Alone & Together

Two important principles in the practice are admirable friendship and seclusion, and it’s a difficult balancing act to balance the two. As the Buddha said, without him as our admirable friend, there wouldn’t be any practice at all. We wouldn’t know that there was a path to the deathless or that the end of suffering could be found—so we’d be lost.

So, we need to spend time with admirable friends. This is one of the reasons why young monks, as they get started, are told to look for seclusion but also to stay with the teacher. The seclusion is physical seclusion and mental seclusion. Physical seclusion is when you just get away on your own, because you need that time to look at yourself.

At the same time, though, you need guidance. In my own case, my first year as a monk, I spent a lot of time alone on a mountain, but I wasn’t totally alone. I had Ajaan Fung at the base of the mountain. Issues would come up in my meditation, and it was good to have him there to talk things over with, to get a grounding, to get perspective.

It’s so easy when you’re off on your own to get ingrown. You’re in what’s akin to an echo chamber. It’s common knowledge in the forest tradition that some people go up into the forest alone and they basically go crazy, they get into spiral hallucinations. And it’s recognized in the Canon too.

One of my favorite images in the Canon is when a monk comes to the Buddha and says, “I want to go up into the forest.” The Buddha sees that this particular monk is not talented in that direction, he’s not ready to go, so he tells the monk: “It’s like a cat or a rabbit seeing an elephant plunging into a lake and squirting water on its back and in its ears, and the cat or the rabbit says, ‘Why can’t I do that too?’ So the cat goes to plunge in the lake and tries to squirt water in its ears and on its back. I like that image. Can you imagine a cat squirting water in its ears as it’s swimming around? It’s going to sink or it’s going to get carried away.

A lot of people, when they just go off on their own, get really ingrown in their defilements, so they need some grounding. They need a reality check by being around good people—but that’s the trick. A lot of times, we live our lives in areas where there are not that many admirable people around. So we need to depend on Dhamma talks; we need to depend on Dhamma readings; we have to find some seclusion—time to get away, because we’re constantly bombarded.

We have no time to know ourselves, no time to see exactly where our problems are, because we’re dealing so much with other people’s problems.

This is why one of the tricks you need as a meditator is to keep your conversations with others as short and as to the point as possible, so that you can go off and find some time to be alone.

One of the ways they have of torturing people is to submit them to a constant barrage of sensory input: lights on all day long, loud music on all day long. When people have no time to be by themselves, they get exhausted, because you need some quiet to be able to look inside. Even inside, you’ve got the problem of who you’re hanging around with inside.

If you’re constantly dealing with other people’s issues, you don’t know about the committee in your own mind. Voices come up, and you don’t know where they’re coming from. Thoughts come into your mind. Who are they? Who do they represent? Where did you pick up those ideas? You want to be able to track it down. You can’t track it down if there’s a constant barrage of new stuff coming in all the time. So it’s important that you find some time to be alone, to get to really know your mind.

After all, the heart of the path is concentration. Concentration starts with being secluded from sensuality, secluded from unskillful mental qualities. If you can’t get secluded from other people, there’s no way you’re going to get secluded from these things in your mind. So it’s an important principle: You find time to be by yourself, to get to know yourself, and have the guidance of what you’ve learned from your admirable friends.

Admirable friendship means not only having good people to be around, it also means trying to figure out what their good qualities are, noticing—if you don’t have those good qualities yourself—how to develop them. Part of this lies in asking them, part in just observing them and then taking their lessons to heart.

It’s so easy to say, as we read the texts, “That was okay back in those days, but we have modern problems they didn’t have back then.” Well, they had greed—we have greed. They had aversion—we have aversion. They had delusion—we have delusion. Some of the details may be different, but the basic patterns are all the same.

As Ajaan Mun once said, “People are all the same, but they’re different. But when you come right down to it, they’re all the same.” He said that to Ajaan Fuang one time, and Ajaan Fuang said he had to take it and think about it for a while. What it comes down to is that, basically, we all have the same problems of greed, aversion, and delusion. The details, the tiny workings out, may be different, which is why different people have different problems as they try to settle down into concentration, and why different issues will come up as you try to develop discernment.

