Smoothing It

John McPhee tells the story of a time when he was writing a piece on people living in Alaska. He had spent some time with a couple who were subsistence farmers, living in the forest. They lived a really rough life. Everything they ate, everything they used, they had to make themselves. They had to put up with the severe cold and dark of the Alaskan winter. After staying with them for a while, he was going to go out, take a hike through the forest to get to the river, and from the river he was going to go back to a little town, Eagle. It turned out the couple decided that they had to go to Eagle as well, so they accompanied him.

They had to spend one night in the forest on the way, so they pitched their tents. John McPhee was embarrassed that he had a little inflatable pillow and he confessed to the wife that he felt that he wasn’t genuinely roughing it. Her reply was really interesting. She said, “We’re not here to rough it. We’re here to smooth it”—this, in spite of all the difficulties in their life. The things that they could make smooth, they did.

This falls in line with the Buddha’s principle that when you’re practicing, you don’t weigh yourself down with unnecessary pain. But you do have to look carefully at your mind. If you find that when you live at your ease, your defilements grow, you’ve got to take on some pain. But if you take on pain and that makes your defilements grow, then you’ve got to learn how to live more easefully.

So the real gauge of how difficult the practice will have to be for you is what gets results. If you find that sitting with pain focuses your mind, that’s perfectly fine. There are people who say that because the Buddha said that the middle way is a middle way between self-torture and self-indulgence, you shouldn’t try to inflict any pain on yourself at all. But that’s ignoring huge parts of the Canon where the Buddha says it’s really going to depend on the individuals how much pain they have to endure to get results in the practice.

The important thing is you don’t see the pain as a virtue in and of itself. You sit with the pain because you want to understand it—although it’s not so much understanding the pain, it’s understanding how the mind creates the pain out of the potentials for pain. You sit here right now and there are parts of the body that you can focus on in certain ways and make them very painful. You could focus on the same parts of the body in different ways and make them very pleasant. For the sake of concentration, for the sake of giving the mind a place to rest, you take the second option. You pursue that until you run into times where the second option just doesn’t work.

Ajaan Maha Boowa talks about the time when he had developed a fairly reliable concentration practice, until one night the pain in his body got so bad that it knocked his concentration off its basis. The only thing he could do was to use his discernment to figure out how the mind takes a physical pain and brings it into the mind and makes it a mental pain. He found himself cornered, and that caused him to come back out of the corner with his discernment. That was the lesson he learned that night—how much the mind is involved in the fashioning of pain. And that’s what we’re here for: to understand that kind of process.

We don’t believe that by enduring pain you’re going to burn off your old karma. The Buddha was quite snide—it may be hard to imagine the Buddha snide, but he was actually snide—about the idea that you could burn off your old karma. He asked the Jains—who endured self-torture, claiming that they’d burned off karma that way—“How do you measure the amount of karma you’ve burned off today?” There’s no measuring stick.

What’s important is that you gain some insights that lift the burden of pain off the mind. That’s a real measure. That’s something you can actually talk about and see for yourself.

So we’re not here inflicting pain on ourselves simply for the sake of pain, or believing that pain in and of itself is going to purify us. But it does give the chance for discernment to purify us.

If you find that living at your ease makes you complacent, you’ve got to figure out some way to deal more with pain. When the Buddha talks about pain, here, he’s talking about physical pain and also about painful meditation topics, like the contemplation of the body or contemplation of the foul nature of food. He never talks about inflicting bad moods on yourself. His teachings were always to urge, encourage, rouse you, to give you energy. Now, sometimes a rousing talk can be a very stern talk, but it’s meant to energize your fighting spirit.

When you find that you’re simply enduring things, you don’t say, “I’m just going to grit my teeth and endure.” You’ve got to figure out some way to lift your spirits, because that’s how you endure things wisely. Otherwise, you just wear yourself down.

The Buddha talks about six different things you can delight in as you practice, that lift your spirits no matter how bad the situation is. These things can give you encouragement, make you realize you’re doing something really valuable here.

The first topic is delight in the Dhamma itself. We have a Dhamma that takes on the big questions of life and gives big answers. It doesn’t flinch in the face of the questions like, “What happens at death? What are the consequences of my actions going to be? To what extent can I actually shape my life? To what extent is my life imposed on me?”

The Buddha was quite critical of the belief that everything is determined from the past, or that you have no free will. He said that if that were the case, there would be no path to the end of suffering. It’s because we do have this ability to shape the present moment with our intentional actions that we can make changes, and those changes can lead all the way to the end of suffering. That’s a good Dhamma to believe in, a good Dhamma to take as your working hypothesis. It was found by somebody who was totally pure in his motives, totally pure in the way he taught.

So think about that. This is why the Buddha recommends not only recollection of the Dhamma, but also recollection of the Buddha and the Sangha as ways of giving delight to the mind, to lift your spirits, to urge, rouse, and encourage you.

