Inconstancy

Try to keep your attention constantly with the breath, all the way in, all the way out. This is what makes the meditation special. Otherwise, you’re with the breath a little bit, and then you’re someplace else. Then back again, then someplace else. That’s the way your mind normally acts. Try to train it in new habits: the habit of staying, the habit of making a determination and sticking with it. So, stick with the breath, all the way in, all the way out, and again in and again out.

It’s best to make the breath comfortable. So, experiment for a while. You can try long breathing to begin with, to energize the body. As long as the body seems to need energizing, keep with it. But if it gets tiresome, then you can change: shorter, more shallow, heavier, lighter, faster, slower. Try to figure out what kind of breathing feels best for you right now. The best way to know that is to be here continually. It’s like watching a TV show. If you walk into the room and then walk out of the room, five minutes later come back; then walk out after five minutes and come back ten minutes later, you don’t really know what’s going on. You don’t know what connects with what.

In the same way, when you meditate, if you’re here for a little bit and then someplace else, then come back and go someplace else, you don’t see the connections. After all, the insights we’re trying to gain here are insights about what causes what, what conditions what. You can see those connections only if you watch continually. So try to be constant.

Of course, we’ve heard that the Buddha says all fabricated things are inconstant, stressful, not-self. But for the time being, you want to fight against those perceptions. Make your attention as constant as you can. Make the breath as pleasant as you can. Bring these things under your control. See how far you can go with that.

The Buddha says you can go quite far. You get into deep states of absorption, even into formless states: infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness. It can take you far, and it’s good to see how far you can go with it. When you hear about things being inconstant, stressful, not-self, and that being reason enough to let them go, if you haven’t tested the limits of how far constancy can take you, then you wouldn’t know for sure. If you want to make this knowledge your knowledge, you have to test it.

Now, the Buddha does teach the theme of inconstancy. There’s a passage where he’s teaching his son meditation, and even before he teaches him breath meditation or anything else, he teaches him, “Make your mind like earth, develop thoughts of goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity.” Then he teaches a couple of contemplations that are connected with insight: contemplation of the body, to overcome any sense of sensual desire for the body; and then contemplation of inconstancy, to get past the perception, “I am.”

The question is, why does the Buddha teach these things first? Well, you do have to do some preliminary clearing in the mind to be willing to settle down here. If you just tell it to be still, it’ll be still for a while. But if you don’t give it good reasons, it’s going to quickly find reasons of its own to wander off or to fall asleep. So anticipate the things that you might think about that might be getting in the way.

One of the big obstacles to concentration, the Buddha said, is sensuality. Now, sensuality doesn’t mean sensual pleasures, it means your fascination with thinking about sensual pleasures: which ones you want, which ones you’d like to get. You could spend the whole hour thinking about that if you wanted to.

But then you could ask yourself, the object of most sensual desire is the human body. And what is there in the human body? Suppose you took off the skin, what would there be? If you took off the different layers and spread them on the ground, you’d have a huge mess. And none of it would be very attractive. So why is it that when it’s all put back together, you can see it as attractive? The mind can easily lie to itself. When you realize the mind can lie to itself—and how much it does lie to itself—that’s good protection against distracting thoughts.

The same with thoughts of inconstancy: Whatever you can think of that would pull you away from the concentration, anything that you find attractive, anything you find compelling: Just how long is that attraction going to last? The things that seem to be entertaining: How long would they be entertaining? Think about food. Say you tell someone that your favorite food is x, and they just keep providing you with that x every day, every day, every day. Eventually, you come to hate x. So, given that your likes and dislikes are inconstant, why let them get in the way of your meditation? You’re going to be doing something much better here: getting the mind to settle in, getting the mind to be still enough so that it can understand itself.

So try to be here constantly. If you find yourself tempted to go off someplace else, just remind yourself that whatever it could be, it’s not going to last, you can’t really trust it. That’s why inconstant things are not desirable. The word anicca, which we’re translating as inconstant here, is sometimes translated as impermanent. I know a number of people who say that impermanent things are not necessarily bad. As the Buddha said, if something is anicca, it’s stressful. But say you’ve got an illness, and the illness goes away. It’s a good thing the illness is impermanent. So why is that stressful?

You have to realize the word anicca is the opposite of nicca. And nicca means constant. It’s something you do again and again and again, reliably. So if something is anicca, it’s inconstant, it’s unreliable. That helps you see the connection between anicca and dukkha, or stress and suffering. It’s because things are unreliable that you can’t trust them. You can’t really find any true happiness there. So you have to make yourself more reliable.

Years back, when I was with Ajaan Fuang, there was a person in Singapore who had received a copy of one of Ajaan Lee’s books, so he wrote to Ajaan Fuang, talking about his practice. He said that he tried to see everything as inconstant, stressful, not-self. When he was watching TV, driving along the road, every activity in his daily life, he tried to see it all in terms of these three perceptions: inconstant, stressful, not-self.

I read that to Ajaan Fuang, and he told me write back, “Don’t say things outside are inconstant, stressful, not-self. Turn around and look inside. See what it is that’s saying those things are inconstant, stressful, not-self. That’s the problem.” In other words, the mind’s inconstancy is the problem. We’re looking for happiness, and sometimes we get on the right track, but then we’re unreliable. We fall off the track. That’s the problem.

Everything that we experience in life has to go through our processing. We have raw materials coming in from past kamma, but we don’t experience them until they’re processed by kamma in the present moment. If our kamma in the present moment is unreliable, then even good things coming in from the past can turn into suffering.

So as we meditate, we’re not only letting go of inconstant things outside, we’re also trying to deal with the fact that the mind itself is unreliable. We’re trying to make it more reliable by being mindful, by being alert, by being ardent and sticking with this, sticking with the meditation—because if you want to find a reliable happiness in life, you have to be reliable.

What it comes down to, of course, is that the highest level of reliability would be nibbana. That’s something that doesn’t go through any processing in the mind. It’s unprocessed, you might say. Everything else in the world is processed. We talk about the problems with processed food, but the processed experiences of the mind are a lot worse, because they can make us suffer a lot more. Even when we process things relatively skillfully, they’re going to have to fall apart.

So we do our best to process this path, turning our thoughts, words, and deeds into the path, to the point where the path can deliver us to something that goes beyond the path. That’s the only way that reliable happiness can be found.

As best we can, we try to make our path reliable so that we can find that something that really is constant and is the highest happiness.

As for the question of self or not-self, it doesn’t really apply there anymore. Self is a strategy; not-self is a strategy. Both are strategies for the sake of happiness. When you get to the ultimate happiness, you don’t need strategies anymore. There you are. You’ve found something that doesn’t have to push against the perceptions of inconstancy, because it’s constant by nature.

This is what those three perceptions are for, as a measuring stick. When you arrive at something in the meditation that seems really good, you can ask yourself, “Is this really constant?” You have to watch it carefully because sometimes the higher levels of concentration can be very peaceful, very steady. But if you look steadily enough, you can see: “Oh, there’s some inconstancy there.” That means it can’t be the real thing. There’s some stress there, so it can’t be the real thing. It’s not worth claiming as you or yours. But when you find something that is constant and you test it again and again and again, and it holds up to the test, then you’ve found what you’re looking for. You don’t have to lay claim to it because no one else can take it away.