If you’re left on your own, just to your own devices, it’s just you that you’re hearing. And it’s very easy to believe yourself, whether what your mind is telling you is right or wrong. If that’s all you’re hearing, it becomes reality.

This is also why the Buddha said, when you’re starting to practice, you really have to be careful about who you stay with, who you take on as your friends. It’s bad enough that you have unskillful thoughts in your mind, but if you hang around with other people with unskillful thoughts, those unskillful thoughts become stereo. They’re all around you. That makes them seem even more real.

We see books on meditation, CDs on meditation, these talks you’re listening to make it sound like meditation is just something you can stick into your life as it’s lived already, and will have a magic effect like yeast. It’ll turn everything into something wonderful. Meditation can have that effect to some extent, but it’s got to have the right environment. As the Buddha said, the number one right environment is finding someone who’s also on the path, experienced on the path, someone who lives and speaks the values of the path, so that when you bounce ideas off that person, there’ll be some that they don’t just bounce back. They’ll let you know that this is right, this is not right.

At the same time, you’re around their habits. You want to be around someone with good habits, because we pick up the habits and the attitudes of the people we stay with. They seep into our awareness.

So take a good look at the people you hang around with. Are they really helping you, or are they your own worst enemies? Do they reinforce your unskillful thoughts, or do they try to reinforce your skillful ones? This is something really important, because just as you have enemies and friends inside your own mind, or friends that are not real friends inside your own mind, like that chant we had just now, they’re both inside and out, these friends who are non-friends. If your outside friends are non-friends, that’s going to reinforce the non-friends inside your own mind. So even though you may be able to get the mind really still, the attitudes you’re carrying around, the things you tell yourself, are going to come under the influence of the unskillful side.

So this is something you have to be very careful about when you make choices in life about where you’re going to stay, where you’re going to do your work. You really have to look at the people that you’re going to be with, because you’re going to be picking up their habits, picking up their attitudes. It takes a really experienced meditator to be able to resist that kind of stuff.

When your meditation is still tender, you’ve got to protect it, because the state of your mind is the most important thing in your life. Eventually you have to let go of the body, you have to let go of all the things you experienced in this life. And all you have left is the state of your mind, plus the record of all the things you’ve chosen to do in this lifetime. That gets imprinted on the mind as habits, attitudes. Your mind is your most important treasure, so you want to treat it well. You have to be very careful with it, because not only do things outside that have a negative impact on the mind, you’ve got unskillful habits in here as well.

It’s like having a garden, and some of the plants in the garden are weeds, some of them are poisonous. The garden may be your source of food, the source of flowers that give beauty to your life, but you really do have to be selective. This is why “cultivation” is one of the terms they use for meditation. You’re cultivating the good habits in your mind. That means having to weed out the bad ones.

So try to find the right environment to do that. Create it as much as you can in your own life. When you have the choice, be very careful about the people you hang around with, either as your friends or as your co-workers and colleagues. You may be in a situation where you can’t choose your co-workers. In cases like that, you have to be very careful about how much you open up to these people, both in the sense of opening up to their ideas and opening up your ideas to them. But in areas where you can choose, try to use as much wisdom as you can manage. As you sort out the true friends outside, it helps you sort out the true friends inside. You start recognizing your false friends inside as well.

This may involve making sacrifices in your life. There are situations where you could benefit materially from certain friendships, but again, what kind of person are you going to become? That’s the question the Buddha has you ask: “Days and nights are flying past, flying past. What am I becoming as they fly past?” What you’re becoming has a lot to do with how you sort out the true friends and false friends inside, and the true friends and false friends outside.

So it helps to have this place to settle down with the breath so that you can step back from your own thoughts and step back from events outside and have an independent place to watch, from which you can watch all the things around you and all the things inside you, to gain some freedom and independence from them.