Figuring Out Concentration

The description of right concentration says that, on the first level, you have pleasure and rapture accompanied by directed thought and evaluation.

Now, “directed thought and evaluation” is the Buddha’s was of describing how you talk to yourself on an ordinary everyday level. You direct your thoughts to a topic and then you evaluate it: You ask questions, make comments. So, as you’re getting the mind to settle down, you’re taking this habit of the mind that you’re already familiar with and applying it to the task of getting the mind to settle down.

What do you direct your thoughts to? What do you evaluate? To begin with, you try to direct your thoughts to the topic of the concentration itself—in this case, the breath. So, keep thinking about the breath.

Of course, you don’t just think. You watch the breath. You feel the breath. Ask yourself, where do you actually feel it? And is there a limited boundary to it?

Some people say you should feel it only at the tip of the nose, but the Buddha says you want to be aware of the whole body as you breathe in and breathe out. Some people say, well, that means the whole body of the breath, not your physical body. But still, where do you feel the breath? Do you feel it just at the nose? If you focus just on the nose, you’re not with the whole body of the breath itself. So, notice where you feel it. Notice where you don’t feel it.

Then, as you get more familiar with the breath, you’ll get like Jivaka, when he was learning to be a doctor. He’d been studying medicine for seven years, and the thought occurred to him, “When is there going to be an end to this topic that I’m studying here, this skill that I’m mastering?” He went and asked his teacher, and the teacher said, “Okay, go around the city for a diameter of about a league,” which is quite a few miles. “Take along a basket and a pair of scissors. And if you find any plants that don’t have any medicinal use, bring them back.” So Jivaka did as he was told, and when he came back, he said, “I couldn’t find anything that didn’t have medicinal uses.” So, his teacher said, “Okay, you’ve completed your studies.”

In the same way, you’ll find that as you get more and more familiar with the breath, there’s no part of the body that’s not affected by the breath in one way or another. The rise of the abdomen, the rise of the chest, affects the energy flowing down your arms, your legs: It’s everywhere.

So, if you’re going to stay with the whole body of the breath, you want to be aware of the whole physical body and the energy field around it Then, as the Buddha says, you try to spread that thought of ease with the breath throughout the whole body as well.

This is one way of performing the first function that the Buddha recommends when you’re trying to get the mind to settle down, which is to gladden the mind. Make it happy to be here. If you find that working with the breath is intriguing, satisfying, that’s one way of gladdening the mind.

But there are lots of other ways you can gladden the mind, and you can direct your thoughts to those as well. You can think of how you’re here, trying to find happiness in a way that’s totally harmless. You can think about all the ways in which people in the world try to find happiness that actually cause harm to themselves or harm to other people. But here you’re being more responsible. Nobody’s being harmed by the fact that you’re breathing. Nobody’s being harmed by the fact that you’re sitting here.

This is a principle that applies throughout the Buddha’s teachings. When we’re generous, other people, of course, are happy that we’re generous with them. But we, too, find ourselves gladdened by the generosity that we’re able to share. We don’t spend our time just clutching to things, afraid that they’ll be ripped from us, because we’re confident that the more you give, the more wealth you have inside. So sometimes, when you’re feeling down about the meditation, remind yourself that you do have generosity as one of your virtues. That lifts the mind, gladdens the mind.

And the same with virtue itself, the virtue of holding to the precepts: As you’re sitting here, you’re not getting involved in the various ways you could harm yourself or harm other people. No lying, no stealing, no illicit sex, no killing. You’re giving protection to yourself and protection to other beings.

So, thoughts like that can gladden the mind, make you more confident that yes, you are on the path, and you’re developing momentum. The things that Buddha has asked you to do, you’ve done, and you find that they do lift your heart, gladden the heart. So, sitting here, dealing with pain in your legs, pain in your back, and a mind that wanders around, does have some promise. It’s not going to be like that all the time. Eventually you get so that you’re happy to be here. You can settle down.

So there are many ways of gladdening the mind, either with the breath itself or with topics related to the Dhamma: your own virtue, your own generosity.

Or you talk to yourself about how you’re inspired by the example of the Buddha, who put everything on the line to find if it’d be possible to find a happiness that didn’t die. He left his home, left all of his material wealth, had to go out in the forest. You can imagine what it was like, someone brought up as a prince, suddenly having to eat alms food from people who lived in the forest.

But he was determined. As he said, he was heedful, ardent, and resolute. And this is the Dhamma that he found as a result. So let that thought inspire you. Let that thought make you glad that you’re here, working on this skill.

