Develop Your Inner Observer

“The mind is luminous”—that’s what the Buddha said one time—“and it’s defiled by incoming defilements,” which means the defilements don’t have to stay there. He says it’s because the mind is luminous that it can be developed. That means that when he’s talking about the luminous mind, he’s not talking about the awakened mind. He’s not saying that our nature is awakened or already pure.

If something’s to be developed, it’s part of the path. It’s not the goal. What the Buddha is talking about when he says “luminous” is the mind’s ability to observe itself. We want to make use of that as we practice. It’s part of the training from the very beginning.

As the Buddha said, the Dhamma is nourished by commitment and reflection. You do what’s required by the path and then you reflect on how well it’s going. And a large part of what you’re doing is learning how to train that ability to reflect well. That’s where the luminosity comes in.

The Buddha started with his instructions to Rahula, basically telling him to act only on skillful intentions. That’s the commitment part.

Then, as he’s doing his actions and after they’re done, he should reflect on the results. If he sees any harm coming up while he’s doing the action, he should stop. If he sees no harm, he can continue. If, after the action is done, he sees that he caused some harm, he resolves not to repeat the mistake. If he sees no harm, he takes joy in that fact and continues training. This is how you perfect your ability to reflect.

Most people use their ability to reflect in some fairly unskillful ways. A lot of us have an inner critic who’s pretty merciless—but also pretty dumb. It may be clever in pointing out ways in which you’ve been deficient, but for what purpose? It picked up the voices of who knows who—people who have criticized you in the past, parents, teachers, friends—and they all gang up on you. As you come here to meditate, you have to ask yourself, “What do they know?” When you’re training the mind through virtue, concentration, and discernment, you’re going into territory that most of them never knew before. So you’ve got to train your inner critic to actually be helpful as you train in these skills.

Some people say they just want to get rid of their inner critic. But if you don’t have the ability to reflect, you’re not going to get anywhere on the path. It’s only through reflection that we notice where we can still improve, and we can come up with ideas of how we can improve. So listen to what the Buddha has to say about how to talk to yourself.

The more I go through the Canon, the more I see him saying, “Train yourself this way: ‘We should train ourselves: “We will do this.” We’ll train ourselves: “We will do that”’ or ‘I will try to do this,’ ‘I will try to do that.’” That’s how you talk to yourself. And it’s not just in the beginning stages, as when Rahula was told to ask himself about “this action I want to do,” “this action I’m doing,” “this action I’ve done.” When the Buddha is talking about developing discernment, developing mindfulness as a governing principle, he has you say, “I will try to develop any discernment that I haven’t developed yet. And when I have developed discernment, I’ll try to maintain it”—“I”, “I,” “I.” You’re responsible for what you’re doing.

Even when you train yourself that “I will try to dwell in the utmost emptiness,” there’s still an “I” in that determination. That’s the “I” of the inner commentator.

And as you’re training the inner commentator, you’re also training your ability simply to observe, because a wise commentator doesn’t just keep jumping to conclusions. The wise commentator will stop and watch for a while. That ability just to watch, with a minimum of commentary: That’s a useful skill. It’s a level of consciousness that we’re trying to develop. It plays a really important role in concentration practice. You get the mind still, and then you watch—because if you start jumping to conclusions or getting impatient, you can ruin the concentration and you don’t gain any knowledge.

So your ability to get to this “knower” inside—what the Thais call, phoo roo, or awareness itself—is an important part of developing your ability to reflect. But it is conditioned.

Some people mistake it and say, “This must be the unconditioned mind.” Well, any consciousness that has an object is conditioned by the object. Consciousness may seem to be continuous, but that’s because moments of consciousness blend very easily into one another. We tend to glom them together. But each time the object changes, that’s a different moment of consciousness.

So we’re developing this quality of the luminosity of the mind, the mind’s ability to observe itself, as we use it to reflect. When we’re not sure about what to think about what’s going on, we just get very quiet.

We can get through a lot of the suffering that we’ve caused ourselves simply by learning this skill. Think about the Buddha’s instructions about harsh speech coming into the ear. Just tell yourself, “An unpleasant sound has made contact at the ear,” and that’s it. Anything beyond that is your elaboration on that sound. The actual contact with the ear may have ended a long time ago, but if it’s still reverberating in your mind, that’s the sign of an untrained commentator.

The trained commentator stops. He says, “Anything beyond that contact, I’m responsible for. So why am I doing this to myself?”

This is where we get to the question we had this morning about seeing things in terms of the four noble truths. The four noble truths provide a framework for how to look at things so that we can stop suffering.

Now, we may have other purposes: We may be looking at things in terms of how to maintain our self-image, how to maintain what we see as our image in the society we inhabit, how to settle scores. Those are all different frames of reference, different ways of looking at things with different purposes. Most of these purposes are ways to keep samsara going along.

The Buddha is offering us another frame, teaching our ability to reflect, to look at things, for the purpose of ending suffering. That’s a very different thing. So you have to ask yourself, “What is your purpose in talking to yourself? What is your purpose in practicing?” Train your commentator in the direction of the four noble truths, seeing the extent to which you’re burdening your own mind and you don’t have to.

So we start with this luminous mind, this ability to observe, and we try to develop it, both in getting down to the mere act of consciousness and also in seeing the different ways we go beyond that mere act of consciousness—and we don’t have to. This luminosity is a quality to be developed, which means it’s part of the path, which further means it’s conditioned and fabricated. But it’s a really useful thing to fabricate.

The more sensitive you get to how the mind fabricates, even on the bare level of bare awareness, the more likely you are to get the mind inclined to want to find something that goes beyond this, something that’s not fabricated.

But in the meantime, work on developing this skill, because it helps you sort out a lot of things in the mind—in terms of comprehending suffering, abandoning its cause, developing the path so that you can realize the cessation of suffering. All the duties of the noble truths are contained right here.

Or they should be contained right here. I mean, you can commit and reflect around all kinds of things. But if you can commit and then reflect in terms of the four noble truths, that’s something special.