You read about other people’s approaches to getting past their defilements, and some of them may work for you and some of them may not, but the basic battle lines are the same. We all have to deal with sensuality, we all have to deal with ill will, all the hindrances: sloth and torpor, restlessness and anxiety, doubt about what we’re doing, about our ability to do this, or maybe doubt about the practice. The details may be different, but the basic outlines are all the same.

So we can learn from one another, but then we have to take time out and be alone for a while to figure out, “Does this lesson apply to me and, if it does, exactly how does it apply to me?” You’re learning how to read yourself, and also knowing some safety measures to make sure that, when you get off alone, you don’t fall into an echo chamber of defilements.

Ajaan Mun gave an important piece of advice to Ajaan Maha Bua. He said, “When something comes up in your meditation, and it seems strange, there may be a part of your mind that’s attracted to it, but a part of your mind that’s not quite so sure, just stay with your sense of being aware. Let it pass. Don’t think that you’re missing out on a great opportunity. Just tell yourself: ‘I’ve got to learn.’”

The best way to learn is to watch, be observant. The piece of advice that Ajaan Lee gave was when you come to some insights, ask yourself: To what extent are they true, and to what extent is the opposite true? After all, there are only a few things that are true across the board: the four noble truths, the duties of those truths, and the basic principle that unskillful qualities should be abandoned and skillful ones should be developed. Everything else has its time and place. Even the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self have their time, they have their place—and also times and places when they’re not appropriate. You can start thinking about not-self and decide, “Well, there’s nobody there—nobody’s responsible, I have no free will, no choice, because there’s no me.” You can get involved in some really serious wrong views and wrong behavior that way.

There’s a case in the Canon where a young monk is asked by some sectarians, “What is the result of action?” He says, “The result of action is dukkha”—which you can translate as pain, stress, suffering. The sectarians said, “We’ve never heard that from any other Buddhist monks. You’d better go check that with the Buddha.” So he does, and the Buddha says, “When you’re talking about karma, you don’t talk about the fact that all feelings are stressful. You’re talking about the fact that there are pleasant and painful and neutral feelings.” When you’re thinking about action, the question is: What kinds of action are skillful and which ones are not? You don’t go straight to the non-action of total nibbana. That’s a case where the perception of dukkha is not useful—it’s not the right time, not the right place. So you have to be careful as you get off on your own, because your inner conversation can go way off course, with no sense of time or place at all.

This is why the monks have their time divided. In the old days, you would wander during the cold season and the hot season, then come together during the rains, to get the advantages of both being alone and being together. For lay people, this means finding time to be alone and finding time to be together with admirable friends—and then learning how to deal with the friends who are not so admirable. In other words, how to be with them without picking up their wrong views or their wrong habits, and having the good sense to let them know that you need time to be by yourself.

Our society is getting more and more connected. All you have to do is pick up your phone and you can be in conversation with anybody, anywhere. So there’s more and more of a bombardment. The mind gets more and more dependent on it; it feeds on that. That’s one thing you’ve got to cut down on. Tell yourself there’s a time and place for connection and a time and place for being disconnected. Otherwise, how are you going to see your defilements if you’re having to deal with other people’s defilements all the time?

So realize that you have to find a balance, and that that balance will be different for each person. Ideally, as you get more advanced in the practice, you can find more time to be alone and not go crazy. But at the same time, you want to be able to be with other people and not pick up their crazy ideas. When you’re really strong in the practice, you can be alone, you can be with others, and it doesn’t make that much difference.

Ajaan Fuang tells of the time when he went to see Ajaan Lee. Ajaan Lee had been in Bangkok for a couple years teaching. Ajaan Fuang visited him, and he realized after only one night that his meditation had been knocked off course. The monastery where Ajaan Lee was staying was right next to the railroad tracks, and there was a constant line of visitors coming in from noon to midnight. Ajaan Fuang realized that his meditation needed to be stronger.

So he went into the woods to strengthen it that way, but he also began to spend more time teaching, being with others, and learning how to maintain his mindfulness that way, too.

So there’s a skill to being alone and a skill to being together—and you’ve got to find the balance that works for you.