A Better Place to Feed

Ajaan Fuang noted that the last rain of the rainy season tended to be very dramatic. He said the rain devas were bidding farewell. So we’ll see if this is the last of the rains.

When the Buddha described his awakening in the shortest possible terms, it was a principle of causality: “When this is, that is. From the arising of this comes the arising of that. When this isn’t, that isn’t. From the cessation of this comes a cessation of that.” That’s two causal principles that act together.

One pair—“When this is, that is; when this isn’t, that is”—talks about causality in the present moment. You do something right now and the results come right now. You stop doing it, the results stop.

The other pair is causality over time: “From the arising of this comes the arising of that”—you plant a seed now, you’re not going to get a tree right away. It’s going to take time. “From the cessation of this comes the cessation of that”—the seed is impermanent, which means that no matter how big and solid the tree may grow, it, too, is going to be impermanent.

But we’re not dealing with trees, we’re dealing with our own actions. What this means is that what you’re experiencing right now is a combination of two things: the results of past actions and the results of what you’re doing, right now.

The things that come in from the past you can’t change. But you can change how you experience them right now. In other words, you can’t go back and undo the original action, but the state of mind that you create right now can make a big difference in how you experience the result.

The Buddha gives the image of a lump of salt. You put a lump of salt into a small cup of water and you won’t be able to drink the water because it’s too salty. You put that same lump of salt into a large, clean river and you can drink the water because there’s so much more water than there is salt.

Another analogy he gives is of a person who steals a goat. If a poor person steals a goat and a fee is imposed on him, then because he’s poor he can’t pay the fee, so he has to go to jail. If a rich person steals the same goat and the same fee is imposed on him, he has more than enough to pay. So he doesn’t have to go to jail.

So, what does it mean to be wealthy? What does it mean to have a lot of water in your mind? The Buddha says there are several things: One is developing attitudes of goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy and equanimity in a really expansive way, extending them to yourself and to all other people, all other beings. He doesn’t say to start with yourself, but later commentators say it’s good to start with yourself because all too often, when we think about goodwill for everybody, we tend to forget ourselves.

We think that goodwill means that you have to make lots of sacrifices for everybody else. But as the Buddha said, an important part of goodwill is looking after your true happiness. In fact, that’s where your first emphasis should be. Fortunately, that’s not a selfish thought because your true happiness—if it’s going to be true and it’s going to last—can’t involve harming other people. Otherwise, they’re going to try to destroy it, which means it’s not going to last. You think about what would qualify as true happiness, and a lot of the qualifications have to do with developing the skills to create this state of a large river inside, of wealth inside. Whatever we have to deal with in life, we have to process it. If your processing skills are poor, then, no matter what good stuff is coming from your past kamma, you’re going to make a mess out of it, squeezing it into that little cup.

So work on the skills. This is what we do as we meditate. As the Buddha said when he described the steps leading up to suffering, the first thing that happens after ignorance is that you fabricate your experience in ignorance. And because it’s in ignorance, it’s going to lead to suffering. But he also discovered that if you do it with knowledge, it can become part of the path to the end of suffering.

The fabrications he points to are: One, the breath—bodily fabrication. Two, verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself, which he calls directed thought and evaluation: when you choose a topic and then you make comments on it, ask questions about it, decide what you think about it. And then three, mental fabrication, your perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the words and images you hold in mind that identify things. Feelings are feeling tones—pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain.

All these factors are things we put together in order to create a state of concentration right here, right now. You want to remember that, because otherwise you go back to your old ignorant ways, which is why meditation requires your powers of mindfulness. Remember that you want to stay here. You can’t give in to the impulses that say, “I’ve thought about that enough. Let me think about something else.”

It is not enough. If your powers of concentration aren’t yet strong, you’ve got to remind yourself, “This is not enough. I’ve got to do more. I’ve got to stay here longer, longer, longer.” So, when you find yourself slipping off suddenly, ask yourself, “What cut your mindfulness? Why is it so easily cut? Can you resist that?”

This requires alertness—that you watch what you’re doing.

And then, stir up some ardency, the desire to do this well.

So you focus on the breath, and then you think about the breath and make comments about the breath. That’s where you really use your mindfulness and your alertness. After all, to make comments on the breath, you have to watch—“How is the breath going? How is the mind doing? Is it staying here or is it going to move someplace else? And is the breath comfortable? What would feel really good right now?”

Try to breathe in a way that feels satisfying to the lungs, the heart, the different organs of the torso. Then think of that sense of well-being or comfort spreading out through the arms, the legs, and the head, so that you’ve got a good feeling filling the body right here. This requires that you have certain perceptions about what the breath can do. Don’t think of it just as the air coming in and out through the nose. It’s also the flow of energy in the body. In fact, that’s primarily what it is from the Buddha’s point of view.

So these are the skills you need in order to create a good place here in the present moment, to bring some knowledge to the processes that otherwise would lead to suffering. The more aware you are of what you’re doing, the more these different kinds of fabrication actually become part of the path.

As you develop a more expansive mind state here, then whatever bad influences come in from the past don’t weigh so heavily on you, because you’ve got something bigger and better right here. You want to nurture that, maintain that. So you develop an expansive mind. You expand to fill the present moment.