As the Buddha said, if you delight in abandoning unskillful qualities and in developing skillful ones, that delight can take you all the way to the end of the path. So approach this as a skill that you’re trying to master. And it’s a good skill. That attitude can help get you over whatever obstacles you encounter, whatever setbacks there may be. You’re still glad to be here, working on this problem.

Because after all, if you don’t work on this problem now, when is it going to get solved?—the problem of how the mind wants happiness, acts on desires for happiness, but can still suffer from its own actions. You’re sabotaging your own desire for happiness. Why is that? What’s going on? Well, here’s a chance to find out. Get the mind still, more mindful, more alert, more concentrated, and you’ll be able to see exactly what the mind is ignorant about. That way, you can get past that ignorance.

There are a lot of reasons to be glad. So direct your thoughts to those reasons, whichever works for you right now.

Then the Buddha says the next step is to concentrate the mind, make it more steady. Here again, you do some directed thought and evaluation for that, to see exactly what’s going on. When there’s a disturbance in the mind, even as you’re trying to get it to settle down, what’s causing the disturbance? What can you do to let it go? This is where you have to look at the details.

We sit down sometimes with an abstract sense that we want the mind to be in concentration. But what is that concentration? If you approach it as an abstraction, you’ll never find it. If you approach it as a moment-by-moment challenge, though, you can either stay with the breath or you can move off someplace else. You can stay with the breath with a sense of ease, or you can allow there to be a sense of dis-ease in here. Each time you breathe in, each time you breathe out, try to get focused like that, and you’ll find the mind gets more and more steady, more and more centered.

Then finally, the last step, the Buddha says, is to release the mind. Anything you find that’s getting in the way of the concentration, you let it go. The question was raised when I was in Poland, “We hear so much about letting go, letting go, letting go. Well, exactly what do you let go? Because sometimes you can just let go of everything.” Well, eventually you do, but you don’t let go of everything all at once.

The first things you let go of are the things that get in the way of trying to develop skillful qualities. So, you focus on the developing. Whatever gets in the way of the developing, that’s what you put aside.

So here you’re trying to get the mind to settle down. It’s like being a dog trying to settle down and find some sleep. It lies down on the ground. Whoops, there’s a stone. So, it gets up and it scratches the stone away. Circles around. Lies down again. Whoops, there’s the root of a tree. Moves over a little bit. Finally, when it gets things just right, then it can settle down.

It’s the same with the mind. You’ll find there are different perceptions, different obstacles, different hindrances that get in the way. You’re trying to figure out: Why are they there? Why does the mind hold on to them? And holding on, of course, it doesn’t mean it has a hand that holds on. They’re actions that you keep repeating. So why do you keep repeating them? What’s the allure? When you can see the allure, you realize that it’s not worth the fact that it’s getting in the way of the stillness of the mind. Then you can let it go. You can stop it.

That’s how the mind gets released. The image they have in the Canon, the image of nibbana, is of a fire that’s gone out. To understand that image, you have to understand how they understood the physics of fire back in those days.

Someone once complained that they didn’t have physics back then. Of course they did. When you explain physical phenomena, those explanations count as physics.

Now, their version of physics taught that the fire element, when it was provoked, would latch on to its fuel. As it was latching on, then it’d burn. When it let go, it’d be released. It’d go out and return to its latent state. The message being that the fuel doesn’t hold the fire. The fire is what holds the fuel, and the fire traps itself by holding on. When it lets go, then it’s freed.

So, whatever it is that’s disturbing your mind, it’s not holding you down. You’re holding yourself down because you’re holding on to the action that’s disturbing you. You keep repeating it. You don’t have to. When you can stop, then you’re freed.

So, these are the three main activities the Buddha recommends after getting to know the state of your mind. You want to gladden it, concentrate it, release it. And you use your directed thought and evaluation to do those three things. In some cases, as the concentration gets deeper and you start contemplating your concentration, the Buddha doesn’t use the verbs for directed thought and evaluation. He talks about reflecting, contemplating. What the difference is, he doesn’t explain. So for the time being, you can just say, “I’ll just think about whatever is disturbing the mind.”

Then as your thoughts get more and more subtle, more and more precise, it’s all to the good, because you are trying to figure things out here. You’re not just dulling the mind, putting it to sleep, or making it go into a blank state. You’re trying to figure things out.

The more the mind gets still, the more delicate the work becomes—but it’s still work. There’s still plenty to figure out. So whatever verb you use, or however you describe the verb of thinking, make sure that your thinking is on target, doing what it should be doing. Whether it counts as directed thought or as reflection or whatever, it’s all to the good.