Dangers Outside & In

The Buddha said that all skillful qualities are rooted in heedfulness. Heedfulness is a measured sense of danger: There are things you have to watch out for, but there’s something that can be done about them. If there were nothing that could be done about them, heedfulness wouldn’t mean anything, wouldn’t accomplish anything. When your heedfulness makes a difference, that’s when it’s important. You protect yourself from dangers and you strengthen good qualities of mind.

As the Buddha said, the five strengths are based on heedfulness. You have conviction in the Buddha’s teachings because you realize that these teachings protect you from danger. And you develop persistence: You work on developing the good qualities that the Buddha said will lead to happiness and abandoning the unskillful ones that lead to unhappiness. You have to keep this in mind, so you’re mindful.

Then you get the mind into concentration because the mind needs food, and if it doesn’t have the food of the pleasure of concentration, it’s going to go feeding off other things. This is when you learn that you can’t really trust yourself. Often, when the food that you can get through virtuous behavior isn’t readily available, a lot of people just go ahead and do whatever is convenient. They forget about the precepts, forget about principles of goodwill and compassion, because they’re hungry. When you feed the mind with concentration, though, it makes you more reliable. Makes you safer.

Then you develop the discernment that puts you in a position where ultimately you don’t need to feed at all. That’s when you’re totally safe: safe both in the sense that you’re beyond the reach of dangers outside, and you don’t present any inside dangers yourself.

The dangers outside are things the Buddha says you’ve got to accept. We’re born into this world, we have a physical body, and it’s going to be subject to illness, it’s going to be subject to pains, it’s going to be subject to aging and death. And it’s also open to attacks. This is an aspect that the Buddha doesn’t talk about that much, but it is there in the suttas. The fact that you’ve got this body means that people can attack you with sticks, stones, and knives. Of course they didn’t have guns and atom bombs in those days, but the same principle applies. We leave ourselves exposed to dangers like this, to the pains that come from that. The Buddha says to learn how to accept the fact that these things can happen.

And accept the fact that people will say harmful words, harsh words, hurtful words. After all, they have mouths. They can use their mouths any way they want. And they’re hungry, too. If we get in their way, they’ll do what they can to push you out of their way. These are some of the things we have to accept about the world outside.

But those dangers, the Buddha said, are not really all that serious. The really serious dangers are the ones that come from within. The outside dangers are dangerous mainly in the sense that they might inspire you to respond in a way that’s not skillful. Then that becomes your karma. Worse off, they may actually try intentionally to get you to behave in ways that are unskillful—either out of ill will for you or simply because they’re deluded.

There are a lot of well-meaning people out there who can hold really harmful ideas. So you have to be really careful. If you adopt their ideas, then you start doing harmful things as well.

But the real reason you might pick up on those ideas is because you already have the germs inside. You’re a hungry person too. And you can do dangerous things.

That’s why we focus on developing the mind. As we develop the mind, we learn that we can respond to outside dangers in a skillful way because we don’t feel so threatened by them. One, we accept them. But we don’t just stop with acceptance.

In the case of pain, the Buddha teaches how to be with pain but not overcome by it. He teaches this principle in very general terms. If you’re doing breath meditation—or as you’re breathing in any case—if you see there’s a potential for pleasure in the body, you develop that potential. If you see there’s a potential for rapture, you develop that, because that gives you a place to stand, so that when there are pains in other parts of the body, you don’t feel totally exposed, totally threatened. You have a safe place to stay. Simply let the pains have another part of the body. Then as the mind settles down, it can develop that sense of well-being.

Then you look at how you perceive the pain. That’s all the Buddha says. You look at what he calls mental fabrication, which includes perceptions and feelings, and you try to calm those perceptions down; you calm those feelings down.

He doesn’t give you much to go on, but this is an area where the ajaans have lots to say. Ajaan Lee will talk about perceiving the breath energies in the body flowing through the pain. Ajaan Maha Bua will talk about how you relate to the pain, how you visualize it to yourself. Do you visualize it as a solid block or as discrete moments? And those discrete moments: Are they coming at you or are they going away from you?

These are the questions you can ask. And you’ll find that as you take a more proactive approach to the pain, it’s not as scary as you thought it was. When you’re running away from it, it seems huge. But when you turn around and really face it, it begins to shrink. You begin to understand the extent to which your perceptions have made the pain a much bigger problem than it has to be.

If someone else is inflicting pain on you, then the Buddha says to try to make your mind expansive. This is one of the common themes throughout all the ways that the Buddha has you deal with the things you have to accept. Expand your mind. Expand your goodwill. Expand your compassion, your empathetic joy, your equanimity, as is appropriate. If someone’s attacking you, he says, have goodwill for them. And start your goodwill there, focused on them.

We’re often told to start goodwill with yourself, then go to people you like, and then people you’re neutral about, and then people you don’t like. But in a case like that, you may not have any time. So, goodwill for the bandits and then for the whole cosmos. Because even if they end up killing you, you at least will have maintained your goodwill, maintained the level of your mind. That more expansive mind presents a lot fewer dangers to you than a narrower, vengeful state of mind would. So you protect yourself through your goodwill.

The same with harsh words: The Buddha says to think of your mind as being like space. People can try to write words on space, but there’s no place for the words to stick. Space is vast but has no surface, so it doesn’t hold things. Have a mind like that, and you’re a lot less likely to pose a danger to yourself.

Because there are things the Buddha says you shouldn’t accept, and the main thing you shouldn’t accept is when unskillful qualities come into mind—in particular, the unskillful qualities of sensuality, ill will, and harmfulness. These directly prevent you from getting into concentration. And if you can’t get into concentration, where are you going to feed, emotionally or intellectually? You start feeding on other people—their words, their actions. And that’s miserable food.

So work on developing the opposite of those unskillful qualities: renunciation, goodwill, compassion. Learn how to feed on those, and you’ve begun to feed on the concentration that develops as you cultivate these qualities. When you’re feeding well inside like this, then even though there are very few things outside that you feel you can actually feed on safely, you’ve got your own supply of food inside and you’re a lot more trustworthy as a result.

So even though there are dangers in the world outside, remember, the big ones are inside. But those are things you can do something about.

When they talk about accepting causes and conditions, you accept the fact that there have been bad choices in the past, and you’re going to have to experience some of the results of those bad choices. But you don’t have to make bad choices now. You have that freedom, and we meditate to make the most of that freedom. Develop a sense of well-being as you stay here with the breath. Learn how to feed on that, be nourished by that, healed by that, and you’ll be a much safer person.