Learning by Doing

Many of the Thai ajaans would like to start their Dhamma talks by saying, “Make a survey of your body; make a survey of your mind.” With the body, make sure that it’s sitting up straight, hands in your lap. With the mind, make sure that it’s sitting up straight, too. In other words, it’s not leaning forward into the future, not leaning back into the past, not leaning left to the right, which means not leaning toward things that you like or don’t like. You’re just alert here right now.

Of course, that’s not just a survey—you’re actually creating conditions so that the mind can settle down. If the mind is leaning forward or back, you’ve got to do something about it. Remind yourself that things in the past have gone. There’s no way you can get them back, no way you can go back and change them.

As for the future, it’s not here yet. You don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. Sometimes we worry about the future, thinking that our worries will prepare us for future dangers, but you have to realize that there’s only so much you can do in preparation for possible dangers. The best things to do is to get your mind in good shape—alert, mindful, ardent—so that whatever happens in the future, you’ll be in good position to deal with the unexpected.

In other words, you give yourself reasons to be right here.

Then you look at what you’ve got right here in the body as it’s sitting up straight. The body’s moving slightly. It’s breathing. How does that feel? Try breathing in long and out long. Does that feel good? If it does, keep it up. Keep it up until it doesn’t feel good anymore. Then you can change. Make it shorter, or in short, out long; in long, out short. In short, out long tends to be relaxing. In long, out short tends to be more energizing. Deep, shallow, heavy, light, fast or slow: Experiment to see what feels best right now.

You’re not just putting up with whatever’s there. You’re making changes, both in the mind and in the body. Sometimes we’re told that the desire for things to be different is the cause of suffering, so we should just accept things as they are. But that’s ignoring the fact that “as they are” already involves some manipulation on our part. It may be very subconscious, but it’s there.

After all, what do we have here in the present moment? We’ve got the results of past actions that are bearing fruit—sometimes good, sometimes bad; sometimes pleasant, sometimes painful—but we’re not going to experience those results if there’s no present intention to go out to the senses. The senses are where we pick up the results of past actions. There’s a flowing of the mind out to the senses—out to the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body and mind—to pick those results up.

It’s through what’s flowing out—in terms of your intentions, in terms of the way you pay attention, what you pay attention to—that you’re going to have a big influence on what you’re going to experience.

I was talking to group of people this afternoon who were talking about how to listen to Dhamma. As I pointed out, they often come with filters and they don’t realize what the filters are until they’ve been listening for a quite a while. Suddenly, things make sense because the filters have been dropped.

You’re not going to see your filters unless you consciously try to change them.

One of the filters is fear of missing out on what’s going on outside. You have to tell yourself, “No, we’re going to go pay attention to what’s inside right now.” In some cases, that really seems to go against the grain. Other times, you’ve gotten more used to coming inside, looking inside.

That tendency comes with time. It’s a habit you can develop—and it’s a good habit to develop, because as the Buddha said, we suffer because of things happening inside the mind, not so much because of things outside. The way we process things coming in from the senses: That’s the big problem. And you’re not going to see the process if you’re constantly looking outside.

So turn your gaze inside and consciously decide you’re going to breathe in a comfortable way. You’re going to pay attention to this breath that you’ve been ignoring for so long. Notice where you actually feel the breathing process in the body. When we talk about “breath,” it’s not the air coming in and out through the nose. It’s the movement of energy in the body. And where do you feel that? You might feel it in some unexpected places.

Look as carefully as you can at what’s actually going on right now as you try to keep your mind with the breath, keep your awareness with the breath, maintain the intention to stay with the breath. Breathe in a way that gives rise to a feeling of pleasure.

Maintain a perception of the breath that’s open—in other words, open to seeing new things in terms of where the breath is felt, what kind of breathing might be comfortable right now. All those different factors—intention, attention, perception, feeling—come under what the Buddha calls “name”—as we chanted just now, Nāma-rūpam. Why do they call it “name”? It’s hard to say. Basically, it covers the mental activities that follow on consciousness.

