What We’re Here to See

It’s a very basic principle that we learn by doing. If you want to learn about the mind, you have to give the mind something to do, but you want that something to be very focused here in the present so that you can observe the machinations of the mind clearl.

This is why we bring it to the breath. The task at hand now is to develop concentration around the breath, or if you don’t like the word concentration, just think of the mind being centered in the breath, dwelling in the breath

Notice when you breathe in where it’s clearest. Focus your attention there and try to keep it there. The fact that you’re trying to keep it there gives you something to measure its movements against—because it will move. That’s been its habit for who knows how long. But all too often it moves without really being clear about which direction it’s going, and where it’s been.

It’s like a hobo hopping trains. You hop from this train to that train, this train to that train, and you end up off in Siberia someplace. And it’s hard to track which train led where, how many trains there were between the train here in California and the train in Siberia.

That’s because the mind doesn’t have anything clear to measure itself against. But here we’ve got the breath. When you’re with the breath, you know you’re in the present moment, so you try to observe: What are the stages in getting the mind to settle down?

The Buddha says you’re going to use some directed thought and evaluation, and this is nothing new. It’s not like you have to suddenly invent directed thought and evaluation. The mind’s doing that all the time. It’s its basic way of conversing with itself: You choose the topic and then you comment on it.

In this case, the topic is the breath, and the issue is getting the mind to stay with the breath. Then you comment on how well they’re going together, what you might do to make them go together better. So you experiment with different ways of breathing. When you find something that feels good, stick with it, but don’t clamp down on it. Just follow it very consistently, and when it feels solid enough or steady enough, then think of it spreading so that you feel like you’re surrounded by good breath energy. Your awareness fills the body. There will be a strong sense of refreshment, and a sense of pleasure and ease—that’s the direction you want to go.

But watch out for the pleasure and ease because they can distract your attention from the breath. You’re there with the breath, you know they’re there, but you don’t leave the breath. Otherwise, it’s like driving down a road and you start seeing signs that you’re headed in the right direction. If you go driving on the signs you’ve lost your way. Stay on the road and the signs will keep pointing you in the right direction.

You’ll find that some days the mind settles down well, other days it doesn’t settle down quite so well—which is why you want to observe. The Buddha mentions this in his descriptions of dhammas as a frame of reference. You want to notice, when mindfulness isn’t present, how it can be made present; when concentration isn’t present, how it can be made present—you want to see the stages, see the steps—and when these things are present, what you can do to maintain them and develop them further.

At the same time, you have to watch out for the hindrances. It’s the same sort of thing; you want to see if there are no hindrances there, how does one come?

There are going to be stages in which a thought forms. And especially when you’re doing concentration, the thought will form and part of you will be involved in its formation, and part of you will be saying, “No, we can’t be doing this.”

So the first part hides what it’s doing from the second part—in other words, the mind starts lying to itself. As Ajaan Chah said, it’s one of the first things you notice about the mind as you really watch it: how much it lies to itself. It’ll do something and then pretend that it didn’t. Like a cat that walks across a fireplace mantle, knocks something off the mantle: It’ll sit down and it’ll groom itself as if nothing had happened.

Now, if your mind is easily distracted, you’ll be easily deceived. But if you stay with the breath continually, you begin to notice: A decision was made to leave as soon as possible. Then part of the mind hid it, but it’s hiding in plain sight.

You can make up your mind, “No. I’m going to undo that decision now, I’m not going to go.” There’ll be a back and forth, but as you get better and better at this, you’ll begin to see the stages by which the mind loses its focus on the breath, and you can nip that process in the bud.

At the same time, you can get to know the stages by which you can get back in concentration, so that if you’ve been distracted, you can get right back in. You don’t have to go back to square one. In fact, this is one of the signs of progress in concentration practice: your ability to get back into concentration, to know your spot, know the place where the mind likes to stay centered, know the quality of the breath you’re after, and you just do it.

