For Your Good & the Good of Others

Close your eyes and watch your breath all the way in, all the way out. Try to make your awareness of the breath as continuous as possible and think of it smoothing out any roughness in the breath, so that the breath feels good all the way in, all the way out. It can provide a good place for the mind to settle down with a sense of well-being.

We come to a quiet place like this to engage in this practice, not so that we can stay in a quiet place all the time, but so that we can have a skill to take out with us. You know that sign they have in national parks: Take only memories. When you leave here, take more than just a memory. Take a skill. This skill is good not only for you, but also for the people around you.

All too often we find ourselves in difficult situations and we can make a mess of those situations if we’re trying to feed off them. The mind is hungry for things to be this way, to be that way, and when they don’t go the way we want, we can create a lot of trouble because our desires get in the way. But to have a good sense of well-being that you can carry around inside is like food. When you’ve got good food inside, you don’t have to go stealing food from anyone else. When you’re not trying to feed off a situation outside, you can actually see it a lot more clearly and see what needs to be done. Otherwise, our sense of what we are and what we want gets in the way.

There’s an interesting passage where Ven. Sariputta comes out after a day of meditation. He tells the monks, “I was thinking today: Is there anything in the world whose change would get my mind upset? And I couldn’t think of anything.” Ven. Ananda happened to be there and he said, “But what if something happened to the Buddha? Wouldn’t that give you sorrow?” And Sariputta said, “No, I’d think it’s unfortunate that a person so beneficial for the world had to pass away. But that would be it.”

Ananda had an interesting response. He said, “It’s a sign you have no conceit.” It’s the “I am, I am” in situations like that that can create a lot of trouble. The less there is of that, the more easily you can see what needs to be done.

In other words, for too many of us, the issue of grief, say, is all about “me.” We’re losing someone else, but the “me” is the big issue. If you can take the “me” out, then you can start thinking about the other person. I saw this distinction really clearly when Ajaan Fuang passed away. He’d had an illness, and you could tell that he was not afraid of dying. So when his death came, there was nothing about him to be sorry about. I realized whatever sorrow there was, was all about me. That lesson has stayed with me ever since.

When there are difficult situations, it’s good that you have food outside of the situation so that you can see the situation clearly, see what needs to be done, what really would be a way of extending goodwill, acting in a way that increases the happiness of others or helps them find happiness more easily. In other words, you get yourself out of the picture, not by effacing yourself entirely, but by having an alternative source of well-being. Otherwise, you suffer from what Kurt Vonnegut called samaratrophia. You try to help, help, help, and then you just run out of energy. You burn out.

So for the good of the people around you, meditate. Try to get a sense of what it’s like to have the breath filling the body and a sense of well-being filling the body as well. Learn how to maintain that: first while you’re sitting here, then when you get up. See how you can maintain that balance of being aware of the world outside at the same time that you’re fully aware of the energy in the body. The greater the sense of fullness, the more consistent the sense of fullness, then the more it’s going to impress itself on you that this is something really valuable that you want to maintain in all situations. So learn how to appreciate it now.

All too many people don’t have a sense of the breath energy in the body. The body, as far as they’re concerned, is just a piece of matter, what the Buddha would call the earth element. It’s solid, there’s a little bit of liquid there, blood flowing through it, but for most people that’s pretty much it. See if you can learn how to sense the body as you feel it from the inside as a form of energy—because actually when you get down to it, that’s what it is to begin with. We place a shape on it, and we have to notice other things about it, and we add that to our sense of the body. But our initial impression of the body is of energy.

Try to get back to that level of immediate impression and look at the various sensations in the body as aspects of the breath. In some parts, the breath energy will be still; in other parts it’ll be moving. If it feels blocked or tight, it’s a sign that it’s not good breath energy. You can make a change in it. If you see the body simply as a lump of matter, there’s not much you can do about feelings of blockage. But if you realize it’s energy, energy can be teased out, straightened out. So work with it. Take an interest in what’s going on inside here, because again, it’s good for you, it’s good for the people around you. It gives you a good foundation for insight.

This is how we develop our discernment, realizing that there are resources inside that we haven’t developed. Instead of going out and laying blame on things outside, we try to fix what we’ve got inside. Ajaan Lee’s image is of having a piece of land you haven’t developed. If you go planting things on somebody else’s property, there are bound to be issues. But if you develop your own land, then you have your own food. Often, you’ll have more food than you can eat yourself, so you can share it with other people.

So realize you’ve got this resource here, you’ve got this potential right here. You’re sitting with potentials for well-being. It’s simply a matter of exploring those potentials so that you can get the most use out of them.

As for other thoughts that come in, use whatever discernment you have to deal with them. When I was staying with Ajaan Fuang, there was one point where he said, “Use your pañña.” That was back in the days when I thought pañña was best translated as wisdom. I said, “I don’t have any pañña, that’s why I’m here trying to meditate.” He said, “No, everybody already has pañña to some extent.”

It made me realize, okay, wisdom is not the best translation, at least not in his sense. The more I came to understand it, the more I realized it really was a quality of discernment on the one hand and ingenuity on the other—finding potentials that are harmless and right nearby, seeing things you didn’t see before: That’s the discernment part. And then coming up with solutions to problems: one, recognizing that the problem is there, and two, coming up with a solution. Giving it a try. That’s the ingenuity. Those are two qualities we have to develop all the way through the practice.

It’s not the case that you get your concentration perfect and then you start thinking about discernment. To get the concentration going requires some discernment. When you realize that this is better than the mind’s normal preoccupations, that involves some discernment right there, as does seeing that you don’t have to go following every thought that comes up randomly in the mind. The Buddha has some discernment he can lend to you. It’s there in the texts. His insights on constancy, stress, not self: Learn how to use them, even before these insights arise spontaneously in your meditation. As you go through life, borrow the Buddha’s wisdom, borrow the Buddha’s discernment. It’s not just wise sayings. It’s also techniques, strategies for dealing with all the different ways the mind creates suffering. Learn to think strategically as you get the mind to settle down.

Then once the mind has settled down, learn how to use that settled-down mind in a strategic way as well. It has lots of uses as you go through the world. It’s not just still. It’s still with a sense of well-being: pleasure when you need pleasure, rapture even when you need rapture. These potentials are right here, and they’re to be used.

When the Buddha says the middle way avoids the two extremes of self-torment and sensual pleasure, he’s not saying it’s a middling feeling of neutral okay. It can actually be a very strong sense of well-being as you get the concentration going. It’s middle in the sense that it doesn’t lie on the continuum between torture and sensual pleasure. It lies off the continuum entirely: a pleasure that’s good for the mind, a pleasure that’s good for other people, too. They may not be able to taste it directly, but when your mind is well-fed, as I said, it’s not going to run around nibbling on other people.

So learn how to make use of these potentials you’ve got. They’re there, and it’s simply a matter of using your discernment to develop them and get the most out of them.