Events as Events

When you establish mindfulness, the Buddha says that you focus on the body in and of itself, putting aside all greed and distress with reference to the world. The body in and of itself means precisely that—not the body in the world, but just the body as you have it right here. The body in the world would be thinking about the body in terms of whether it’s good-looking to other people or whether it can do the work required by the world. In other words, you see it in the context of the world outside.

Here we’re dropping that context and giving the mind a new context: just the body right here, what’s appearing right now. In this case, it’s the breath. If you focus on the breath coming in and going out, it’s an instance of what they call the wind element, the energy that flows through the body. Address it on its own terms. Does it feel good? Does it not feel good? If it doesn’t feel good, you can change it. As the Buddha said, the breath is the factor that has the most influence on your sense of the body as you feel it from within. So take some time to look at it on its own terms and don’t drag other issues in to interfere.

When you look at things on these terms, they get a lot simpler, and it’s a lot easier to see what your duties are. As soon as you think of things in terms of the world, there are duties that the world imposes on you. When there’s a sense of you in that world, you start thinking about what you like and what you don’t like. The duties you follow tend to be the duties of your likes and dislikes, or the world’s likes and dislikes, which have no guarantee of taking you anywhere good. You know how arbitrary and fickle your likes and dislikes can be. Today you like one thing, tomorrow you don’t, and then you start liking it again. The same with the likes and dislikes of the world. But the duties the Buddha gives you are constant and unchanging. And they’re not imposed on you. He’s simply saying that if you want to put an end to suffering, this is what you’ve got to do.

First, you get the mind really still, and then you look at what’s going on in your experience of the body and the mind here in the present, on their own terms—on the terms of the body, on the terms of the mind, events in the mind, events in the body: what the Buddha calls, on the one hand, name and form, and on the other hand, consciousness. Consciousness is your awareness. Form is your sense of the body as you feel it from within, in terms of earth, water, wind, fire, or solidity, liquidity, energy, warmth. Name refers to mental events: feelings, perceptions, intentions, acts of attention, and contact among these things. You want to learn how to be with these things just on their own terms, instead of thinking of this as “my body” or “my mind” or “my awareness.” It’s just awareness, mental events, and physical phenomena right here.

When you look at them on those terms, it’s a lot easier to realize what you can do about them. In particular, when you get to acts of attention and acts of intention, there are skillful ones and unskillful ones. Your perceptions can be skillful or unskillful. Whether they’re skillful or not has nothing to do with whether you like them or not. It has a lot to do with where they’re going to take you. When you look at them on those terms—how they appear, how they condition the mind, how they condition the body—it’s a lot easier to get the duties right. Wherever there’s a sense of stress or suffering, you try to comprehend it to see what it is that you’re clinging to. When you see what you’re clinging to, you figure out what’s causing you to cling, and that’s craving. You comprehend the clinging and try to abandon the craving so that you can realize the end of suffering through the end of craving. You do that by developing the path, everything from right view all the way through right concentration.

When you look at things in these terms, it’s a lot easier to do the right duty because it’s pretty obvious. A certain perception has an effect on the breath, or a certain way of paying attention to the breath will have an effect on it, and you see that the effect is either good or bad. If it’s good, you can develop it. If it’s bad, you let it go and replace it with something else.

When the Buddha talks about things like name, form, and consciousness, he’s not talking about abstractions far away. He’s talking about your direct experience right here. Simply remove the sense of “I,” “me,” or “mine” for the time being, and just look at these things as events. If you look at them as yours, then that creates a different set of duties. The duty becomes to develop what you like and abandon what you don’t like. But as I said, your likes are pretty fickle, so you can’t take them as reliable. Try to stay with these things on their terms, and you begin to see how they interact with one another.

In dependent co-arising, the Buddha says that name and form depend on consciousness, and consciousness depends on name and form. You can interpret this on many different levels. On the level of rebirth, if there’s no physical basis for the new being to take birth, then even if there’s a consciousness, the consciousness has no place to land. Or if there are the physical requisites for name and form, but there’s no consciousness coming in, name and form have no place to stand. It’s the combination of the two that allows a new being to take birth. That’s on the level of rebirth.

But these events are also happening right here, right now. Consciousness is the simple fact that you’re aware of things going on in the body, aware of things going on in the mind. If it weren’t for that consciousness, there’d be no knowledge of these things at all. At the same time, if these things—like mental events and physical events—were not happening, consciousness would have nothing to know. It wouldn’t have an object.

An image in the Canon is that you’ve got two sheaves of reeds, like two haystacks, leaning against each other. You pull one away, and the other one falls. You pull the other one away, and this one falls. Consciousness depends on name and form; name and form depend on consciousness. This is how we maintain our sense of the present moment. Building on the present moment, we can also create thoughts of past and future. But right now, we’re trying to keep away from getting involved in past and future. You want to just see what’s happening right here, right now, simply as events. If you add your sense of “you” to it all, then it becomes a state of becoming. For the time being, you don’t want to go there. You want to get used to seeing these things simply as events. When they’re simple events, you begin to see how ephemeral they are, how quick they are to change. You begin to wonder how you could think of building anything solid out of them at all.

But before you give up on them, try to build at least a state of concentration so that the mind can get settled and still, with a sense of well-being. When it has that sense of well-being, it can look at its old attachments, the old ways it had of thinking and looking, and realize, “Okay, that way of doing things actually causes stress, and I don’t have to do it.” When you realize that it’s stressful and unnecessary, why would you hold on? You don’t even have to think about inconstancy, stress, not-self. Just the fact that you realize that it’s not worth the effort: That’s when you let go. And because you’re letting go simply of events, rather than thinking that you’re letting go of something that’s a part of you, it’s a lot easier to let it go.

Learn how to look at things on these terms, simply as events: mental events, and physical events. The less you get invested in them, the easier it is to let go of the unskillful ones, to develop what’s skillful, and then ultimately to let go of what’s skillful, too. But you don’t want to do that until things are really solid. When the Buddha has you let go, it’s not as if he’s going to set you adrift. He has you let go of things that are going to cause disappointment, and when you let go, you find yourself in a place where there is no disappointment. He’s treating you well, much better than you’ve been treating yourself.

So have some trust in this process. You realize that when the Buddha is talking about these things, he’s not talking about far-distant abstractions. He’s talking about what appears in the present moment when the mind gets really still, and your sense of your self can begin to fall into the background. You see events as events, and whether they should be developed or let go. Then you’re following the right set of duties, the duties that have your best interests in mind.