Concentration Isn’t Dumb

There was one time when I was on my alms round at Wat Dhammasathit in Thailand. My mind had been very quiet for quite some time. A thought went through it, “This is stupid. You’re not thinking about anything. You’re not being intelligent about anything.” But then I reflected: Getting my mind to be quiet required a lot of figuring out. It required some intelligence. I’d learned many lessons about how important it was to get the mind quiet as an intelligent way of administering your mind, you might say. If you’re going to think, you want to have the mind rested so it can think clearly.

The images they give in Thailand are two. One is of a knife. If you keep using the knife over and over and over again without stopping to sharpen it and bathe it in oil, it gets dull. Then as you try to cut through things, nothing cuts, because it’s so dull. You have to take time out to sharpen the knife, and the next time something comes up you need to cut through—chop! There it is. It cuts right through. The mind is like that. It needs to be rested in order to think properly, in order to stay sharp.

The other image is of a motor. If you keep the motor running all the time, after a while it begins to run out of lubricant, begins to seize up, burns, and you’ve ruined the motor. The mind is like that, too. You need to take care of it. Give it time to rest. Otherwise, the thoughts that come out just get lower and lower and lower in quality.

So even though you’re not thinking very much when the mind is quiet, it’s actually part of a larger policy that’s actually quite intelligent. As I said, to get the mind to settle down requires some understanding.

Now, some people can get it to settle down very quickly. They’re the people who tend not to think too much anyhow. The problem is they don’t understand what’s happening.

Ajaan Fuang made a comment one time that the people who find concentration easy find discernment hard because they’re used to not thinking. They’re not very much involved in the world around them. They can just let it go. Which is okay, as long as they can let it go. But then there come times when they are involved. Issues come up in their minds, and they can’t let them go. They can’t get the mind to settle down at all. They don’t know how to do it because they haven’t had to figure the mind out before.

The people who like to think a lot are the ones who have to figure concentration out: how to get the mind to want to settle down, how to talk to it, how to give it encouragement, how to have some respect for concentration.

You also figure out, “Okay, what are these things I’m putting together to create a state of concentration?” You’ve got the breath. You’ve got your thoughts that you direct to the breath and then evaluate the breath. And there are perceptions you’re holding in mind, along with feelings you’re trying to create. All of these forms of fabrication are going on in your mind all the time. Even though you’re getting the mind into concentration, they’re still going on, simply that you’re changing their focus.

Focus on this: How do you change your breath so that it’s more enjoyable? How do you change your inner conversation so that it’s more willing to settle down and take an interest in the breath? This whole issue about the breath energy in the body: It takes a while to get used to how to deal with it so that you’re not pushing it around too much, you’re not oppressing it. A lot of times when you’re told, “Let the breath go here, let the breath go there,” you forget the word “let.” It turns into “make.” “Make it do this, make it do that.” Yet pushing on it makes it uncomfortable. Instead, you want to* allow* the breath. Get in touch with what feels really good right now. Then figure out how to let that good sensation spread in a way so that it still feels good as you spread it.

There’s a lot to figure out here. It requires a pragmatic intelligence. You’re not thinking about generalizations or abstractions. You’re thinking about actions and trying to act in a way that’s skilled. That, too, is a kind of intelligence. So is knowing how to read the mind so that it can settle down and stay there. To keep it there, you have to protect it, because other thoughts will come up, and it’s so easy for the mind to jump onto those other thoughts. You’ve got to figure out some strategies to keep it interested in staying still and in being able to zap the new thoughts as they arise.

And learn to see that you’re actually learning about how the mind switches from one frame of reference to another.

Like that science fiction story I read one time: Two pilots were in a spaceship that didn’t need to use any propellant. It moved because it changed its frame of reference. If its frame of reference was the Earth, it stayed on the Earth. If its frame of reference was the Sun, all of a sudden it would zip away from the Earth at the same speed that the Earth was going around the Sun, but in the opposite direction. If its frame of reference was the center of the galaxy, it was way off far away.

The important element of the story was that when the ship changed its frame of reference, the people on the ship would get knocked unconscious for a while and then come to in the new frame of reference. And that’s the way the mind is. It gets knocked out and you suddenly find yourself thinking about something else. It’s like you’re in a different world someplace else.

Well, how does that happen? There are steps and there are choices that are being made. You need to learn how to figure out which voice in the mind has been making the choices and then hiding behind other voices, and then coming out again, pulling you away. And you let yourself get pulled away. Why? What are the different stages by which that happens?

This should be something fascinating. The mind is deceiving itself, playing make-believe, and we like to make-believe along with it. How does that happen? There’s a lot to figure out here, simply getting the mind into concentration, getting it to stay in concentration, and then figuring out how to get it more deeply into concentration.

So there’s plenty to engage your intelligence. It’s just that it’s a different kind of intelligence. It’s not dumb. It’s simply a matter of learning how to have the right attitude. As the Buddha said, concentration is something you should respect, because it does have this ability to heal the mind of its wounds, allow it to rest, gather its strength, and to be still at the same time that it’s not falling asleep, so that it can observe itself. You do have to be mindful. You do have to be alert. You have to make the right effort to keep the mind here. So you’re developing strengths in the mind as you stay still.

The Buddha also says to learn how to delight in seclusion, and in particular, mental seclusion. In one of his suttas he talks about how a monk leaving the villages goes off into the forest and stops to reflect: As you stay in the forest, the disturbances that come from being around a lot of people are not there. This is to counteract your fear of being in the forest with its animals and diseases and hardships. You appreciate the positive side of being separated from all those disturbances caused by other people.

Then in order to get past the disturbances that come with the perception of forest, you have to think about the perceptions of concentration. In that sutta, he talks about taking the earth element as your focus, but you can do the same with the breath. Just think, “Breath going through the body. Breath going out into the world in all directions.” Then notice how much more peaceful that perception is than the perception of wilderness.

Then you get into deeper and deeper states of concentration where the perceptions are less and less disturbing. You learn how to appreciate the fact that the mind is not being disturbed. It’s still, but it’s alert. Learn how to delight in that.

So—respect and delight for concentration: Those are the attitudes you should have. Learn how to talk yourself into wanting to get the mind to settle down and then doing the work that needs to be done. You find that instead of limiting the range of your mind by doing this, you’re actually expanding it. You’re getting intelligent in a different way, a very useful way. And you come to see why the Buddha cited right concentration not only as a part of the path, but as the heart of the path, the part that the other parts serve to support. It allows you to see a lot of things you wouldn’t have seen otherwise and it clears up a lot of the issues in the mind that otherwise would keep you enslaved.

Freedom lies in this direction. And there’s nothing dumb about that.