Present-Moment Intelligence

I’ve been reading a book on visual intelligence: the way in which the eye and the brain register light waves and then make sense out of them, constructing a whole world. Just by opening your eyes and looking, you create all kinds of things. You create a three-dimensional space, and sometimes you create colors and lines where they don’t even exist, but there are patterns that suggest these things to you.

And that’s just your eyes. One of the Buddha’s most important discoveries was the extent to which your whole mind constructs the present moment. He saw that causality doesn’t just happen over time, sometimes it’s instantaneous. You’ve got raw material coming in from your past karma, but you’re going to experience it because of your present karma. And not only that, you’re going to shape it in certain directions with your present karma. One of the purposes of meditation is to see how you do that.

This is why it’s so important that the meditation focuses on the present moment—so that you get more sensitive to what you’re doing, and particularly so that you learn how to see where you’re adding unnecessary stress and suffering.

For the most part, we tend to take it for granted: a certain level of stress, a certain level of dis-ease in life. They say that most people go through life with a certain default level of dis-ease. For some people it’s higher, for some lower. Events will knock it out of that basic default level every now and then—something will make you very happy for a while or very sad—but after a while, the mind tends to go back to its basic level, whatever that was.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. If it had to be that way, there would be no purpose in practicing the Dhamma; there would have been no purpose in the Buddha’s teaching the Dhamma. But the way we put things together can make a huge difference, and we can learn new skills for how to put them together in a better wy. We can also learn new sensitivity, so that we can tell when we’re doing a better job.

The Buddha has you be sensitive to three things: one, how you breathe; two, how you talk to yourself; and then three, the perceptions and feelings you focus on.

Often these things are underground. Most people go through life without paying much attention to their breath. As for the way they talk to themselves, they take it for granted: This is the conversation, this is how it tends to be, these are the voices that tend to have power in the mind.

As for the perceptions, what we think is abstract thinking is often driven by underlying images, underlying similes, analogies. But the fact that they’re underlying means we don’t see them. The Buddha wants us to become sensitive to these things.

So we begin by focusing on the breath, and learning to manipulate the breath.

One of the main misunderstandings about breath meditation is that, whereas, in yoga they manipulate the breath, in the Buddhist way of doing things you don’t manipulate the breath. Where that idea came from, I have no idea, because the Buddha’s instructions tell you to breathe in certain ways: You breathe in ways that make you sensitive to pleasure, sensitive to rapture. You calm bodily fabrication. You breathe in ways that gladden the mind, steady and concentrate the mind, release the mind. This doesn’t happen on its own. It’s a training.

In the course of the training, you’re going to be talking to yourself as you give yourself directions: “Do this, do that.” Then you learn from what you’ve done. This is what the meditation is good for: understanding actions and their results.

Sometimes you hear people saying that meditation will teach you to understand metaphysical truths about the way things are. Some say that seeing that there is no self is going to be a major spiritual landmark in your practice. But what kind of meditative practice or experience could prove something like that? What would have to disappear for you to say, “Okay, there is no self”? Or what would have to appear? Those aren’t things you can learn through meditation.

What you can learn from meditation is: This action leads to this result; that action leads to that result. Some actions lead to more suffering and stress than others. That you can see for yourself. And that’s what meditation is good for. That’s what the meditation can teach you. It’s why the Buddha taught us to focus on the present moment. We’re here to see patterns in cause and effect: to train ourselves, and then see what results come about.

Look at the four noble truths: They’re about actions, either skillful or unskillful. The skillful actions would be following the path; unskillful would be going for the three kinds of craving. Then there are results. That’s what the Buddha wants us to see.

Not only that, how can we move from the three kinds of craving to developing the path? It’s going to require some desire. You’re learning to shift the focus of your desires away from sensual pleasures, sensual fantasizing, and more toward noticing which thoughts are skillful, which thoughts are unskillful, and getting a sense of the long-term consequences of your actions. That’s a shift in focus, but it requires desire as well.

Then we see: Acting on these desires, what happens? In other words, you commit yourself to doing the path and then you reflect on the results.

Again, you’re not reflecting to see things “as they are,” but to see things “as they work, as they function.” And you begin to get a sense of when you’re adding unnecessary stress.

There’s a passage where the Buddha describes how you progress through the different levels of concentration. It’s basically noticing this: When you get the mind to settle down, learn how to appreciate the fact that it’s empty of the stress that comes from being with a lot of people and having to deal with the issues of people.

Of course, your issues will then fill up the space. It’s like a strange fruit they have in Thailand. It’s a little tiny, tiny thing about the size of a golf ball with a hard shell. You break the shell, and you put the stringy flesh into a bucket full of water. Within a few minutes, it’s filled the whole bucket. It absorbs the water and expands. In the same way, when the issues of other people are taken away, you find that your issues expand to fill your whole awareness.

Sometimes they can seem overwhelming. But again, all you have to do is ask yourself, “What am I doing right now? How am I putting this together?” Take it apart in terms of how you breathe, how you talk to yourself, the images you hold in mind. And ask yourself, “Exactly where am I adding unnecessary stress here? How can I stop?”

We listen to the Dhamma to give us alternative ways of talking to ourselves. There are so many people suffering as a result of a lack of imagination: They think they have to think in certain ways and act in certain ways, and they have no idea that there are alternative ways that are much better. So this is why we listen to the Dhamma. It’s to give us some ideas, and then we can try them out.

We learn from the different ajaans, we learn from the Buddha, but we have to learn how to use our own ingenuity as well. Once you’ve picked up some ideas from them, you begin to see that they admit of variations.

It’s like getting a recipe that calls for one kind of ingredient, but you realize, “Oh, I could substitute another ingredient there.” Then you get an idea of how far the substitutions go, and what you can’t substitute. Still, a lot of it has to do with your imagination.

There’s no single way of counteracting your unskillful ways of thinking. You get ideas from other people, but then your own way of putting your ignorance together is going to be different from the way other people put their ignorance together. Some of the patterns are the same, but many of them are not. So the solutions will sometimes be the same and sometimes not. This means you’ll have to learn from trial and error. As you get a better sense of how you can work variations on what you’ve learned, your repertoire grows, and it becomes your repertoire.

All this comes from being very sensitive to the fact that you’re putting things together right now, you’re doing a bad job, but it is possible to learn. If you were doing a good job, you wouldn’t be suffering, so you’re doing something here that’s adding unnecessary suffering in the mind.

Learn how to notice that, learn how to drop whatever it is that’s causing it, and the mind will go to deeper and deeper stages of concentration. That’s what emptiness meant in the very beginning of the teachings: empty of disturbance.

Where does the disturbance come from? It doesn’t come from the birds outside. It doesn’t come from the weather outside. It doesn’t come from the people around you. It comes from what your mind is doing as it’s putting the present moment together—in the same way that we hardly notice how the mind can construct all kinds of things out of visual images that are actually not there.

You begin to realize that the mind can construct all kinds of suffering and stress in the present moment that don’t have to be there. And you learn that you can stop doing that.

That’s what insight is: One, seeing that you’re causing stress, and two, seeing you don’t have to do it. When you see both of these facts, you don’t have to tell the mind to let go—it lets go on its own.

And it lets go from insight and understanding—not from feeling obligated to let go, but from seeing there’s a much better way of doing things, and you know how to do it.