Choices

The Buddha’s teachings are all about making choices between the things you feel like doing and the things that would be for your long-term welfare and happiness. It starts with generosity. You have something. You could either keep it and use it yourself, or you could give it away. Your immediate impulse is to keep it. But when you try giving it away, you find that there’s a joy that comes with giving. It goes deeper than simply partaking of whatever you had.

The same with virtue: Sometimes there are things you’d like to say and do that wouldn’t be all that virtuous. But then you think about the long term, and you decide to refrain, say, from lying or stealing or killing or taking intoxicants. And you’re glad you did.

The same principle applies to meditation. You could be sitting here thinking about the world outside, the world of your life, your daily life, or you could be focused on the present moment to develop powers of concentration and mindfulness. And because there’s a choice, and because there are parts of the mind that would go with either choice, there’s going to be a battle inside.

This is why an important part of the practice is getting to know the different members of your mind’s committee, which side they’re on, and learning how to side with the ones that are on the side of your long-term welfare and happiness. The ones that are going for immediate pleasure or immediate preferences don’t have much of a plan. If they don’t care about your long-term welfare and happiness, you can ask yourself, “Do you really want to identify with them?” The important thing is that you realize you don’t have to. Just because there’s an idea in your mind doesn’t mean you have to lay claim to it.

Now, sometimes those ideas will have some strong ways of pushing themselves on you. An important part of the skill of practice is learning how to resist their push. So when you come to meditation, if you’ve had some practice in saying No to your unskillful members of the mind’s committee, you’ve got a good practice. You’ve got some confidence that, yes, you can do it and, yes, it’ll be good for you. And you’ll be happy you did.

Years back, when Ajaan Suwat was teaching in Massachusetts, it was his first time teaching a large group of Westerners. After the second or third day, he turned to me and said, “Have you noticed how grim these people are?” And he was right. They looked very grim. His analysis of why they were grim was interesting. He said, “They don’t have any practice with the Buddha’s teachings on generosity and virtue so, one, they don’t have confidence in the Buddha. And two, they don’t have confidence in themselves.”

This may be one of the reasons why when meditation, especially mindfulness, is introduced to the West, there’s a huge emphasis on just being okay with whatever comes up in your mind. When you’re trying to get the mind still, there will be voices in the mind, or sides of the mind, that you don’t like to see coming up. If you’re not confident that you don’t have to identify with them, it’s going to be hard to not get blown away by them.

I was teaching another retreat one time when, in the middle of one afternoon, one retreatant burst out crying. Everybody else in the room was very quiet as if nothing was going on. He kept on sobbing for quite a while. I found out later that he had been a drug dealer. And it suddenly hit him, all the people’s lives he had ruined by selling them drugs. Now, if he hadn’t had that scar in his past, it wouldn’t have come up. Or even if he had it, but if he had had some good practice with generosity and virtue, he would have been able to withstand it, knowing that he had a good side to himself as well.

This is why the Buddha teaches that a good foundation for meditation is generosity and virtue—and having a right view about your mind and the thoughts coming up in the mind. Some of them are the results of your current decisions; some of them come from past decisions. If they come from past decisions, you have the opportunity to say “yes” or “no” to them. Do you want to continue with them or not?

In the Buddha’s descriptions of getting the mind into mindfulness, which is basically his description of how to get the mind into concentration, there are two activities. On the one hand, you keep track of something here in the present moment, like the breath. And you work with the breath. You don’t just watch whatever’s going to happen. You try to breathe in a comfortable way. You experiment with breathing in different ways. Find what feels comfortable. Try to be aware of the whole body. And then soothe the whole body with the breath.

In some places, he talks about first energizing the body by the way you breathe, because there’s a tendency if you just calm down right at the beginning, to drift off to sleep or zone out, which is not what you want. So breathe in a way that energizes you and then allow it to grow calm. And think of that good energy spreading throughout the whole body. That’s one activity.

The other activity is that if any other thoughts about the world come up right now, you put them aside. If you’ve had some practice with generosity, some practice with virtue, you know how to do that—in other words, without a lot of recrimination, without a lot of guilt feelings, but just very matter-of-factly. This is the nature of training the mind.

You’re ardent, alert, and mindful in doing this. Ardent: You’re trying to do this well. Alert: You’re trying to watch what you’re actually doing and the results you’re getting. And then mindful, trying to keep all this in mind. This is what you want to do. If you have any experience with meditation, about how to deal with different distractions that come up, put that knowledge to use.

If you find yourself zoning out, try to remember: As soon as things get comfortable inside, you have to watch out. You have to give the mind work to do. This is why we talk about allowing the breath energy to spread through the whole body. Ask yourself, is there any part of the body that’s not nourished by the breath? Examine it. Think of opening new pathways in the body until the whole body is saturated with good breath energy. That helps to wake you up, to keep you alert.

You’ll be talking to yourself as you do this. We tend to think of meditation as being a state in which you try not to talk to yourself. And there are higher states of concentration where things get really, really still in the mind. But in the beginning, you have to talk, because parts of the mind want to stay and other parts of the mind don’t want to stay. So there has to be some reasoning back and forth.

There are also other reasons why.

Ajaan Lee, one of the forest masters, says that you don’t want to be too quick about getting rid of your sense of self. We hear about “not-self, not-self” as an important insight, but it’s one of those insights that you have to learn how to apply at the right time in the right place. Like right now, you’re responsible for staying with the breath. And you want to have the confidence that, Yes, you can do this. As the Buddha said, that’s a kind of sense of self. And it’s an important part of the practice. You want to have the sense that you will benefit from this.

Then there’s the commentator inside. You want to train the commentator so that it’s actually helpful. If it starts telling you that you’re no good as a meditator, say, “I want to hear something that’s useful.” You take responsibility. You observe. And you suggest ways of improving things.

These are all different roles of your sense of self as you’re meditating. You need them because there are other senses of self in the mind that would pull you away. Those are the ones to which you apply the perception of not-self. You don’t have to identify with them. You have the choice. And when you see yourself as not just one unitary thing, but as using many different senses of self, it’s a lot easier to start letting go of the unskillful ones and to start nourishing the skillful ones. That’s because part of the mind realizes that if you’re going to be responsible for the practice, you need a sense of self. Just learn how to make it skillful, so that the skillful voices take over and the unskillful ones go quiet. Let them go.

You’re using your powers of judgment here. That’s part of this path of choosing: choosing to be generous; choosing to be virtuous; choosing to develop your mindfulness, your concentration, your discernment; judging what gives rise to long-term good results and what doesn’t; and learning the skills to make the mind want to stay with what gives long-term good results and not identify with the other things.

We know that it’s not good to be judgmental, but it is good to be judicious. That’s a skill you’re trying to develop as you meditate. See that the whole practice is learning how to be judicious.

Keep that in mind as you practice. And try to nourish the practice in all directions, in all dimensions, because we’re training the mind but we’re also training the heart. You want to train the heart to want long-term happiness. You want to train your mind to be good at directing your actions in the right direction. You want them to work together. When they work together, that’s when they both grow.