When the mind is small—in other words, when you’re focused on one tiny little spot—it’s very easy to slip off into the past or the future. It’s as if the path to the past or the future were a little tiny tube, and if your mind is small enough, your awareness is small enough, it’s going to slip easily down the tube. But if you fully inhabit your body right here, right now, from the head down to the feet and every place in between, then you can’t fit down the tube. So stay right here in an expansive way.

Then you might ask yourself: Once it gets good like this, why do you leave? It’s usually because either something unpleasant comes up—and unpleasant, here, can be just mildly unpleasant, it doesn’t have to be fiercely unpleasant. Or you just say that “Okay, I understand this. Now let’s move on.” But you don’t really understand it unless you’ve stayed with it for a long time. The mind that likes to take a quick sketch and then move may know a lot of different things superficially, but doesn’t know any one thing really well.

So you try to move in, stay here, and see what you learn by staying here. A lot of the lessons have to do with defending this state of concentration against distractions or pains. If there’s a pain in any part of the body, you don’t make that your primary focus. Try to focus on the parts of the body you can make comfortable by the way you breathe and by the way you perceive how the breath is moving through the body. Then you can use that sense of comfort to spread through those patterns of tension or tightness around the pains, to loosen things up.

This creates another one of the qualities you need in order to keep your mind expansive, which is that you don’t let your mind get overcome by pain. You realize you have tools to use against pain.

Years back, I was part of a psychology experiment. They’d have you put your hand in a bucket of ice water. With one group, they told them to take it out as soon as it got painful. With the second group, they said, “See how long you can keep it in there.” With the third group, they told them to think of the cold in the hand in the bucket of ice going to your other hand, and the warmth in the other hand coming back to warm up the cold hand. And, of course, they discovered that the third group could keep their hand in there a lot longer because they had a tool; they had an approach—something they could do so that they weren’t simply a victim of the pain.

So, here, you’ve the tool of your breath. You’ve got your tool of mindfulness and alertness. You’ve got your tool of your perceptions—you can change the way you perceive the pain. Think of the pain as individual moments of pain and, as each moment arises, it’s going away from you. That makes it a lot easier to deal with. You think of the breath flowing through—that makes it easier to deal with as well.

Then you find that not only distractions and pains are a threat to your concentration—but even the pleasure of the concentration itself can become a threat as you lose your focus on the breath and start focusing on the pleasure. So you’ve got to resist that. Let the pleasure do its own work—you don’t have to exclaim over it; you don’t have to wallow in it. You’ve got work to do. The pleasure will still nourish the body, it’ll give you a sense of well-being right here, without your having to exclaim over it.

That’s another way that you counteract the effects of bad things coming in from the past: You train your mind not to be overcome by pain and also not to be overcome by pleasure.

So these are some of the ways that you can take whatever comes up from your past kamma and make something good out of it here.

It’s like a cook who knows how to take ingredients that may not be especially good but can make something good out of them. When you have this skill, then you can deal with a lot of problems that you otherwise would have trouble dealing with. When unskillful thoughts come up into the mind, they lose a lot of their appeal.

We go for our defilements, not just out of the force of habit, but also because part of us likes them. We like our lust, we like our anger, and so we run with them. But now we’ve got something better to stay with; a place to stand were we can watch the anger as a separate event in the mind and be more willing to admit that anger has a lot of drawbacks. There is the allure—the sense of power that comes with it; the sense of being right when other people are wrong. But, when you have something better to feed on inside, then it’s a lot easier to see that the food of anger is pretty miserable. You can more easily remember the times in the past when you gave in to your anger, gave in to your ill will, and ended up regretting it. You might be more willing to admit this time: “Well, I might be right, but if I act on my anger, it’s going to be stupid.” It’s possible to be right and wrong at the same time—in other words, using your rightness in the wrong way.

At the same time, when you have an independent sense of well-being inside here, it makes it a lot easier not to be feeding on your relationships with other people—the sense that you have to depend on them for your happiness. No relationship can withstand that weight. It’s going to crash. But if you have your independent happiness inside, then you don’t have to lean on the other person so much; you don’t have to feed off the other person so much. That means there’s a lot less stress in the relationship, a lot less clinging. It’s the clinging, the feeding, that makes us suffer.

So there are a lot of good things to develop, a lot of good things that you can use your concentration to deal with. It’s an important part of the path. And as you deal with these three kinds of fabrication here in the present moment in a skillful way, in an alert and knowledgeable way, then you’re like a good cook who can take almost anything and make good food out of it. And, when you’ve got good food to feed yourself with inside, then you don’t have to go feeding on unskillful attitudes outside.

So, work on these skills. If you’re the type of person who finds it difficult to get the mind to stay still, learn how to content yourself with small victories. Don’t dismiss them, because sometimes that’s how skills get started: with the little tiny things. If you can stay for two breaths, okay, well, the next time, try to stay for three. That’s a 50% improvement. Then make it four, five. As you build up momentum, then it gets easier to stay for longer and longer times.

This is another aspect of learning how to talk to yourself wisely to keep yourself on track. Have a strong sense of your strengths and your weaknesses, and try to use your strengths to deal with your weaknesses so that the practice comes out balanced. Then the skill of meditation becomes all around.