Four Roles to Play

You’re here to learn how your mind functions. And it’s important that you understand that it’s functioning all the time.

When the Buddha lays out the principles in dependent co-arising, right next to ignorance is a factor he calls fabrication. It’s the activity in the mind, the intentional activity. One of those activities is directed thought and evaluation. In plain terms, that’s how you talk to yourself.

And you’re talking to yourself all the time. One problem is that you’re usually doing it in ignorance. Either you don’t know that you’re talking to yourself, or there are many layers of conversation going on inside. Another problem is that you’re telling yourself strange things, things that are actually going to lead to suffering.

So, the purpose of the meditation is, one, to get you more sensitive to how you’re talking to yourself on these many levels and, two, to start talking to yourself in a skillful way.

This is why, when the Buddha has you get the mind settled down in the concentration, one of the factors of the first jhāna is directed thought and evaluation. For example, you’re talking to yourself about the breath. Focus on the breath and ask yourself: Where do you feel it? Then you focus your attention to where it’s clearest.

The next question is: How does it feel? Does it feel good? You can try experimenting. Tell yourself to try long breathing for a while, then to try short breathing. Fast or slow, heavy or light. Deep, shallow. Broad, narrow.

This is where you bring in another aspect of fabrication, which is perceptions, the images you hold in mind that identify things and give them meaning. What image of the breath is most conducive to settling down? If you think of the breath simply as the air coming in and out through the nose, it’s hard to think of that having any impact on much of the rest of the body.

But if you think of it as the energy flow that allows the lungs to expand and contract, that energy flow goes throughout the whole body. So hold that perception in mind and ask yourself if that helps. You can think of yourself as being like a big sponge. When you breathe in, there’s no obstacle to the breath coming in from any direction. Ask yourself how that works.

You’re engaged in what the Buddha calls commitment and reflection. You commit yourself to doing something and then you watch yourself doing it. You pass judgment on the results. This is a part of your directed thought and evaluation. You’re talking to yourself about your fabricating in the present moment.

We’re constantly shaping the present moment. We’re not just passive observers. To make a comparison, it’s the difference between watching a TV show and getting engaged in an interactive computer game. If you watch a TV, you can’t change things in the program no matter how much you yell at the screen. With an interactive game, though, how the game goes is going to depend on what you do.

That’s what you’re doing right now. As you get more familiar with what you’re doing—getting the mind to fit with the breath, getting the breath to fit with the mind; getting a sense of the whole body being aware; the breath going through the whole body; a sense of ease going through the whole body; everything coming together like this—you get more and more conscious of this process of talking to yourself, and what roles you’re playing in this exploratory conversation.

You find that altogether there are four roles you play. One is the you who desires to gain a sense of well-being from this. You desire to benefit from this process. If you didn’t think you were going to benefit from it, you wouldn’t do it. The stronger you can nurture the sense that this is really going to be good for you, the more you’re going to enjoy it.

You find that it’s like one of those classics of literature. They look big and imposing and oppressive. But then you start reading them and you realize they’re classics because they’re fun to read. That’s how the meditation should look to you: that you’re going to enjoy it, both in the process of doing it and in the long term.

That’s you as the consumer.

Then there’s you as the agent who actually does the meditation—who asks questions. Tries things out. Makes adjustments. And learns skills. Who can do this better and better.

To master a skill requires two more functions for you. One is that you’re the observer, really intent on observing what you’re doing. You want to get down to the details. We’re not dealing in abstractions here. We’re dealing in very practical things: how to breathe, how to talk to yourself. Once there’s a sense of well-being in the body, how do you let it spread? If there are pains in the body getting in the way, what do you do with them? These are practical issues. And there are skills associated with them.

As with pain: First you try to get a sense of which part of the body can be made comfortable by the way you breathe. Then you let that sense of comfortable breath flow through the areas where there’s pain. See if that helps. Sometimes you find that there’s a lot of tension around the pain. As you breathe through it, the tension begins to relax. Part of you may be afraid of that. The whole reason the tension built up around it was to keep the pain under control, to keep it within bounds.

But it’s like that science fiction story where a group of beings on a distant planet had suffered an invasion from another planet. So they built up a defense system after they had repelled the invasion, an impenetrable force field around their planet. Then they found themselves stuck because nothing could get in, nothing could get out, so nothing good could come in. They were running out of resources. So the force field became the problem. In the same way, the tension you build up around a pain often becomes the real problem. You have to be willing to allow it to dissolve and see what happens.

That’s one way of dealing with the pain. There are lots of ways of dealing with the pain. It’s all part of your set of skills. With all of the skills, you try things out, observe the results.

And then you pass judgment on them. Did they work? Did they not work? If they did work, you remember them. If they didn’t work, you try to figure out why. Then you try something else, you try something else, observe it, pass judgment on it again. That’s you as the judge and the analyst.

So, you’ve got four roles here all together: you as the consumer, you as the agent, you as the observer, and you as the judge. All four of those roles have to work together for this to work. If you try to hold on to just one—like just making effort, effort, effort, without judging it—you can just wear yourself out. Or if you’re just the witness, watching whatever comes and not passing judgment at all, nothing happens. It may feel good not to be doing anything, you’re relaxed, but nothing develops.

The Buddha compares that to a goldsmith who doesn’t do anything with the gold but just lets it sit there. You can’t make anything out of gold if it just sits there.

So, we’re working on a skill requiring you to play these four roles.

They correspond to a traditional teaching called the bases of success. The Buddha talks about them in terms of qualities you can emphasize in the process of settling down into concentration. The way he describes it sounds as if there are four different types of concentration: concentration based on desire, in other words, the consumer; concentration based on persistence, the agent; concentration based on intent, the observer; and concentration based on analysis, the judge.

When he talks about the right effort that leads to concentration, though, he includes all four. Right effort requires you to generate desire, exert persistence, uphold your intent to develop what’s skillful and abandon what’s unskillful. You have to use your discernment to figure out what’s skillful and what’s not skillful, and how to encourage what’s skillful and discourage what’s not. So concentration always requires all four.

The difference among the different types of concentration is mainly a matter of emphasis. It’s important, though, that you remember you’re here to understand how things work. Sometimes you hear people say that you’re here to see things as they are, the implication being that you have to get very passive and watch things as they are on their own without your doing anything to them.

But that just drives a lot of these processes that the mind is engaged in underground. You have to be very frank about the fact that you are constructing things. And you’re basically here to learn how to do it in a better way, to construct a path that leads you to something that’s unconstructed. You have to make sure you don’t confuse the path with a goal.

When all four of these roles are working together, then that’s a true base for success. You’re here to see not things as they are, but things as they function. As I mentioned last night, when the Buddha described his awakening in the simplest, shortest form, it was a principle of causality: what causes what, and how the process of causation functions, whether it’s immediate or over the long term.

That’s the sort of thing that can be found only by doing things and then judging the results. Commitment. Reflection. In the bases of success, the commitment gets divided into desire and persistence; the reflection gets divided into intent and analysis.

That’s how the Dhamma is nourished. So feed it well.