Consciousness, too, is active. Sometimes we think that it’s just a passive witness, or even that it’s unconditioned. But as the Buddha said, it’s conditioned by name and form.

There’s one version of dependent co-arising where the two of them start the whole process together. It’s all driven by intention and perceptions. And the best way to see those is to be determined on certain perceptions, be determined on certain intentions.

You’re going to run into some resistance. If you just go with the flow, it’s like being in a boat on a river, with no anchor, no oars—just going whichever way the currents push you. You have no idea where it’s going to go. And you can begin to lose track of which directions you’re going.

But if you’re determined to go in a particular direction, then you realize, “Okay, I’ve got to go against some old currents.” They can be pretty strong but none of them are so strong that you can’t resist them.

So maintain that intention to stay with the breath. Pay attention to how the breathing feels and to this issue of how you can breathe comfortably. Once you’re breathing comfortably, then the question is, “How do you maintain that sense of comfort?” Sometimes it means continuing to breathe in the same way. Sometimes, after a while, the needs of the body change. So you learn how to adjust.

Once the sense of comfort is solid and steady, then you can think of letting it spread. Think of it spreading along the nerves, spreading along the blood vessels, all the way out to the tips of the fingers, the tips of the toes. See how long you can maintain that.

When you can’t maintain that, ask yourself, “What happened? What did you run into?” This is how you learn about your mind. You don’t just watch it willy-nilly.

One of the definitions of discernment or wisdom is penetrative knowledge of arising and passing away. A lot of people focus on “arising and passing away.” They say, “This means that you just watch things coming and going.” But there is that adjective, “penetrative.” It means understanding that there are good things arising and bad things arising. And when things arise, some of them have an effect that lasts for a long time; some of them have an effect that’s immediate.

You’re going to learn that by experimenting. You can’t just sit there and watch things coming and going. It’s like trying to learn about the weather by just watching the sky. You have no role in playing what’s going to happen, so it’s really hard to know what’s going to be a cause and an effect.

But you can get into an experimental laboratory and adjust the conditions. You can recreate weather patterns and begin to understand, “This is how this kind of cloud forms and that kind of cloud forms.” In other words, you manipulate things. Sometimes you run into some resistance. Sometimes you learn that you can do things o that you didn’t expect you could do.

So, we are trying to make a difference here in the mind, and we see what we learn as we try to make that difference. Some people find it hard at the very beginning, so they just give up and say, “Well, I’ll just accept whatever comes”—as if that were wisdom. It’s defeatism.

Someone once asked one of the Thai ajaans, “Shouldn’t Westerners have a special path, given that Westerners find concentration difficult?” He replied, “It may be difficult, but it’s not impossible.” You can’t have a path tailor-made to fit in with your defilements. You’ve got to change yourself. And this is how you do it: Change the way you relate to the body, change the way you relate to your different intentions and acts of attention, the questions you ask, the perceptions you hold on to. You learn about these things, especially in terms of cause and effect, by trying to manipulate them and seeing what you can do. You’re learning things *as they can be. *

There’s a phrase in Pāli, yathā-bhūta-ñāṇa-dassana. Sometimes it is translated as, “knowledge and vision of things as they are.” But things don’t just sit there as they are. Things come into being. The phrase literally means “knowledge and vision of things as they have come to be.” That means seeing cause and effect. And how do you see cause and effect? By playing with the causes.

This is why we talk so much about playing with the breath. It’s one of the best ways of learning about cause and effect—playing around. You get a sense of your own agency and realize that there are some changes you can make in the world. If you pay attention and stick with it, you can make some good changes.

That’s what the Buddha taught. As he said, if people couldn’t abandon unskillful qualities and develop skillful qualities, there would have been no point in his teaching. But we can do this, we can change. And we learn as we change.

So this is your laboratory: your mind, right here, right now; the body, sitting here right now; the breath, putting it all together.

This is a laboratory where you’re allowed to play. It’s not just labor. You get to fool around. And you find that you learn. It’s like kids getting a chemistry set. They can follow the instructions in the booklet, but they can also make some combinations that are not in the booklet. That’s when learning is fun.