Insight from Developing Concentration

Listen to the instructions for breath meditation. Make up your mind you’re going to maintain one intention. You’re going to pay attention to the breath. You’re going to make it consistent so that you can observe how to breathe in a way that gives rise to a feeling of pleasure.

Ajaan Lee recommends that you use, not the perception of air coming in and out of the lungs, but the perception of the energy in the body as your main focus. Think of the breath as going throughout the body, the energy throughout the body. Hold that perception in mind.

Note the words in those instructions: attention, intention, feeling, perception. Those are mental actions that come under the factor of name, in name and form, part of dependent co-arising. What you’re doing is learning how to look at mental events on that level, in those terms. This is priming you to see the processes that can lead to becoming simply as processes.

As you maintain this perception of the breath, it’ll lead to a state of becoming—a skillful one: concentration. You’re inhabiting the body. There’s a sense of you in here in the world of the body. But you’re doing this in such a way that the processes leading up to becoming are transparent. Most of the time they’re not. Yet now you think of your distractions as distractions when you’re trying to get the mind concentrated. You’ve made up your mind you’re going to stay here.

But part of the mind is going to play traitor—or parts of the mind will play traitor. They make an agreement: As soon as your mindfulness slips, your alertness lapses, they’re going to go. Sometimes they’ll go for whatever comes up. Sometimes they have a particular thought in mind that they want to go into. It’s almost as if a curtain comes down on your mind and then you’re off someplace else. You’ve fallen into the thought world. The appearance of the thought world there is becoming. And your going into it is birth.

You want to be able to catch yourself doing these things. Otherwise, your concentration is destroyed. But you can learn both from the process of getting the mind into concentration and from managing to say No to those distractions.

Each time a distraction comes up and you catch the fact that you’ve left the world of the concentration and entered another world, you can decide to drop that world and go back to the breath. You have to make up your mind that you’re going to be quicker and quicker at sensing when the mind slips off, until you sense the point where it’s still with the breath but it’s already looking for another place to go.

The image I like to use is of an inchworm. It comes from the edge of a leaf and it starts waving around, looking for another leaf to hop onto. Another leaf comes by when the breeze blows, and it’s gone. It’s on another leaf. But that period when it’s halfway on the leaf and halfway searching for something else: You want to be able to catch the mind quickly before it goes anywhere.

You can start asking yourself: What is it that makes those parts of the mind want to go? Is it a particular perception? A particular intention? Again, you’re thinking in terms of name, which is one of the big factors in dependent co-arising.

Dependent co-arising is one of those topics that you could talk about for days and days without coming to the end of it, but one of the most important things to notice about it is the number of factors that come prior to sensory contact.

As we’re dealing in concentration, getting the mind to settle down like this, those are the factors we’re paying most attention to. As you think in these terms and get the mind prepared so that when there’s a slight stirring that could turn into a thought world, you’re there. You sense it before it turns into a thought world, before it turns into a state of becoming. That way, you can abort the whole process.

Sometimes it seems just to be a little knot or tangle of energy someplace in the breath-energy field. So you breathe right through it. You can think of using a comb to untangle that little knot—whatever image you find helps to disperse that tangle of energy.

Then you’re like a spider in the center of a web. An insect comes, hits the web, you go over there, take care of it, and then you come back to your center. Another one comes, you take care of that, go back to your center. In this way, the mind can stay and not get sucked into the worlds of what those little insects might be.

It’s in this way that concentration leads to discernment. You’re getting the mind to look at events within it, not in terms of what you like or don’t like, but simply in terms of what they are as processes. If you’re going to get good at concentration, you have to construct a state of stillness. For that, you have to think about attention and intention and perception and feeling that contribute to that state of stillness. At the same time, you have to fend off any other intentions or acts of attention that might go someplace else.

This is something you see in the instructions in right mindfulness.

You’ve got two activities, and with both you have to be ardent, alert, and mindful. On the one hand, you keep track of one thing, like the breath, on its own terms. On the other hand, you’re also putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world—in other words, when there’s any other thought having to do with any thought world, aside from the world of concentration, you’ve got to say No.

It’s in saying No to those thought worlds that you strengthen your concentration at the same time that you get to see how those thought worlds are constructed.

It’s like watching a movie being made. You see all the tricks they employ in order to create certain impressions on the film. And you realize how much make-believe goes on.

Ajaan Suwat commented one time that the Pali word saññā—perception—in Thai also means agreement. There are these agreements that the mind makes as it labels and gives meaning to things. It’s as if one part of the mind wants to play make-believe, and other parts of the mind are willing to play along. Everybody inside you voluntarily contributes to the illusion, whatever the illusion may be. And that’s what these thought worlds are: They’re illusory. They’re totally made up. They come from past karma but they’re also involved with your present karma, what you’re doing right now, what you choose to pay attention to or not pay attention to.

You start seeing where their allure is. Again, a lot of the allure has to do with what you are and are not paying attention to. You see this in sexual fantasies. There are certain parts of the body that you pay a lot of attention to, and other parts that you would rather not think about at all. This is why contemplation of the body, in terms of its 32 parts, is an effective exercise in attention and perception—making you pay attention to things that would help counteract the lust, and hold on to perceptions that would help counteract the lust. That can bring you back to getting the mind into concentration again.

So whether the mind is concentrated, or whether it’s saying No to its distractions, either way you’re learning a lot about the factors of name.

This is how you start seeing dependent co-arising in what you’re doing right here, right now. So it’s not the case that, to gain discernment, you totally leave concentration and start doing a different vipassana technique. As the Buddha said, if you want to gain insight into things, you have to get the mind in jhana. If you want tranquility, you have to get the mind in jhana. Both tranquility and insight come from getting the mind properly concentrated through right mindfulness and right view.

You’re not just gobbling down the pleasure, or like that horse in the analogy that just thinks, “fodder, fodder, fodder” as it’s eating its fodder. You’re stepping back and you’re thinking about things, as the mind is still.

Ajaan Lee’s image is of holding on to a post with one hand or two hands, and then running around the post. As long as your grip on the post is firm, you can run around as much as you like and you don’t get dizzy.

In other words, the thinking that surrounds concentration is an actual part of getting the mind properly settled, ardent, alert, mindful—in such a way that you can gain both the pleasure of the concentration and insight into the workings of the mind that can come only when the mind is really still.

So don’t worry about when you have to do samatha practice or when you have to do vipassana practice. Work on getting the mind into right concentration and you can have the stillness and the insight working together. That’s the kind of concentration that can lead to release.