Something Good to Cling to

The mind has a habit, which is that it likes to cling. That’s how we’re born in the first place. Your mind couldn’t stay in the old body, and so it just hung on to its craving to find a new one. Depending on your karma, you had different options. For one reason or another, you chose this body. That’s how you got here. And for most of us, that’s how we keep on living: just clinging, clinging, clinging to things, trying to find something we can hold on to because so many things in life just keep passing away. Our problem is that we’re not very selective in how we cling. Anything can pass. Sometimes things we don’t like at all, we just hold on to. The mind feeds off these things.

One of the purposes of the practice is to give you a better place to feed. Its ultimate purpose is to get you so strong that you don’t need to feed anymore, but you’re not going to get to that spot unless you learn how to feed wisely. Like right now, as we’re meditating, we focus on the breath in the present moment and see what we can do to make it comfortable, to have a sense of well-being right here. The pleasure of the breath may not be all that great, but the pleasure of a mind that’s able to settle down in a place that it knows is harmless and blameless: That’s a great pleasure.

Otherwise, we’re trying to sit down in places that are like hot stoves. You sit down on one burner and you have to jump right up, you sit down on another one and jump right up. Sometimes you don’t realize how it’s heating up—like the case of the frog they put in the water that gradually gets hotter and hotter. Suddenly, you’ve got to jump. And the mind that’s jumping all the time is not going to find any peace. Often it lands just any old place. It finds that it’s trying to hold on to things and feed on things that are actually going to make it sick. So you jump again.

But when the mind can stay in one place with a sense of well-being and have a sense that this is your place, then it can relax some of its tension, some of its tightness, and have a sense that it can spread out in style. This is a good place to hold on to.

There’s an analogy that Ajaan Chah gives: You’re carrying a banana back from the market and someone asks you, “Why are you carrying the banana?” And you say, you’re planning to eat it. They say, “Why are you carrying the peel too? Are you going to eat that, too?” You need the peel, because otherwise the banana is going to turn into mush in your hand. So even though the peel is not what you’re after, it’s a necessary part of getting what you’re after, which is enjoying the banana at the time you want it.

The same with the path. We hold on to the concentration, we hold on to the practice of generosity, virtue, we hold on to our discernment, because these things enable us to strengthen the mind and give us a good place to stay as other things in the world come and go, so that as the other things that we tend to hold on to and we tend to cling to begin to fall away, we have a safe place we can go back to. We have an option. If the mind hasn’t been trained, it has no options. It just jumps.

So work on making this a place that you can hold on to consistently. Try to get to know the breath. Listen to the body’s needs and what it needs in terms of breath energy, and try to provide it. And see which parts of the body you’re neglecting. Give them some energy, too, so that there’s an all-around sense of well-being. Just be careful, though, that you don’t leave the breath to go to the sense of ease.

That’s how delusion concentration happens. Delusion concentration is when you’re still, but you’re not really quite sure where you are or what you’re focused on. You come out of it and you’re not really sure whether you were asleep or awake. It wasn’t quite asleep, but it wasn’t quite awake either. The mind was in a blur. That’s because it left the breath to go to the pleasure. So stay with the sensation of the breathing, even as it gets subtle. The subtler it gets, the more you have to spread your awareness around so that you have a sense of the body as a whole, from the top of the head down to the soles of the feet.

This is your place. This is your frame. Even if the breath grows still, have a sense of the full body being still. Stay with that stillness. This way, you’ve got a foundation that you can stand on, a place where you can rest, a place that gives you shelter. It’s the floor for your mind, the roof for your mind, and the walls all around you. When you’ve got a good place to stay like this, why go wandering out and going dumpster diving? That’s what a lot of us do in our lives. We just go for whatever trash is out there. This way you can get more selective.

So give yourself this option. Make it something you can depend on. That helps you develop the strengths that are needed, starting with the strength of conviction that, yes, your actions really do make a difference. And because they make a difference, you have to be very careful about the mind, because actions come from the mind.

Persistence: sticking with what you know is skillful, trying to let go of what’s not.

Mindfulness: The Buddha singles this out as being one of the main refuges you can take. In other words, you learn lessons from your practice, you learn lessons from listening to the Dhamma and reading it, and you try to keep those lessons in mind as you practice. That’s it. Not that you’re going to keep all the books and all the talks in the mind all at once, but whatever is relevant to being with the breath, keep that near at hand. When you’ve internalized the message of the Dhamma, the lessons of the Dhamma, that gives you something with which you can argue with the crazy voices in your mind.

In fact, all three qualities that go into mindfulness—mindfulness, alertness, ardency—are ones you really need to make yourself dependable. In other words, you have to see what you’re doing, you have to remember what it means to do well, act skillfully in the present, and maintain the desire to do it well. These are the qualities of the mind that you can depend on.

As you strengthen them, they turn into the factors of jhana. The mind settles down and has a sense of well-being right here in a centered state of concentration. This is the strength that the Buddha compares most often with food.

As the mind settles down and it gets clear, then you start asking the right questions. As long as the mind is hungry, its main questions are going to be: Where is the nearest food? Where is the next meal going to be? Once you’re well-fed, though, then the questions are: How is all this causing unnecessary stress and suffering?

That’s the focal point of the Buddha’s teachings right there. His message for us is that the reason we suffer is not so much from other people, it’s from what we do. Other people may be really bad, but if the mind is well-trained, it doesn’t have to suffer from that.

So what is the mind doing? What is it telling itself right now? Can you see where your suffering is in this tendency to cling, to feed on things that are not worth feeding on, things that are actually poisonous? Can you see why you’re doing that? What’s the cause?

What’s the craving that’s driving that? Can you abandon the craving? The only way to do that is to say No to it, because craving has lots of tricks. When you go along with it, you have no idea what its tricks are. But when you start saying No to it, it’s going to resist. It’s going to put up arguments. At first it doesn’t put up clear arguments, but after a while, if you’re persistent enough, and say, “I’m not going to go with that,” it’s going to start screaming and yelling. Then you listen to that. And if you have a good, solid place to stay, you can listen to it and not get persuaded by its screams or its whispers or however it presents its message.

Then you see that you’re being driven around by something that really doesn’t have any good reasons. And because you’re already well-fed, it’s a lot easier to let go of that craving. So the Buddha doesn’t just tell you, let go, let go. He gives you places to hold on to so you can let go of the things that are obviously unskillful and then strengthen the mind until it gets to the point where it doesn’t need to hold on to anything at all. That’s when there’s really no suffering.

At the same point, that’s where we can really depend on ourselves. As long as you’re hoping to cling, you’re not reliable. If you’re clinging to unreliable things, the mind itself becomes unreliable. So give yourself a good place to stay right here. This makes it a lot easier to live in the world without suffering from the world. And because we’re not leaning on the world, we’re taking that much of a burden off them, too.