The second topic of delight is to delight in abandoning, and the third is to delight in developing: basically, to delight in the fact that you can abandon unskillful qualities and develop skillful ones. As the Buddha said, if we couldn’t do that, there wouldn’t have been any point to his teaching.

All too often, we delight in coming up with desires and then seeing what we can do to fulfill those desires. A lot of them have to do with greed, aversion, and delusion. Our problem is that we delight in developing those things—the wrong things. We should learn how to delight in developing mindfulness—catching ourselves when the mind is about to go into something unskillful, and being able to say No. The developing and the abandoning go together there. Learn to see that as a victory.

Remember what the Buddha said about victory: “Better than victory over a thousand other people is victory over yourself”—which means you have to draw the line inside you between which parts are the ones that have to come out victorious, and which ones are the ones that will have to be defeated in this practice. Learn how not to identify with the second ones, and identify with the first ones—because they’re on your side.

Think about the question the Buddha has you ask: “What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” The voices inside you that say, “Think about the long term. Care about the long term”: Those are your true friends; those are the ones that you want to have come out victorious.

The fourth topic is to delight in seclusion. This can mean both physical seclusion and mental seclusion. Physical seclusion, of course, is when you get away from people and have some time by yourself. Even though you’re going to see a lot of things in your own mind that you don’t like, it’s better that you see them than that they stay hidden. So if you see greed coming up, delight in the fact: “Okay, I can see that.” It means you can do something about it. If you see unattractive habits, it means you now can do something about them.

Then, there’s mental seclusion, when you get the mind quiet in a state of right concentration, secluded from its unskillful thoughts. Learn how to appreciate that—the quietness of the mind. Delight in the fact that you get the mind to a state where you can begin to see really subtle things inside. You’re not just getting quiet for quiet’s sake—you’re getting quiet for the sake of understanding. That’s the proper use of seclusion.

So don’t focus on how lonely you feel or how much you like talking to other people. Realize that you now have a chance to start questioning the perceptions you’ve picked up from society.

This is one of the things I appreciated about Ajaan Fuang when I first met him. I’d been living in Thailand for two years and pretty much learned a lot of basic Thai attitudes that permeated the entire society. Yet here was someone who had stepped outside the society and could look at it with a critical eye, meaning that he’d learned how to look at his conditioning and see which parts of his conditioning were in line with the customs of the noble ones and which ones were not.

So when you get still and quiet like this, you can question your conditioning. And you can question even more basic perceptions that you have. For instance, as you’re sitting here: You have the idea that there’s a boundary surrounding your body, but is there, really? Where is the boundary? How do you sense it? It’s a line you draw with your imagination. Focusing on the breath energy helps you to erase that line, the idea that your body ends with the earth element. There’s breath around the body as well, and the borders of that breath-body are very ill-defined.

So as you’re sitting here meditating, you can think in those terms. You can erase a lot of perceptions you have about the body and the mind and their relationship to each other. You learn a lot that way. Then when you have to deal with people, you put on the attitudes you need to develop when dealing with people. When you move around, you have to put on perceptions of where your body ends. You can use these perceptions and you can also learn that you can pick them up and put them down. That’s what seclusion allows you to do. So learn how to delight in it—rather than feeling lonely.

The last two things you delight in are aspects of nibbana. One is that it’s unafflicted and it causes no affliction to anybody. Nobody is harmed—you’re not harmed; you don’t harm anybody else. Think of all the various pleasures in life that cause harm, like the fact that we have to eat. All of our needs for the basic requisites of life place burdens on other people and other animals, in addition to the burdens we have to assume ourselves. So learn how to delight in the idea that you’ll finally find something that’s totally unafflictive.

The other aspect of nibbana to delight in is that it’s free of objectification: You don’t have to create a sense of who you are and you don’t have to deal with all the things that come about as a consequence of defining yourself as a being. Beings are defined by how they feed—you need a world in which to feed, and your world overlaps with the worlds of other people who are also feeding. Which is why when the Buddha talks about objectification in this way, he always talks about how it leads to conflict. What this comes down to is that we’re here to find a state where there’s no conflict at all.

Learning how to delight in these six things—the Dhamma, abandoning, developing, seclusion, the non-afflicted, and non-objectification—re-trains our ideas of where happiness can be found. So you have to make a conscious decision to learn how to delight in these things.

The Buddha gives lots of examples of how to think, how to hold perceptions in mind, even how to breathe so that you can delight in the fact that you’re here on the path. This way, when there are hard things you have to endure, at the very least you’re not having to endure a mind that’s weighing itself down. The mind lifts itself up. That’s how you can endure things without getting ground down by what’s difficult. Focus on the strengths you have. Focus on the fact that you’re on a good path, going to a good place. And delight in everything that that implies.