For most of us, our evening meditation has a certain sort of ritual: the things we think about at the beginning of the session, then a gradual glide down to getting the mind in place, with some bumps here and there, and you finally land, settle in—five minutes before the hour is up.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Once you know where your spot is, you can go right there. Part of the mind will feel lost: “What do I do with myself when the mind is in concentration?” Well, maintain the concentration. Learn what’s needed to do that, learn what’s needed to prevent it from wandering off into any of the hindrances.

You’re learning about your own mind. You’re learning about the mind in action—and that should be fascinating. After all, here it is, this is what controls your life. It’s done a good job in some ways and a bad job in other ways, and here’s your chance to watch it, to understand it, to get some control over it so that it does better and better jobs. This should be where you’re an authority—your own mind, how it works.

But for most of us, it’s a huge blank. Like those old maps where they had just the coast lines and then big white spots in the middle: terra incognita, unknown lands. Well, you want to fill in those maps.

The lessons you’re going to learn may not come all at once, which is why this requires a lot of patience. Here, the image of a hunter is good: The hunter knows the places where the animals tend to be, and he has to get his tools all ready, and then go and then stay there, with no idea at all at what hour the animals will come, or from which direction. So he has to be alert all around, at the same time very still.

I talked with an anthropologist once, and he was talking about how the trend in anthropology over the past couple of decades has been that anthropologists going into another culture have to learn the skills of that culture if they’re really going to understand it, which is a wise policy.

But he said there’s one skill that no modern anthropologist can master, and that’s hunting. It requires qualities of mind that have been trained out of us in the modern world. But that quality of the hunter’s mind—patient, mindful, alert, concentrated, centered: That’s what we’re working on here. And fortunately we have some instructions, so it’s not hit or miss.

But we do have to learn how to know our own minds. The Buddha gives some sketches, basic principles, but how they apply to the particularities of your mind is something you’re going to have to find out for yourself. But again, this should be fascinating. You may say you don’t like your mind, well, here’s a good way to figure out exactly what you don’t like about it and to do something about it.

So when the mind gets quiet, there is work to be done, it’s going to be patient work and subtle work, but it’s a continuation of this fact that we’re working on a skill.

A lot of people come to the meditation hoping for technicolor visions, or the ability to do some astral travel. Especially now that we’re under lock-down for the virus, astral travel sounds kind of attractive. But that’s missing the point that we’re really working on a skill, and the most important thing you really want to know is not out there on the astral planes—it’s right here in the mind.

You want to fully inhabit your body, fully inhabit your mind if you’re going to know them. Only when you know them can you do something about them and this problem that they keep creating: You want happiness but you keep on doing things that cause suffering. Where’s the disconnect? Where’s the ignorance? Where’s the lack of skill? Well, it’s right here. It’s not in the deva levels, it’s not in the lower levels, it’s right here.

So learn to take the attitude that the mind may be a problem, but its workings can be really fascinating. And here’s your chance to spend time where you have nothing else that’s pressing on you, and you really can get to know your own mind and shape it into something that you would be happy to live with. The instructions are here, the basic principles are here, it’s just a matter of seeing how they apply to you. We’re not trying to clone someone else’s awakening. We’re trying to understand our own problems.

Think of that statement that Ajaan Fuang quoted from Ajaan Mun one time: “We’re all the same, but we’re all different. But when you come right down to it though, we’re all the same.” In other words, we all have the same basic problem: the suffering we’re causing. The details in how we do that are different, and different people are going to require emphasizing different themes in their meditation, exploring different issues as they come up, but then as your practice gains more and more of a mastery, then you’ll find that it settles back into the main points: the four noble truths, the teachings on fabrication.

So keep that framework in mind. But also remember you’re going to be discovering the details about your mind, and a lot of the insights you’re going to gain will be very personal. Still, if you can look at them from the perspective of that more universal framework, it takes a lot of the sting out of seeing some of the stupid things we’ve done. That way, we can actually deal with those stupid things in an intelligent way, in an effective way, in a way in which we find something that’s more than we expected—that it really is possible to put an end to suffering and find a happiness that’s totally blameless, totally changeless.

When the mind finds that, it’ll take on a new aspect. It’s not just the problematic old mind you’ve been living with, it’s a mind showing that it’s capable of a lot more.