A Sense of Yourself

Alertness is an important quality you need to develop for the meditation—and not just as you’re sitting here with your eyes closed. You want to be alert to what you’re doing outside as well. This is why the Buddha includes, as one of the aspects of being a person of integrity, having a sense of yourself—what your strong points are, what your weak points are—so that you can use your strong points to make up for and strengthen your weak points.

The list of qualities you want to observe in yourself starts with a list that you find in many places in the Canon: the four qualities of an admirable friend, which are also four qualities that you develop within yourself that lead to a good rebirth. They start with conviction — in this case, conviction in the Buddha’s awakening — reflecting on: What does it mean to you that someone in India 2,600 years ago awakened to the end of suffering? He said that it was based on qualities that he had developed within himself, but they are qualities that everybody could develop within themselves. Which means you can do it too. You may not become a Buddha, but you can awaken to the end of suffering. This means that your actions make a difference, your actions are important. So you have conviction in the power of your own actions and in your potential.

Ask yourself, how much conviction do you have in these things?

A lot of us have some pretty negative commentators inside, the inner critic that just tears everything down and us immediately opposed to conviction. You have to ask yourself, why do you nourish that inner critic? Sometimes it seems to have a life of its own. It’s like one of those consciousnesses in your body that Ajaan Lee talks about that are not your consciousness and are the consciousness of somebody else. Well, regard it in that way. Even though it may be a feature of your mind that you’ve identified with for a long time, if it’s getting in the way, you don’t need it. You don’t need to identify with it.

This is when the teachings on not-self as a strategy are really useful. It’s one of those selves inside yourself that you’ve been identifying with off and on for a long time, but you don’t have to. Try to develop an inner commentator that’s more encouraging, that’s actually helpful on the path, one that really does believe that “Yes, the Buddha was awakened through his own efforts, by developing qualities that any human being can develop.” You’re a human being, so this news of his awakening has meaning for you. So ask yourself how much you actually believe in that. And if it’s a weak point, what can you do to strengthen it?

The second quality is virtue, learning to be consistent in being harmless in your actions. The consistency is the important aspect of this. As the Buddha pointed out, even people who break the precepts are not breaking them most of the time. It’s not the case that there are people out there killing all the time. Stealing all the time. And down the line. It’s off and on. Well, look into yourself to see how off and on your precepts are. They get their power from being consistent, continuous—because if you don’t break the precepts in any circumstances, as the Buddha said, you give universal safety to the world. In other words, nobody has anything to fear from you. And when your precepts are universal like that, then you get a share of that universal safety as well. So ask yourself, how consistent are your precepts?

The third quality is generosity. This applies not only to being generous with your things, but also generous with your time, your energy, your knowledge, your forgiveness. You might ask yourself, where do you find it difficult to give things up? And why?

Forgiveness is one of the big issues. Learn to forgive yourself for your past mistakes. Learn to forgive others. It doesn’t mean that you have to like them or have to continue having relations with them. Sometimes it simply means that you’re not going to get back at them for the things they’ve done to you. That’s a gift that should be easy to give. So ask yourself, where are the cases where it’s hard? And where can you use your discernment to convince yourself that, yes, it is worthwhile to extend forgiveness.

Discernment is the fourth quality. How discerning are you on the ways in which the mind creates suffering for itself, stress for itself? You can look at it as you meditate right here, right now. The Buddha talks about the disturbances in your mind. How good are you at seeing through them and seeing that you can drop them? The important point of discernment is seeing that the suffering that’s weighing the mind down is not coming from people outside or things outside, conditions outside. It’s coming from within.

So you look into your mind, try to get it as quiet as you can. As peaceful as you can. The more peace there is in the mind, the less disturbance. Ask yourself, what’s getting in the way of the peace? What attachments? What obsessions in the mind? And what can you do about them? How can you see through them? There’s part of the mind that holds on to them because you think it’s worth holding on. You’ve got to see through that. Even with some really negative stuff, stuff that’s obviously negative, there’s part of the mind that feels that you’re being virtuous or being wise or being practical, realistic, by holding on. But if it’s making you suffer, you don’t have to hold on. That’s the message of the four noble truths. So you examine yourself in terms of these four qualities. See to what extent you really are an admirable friend to yourself.

And then the Buddha adds two more qualities to look for. One is your learning in terms of the Dhamma. This is an aspect that’s sometimes downplayed in the forest tradition. You have to understand that the Dhamma textbooks that were available in those days were pretty bad. Which is why Ajaan Mun would say, especially to the people who’ve been studying Pali and reading the commentaries, “Put your knowledge away in a trunk. Lock it up. And then focus on the practice.” Then he’d have them ask themselves questions that would gain insight into what was actually going on in their minds. The questions were actually based on the suttas, based on the Dhamma, just that the way that the Dhamma was being presented in Thailand at the time was pretty off course.

But you had cases of, say, Ajaan Chah and Ajaan Lee, who actually studied quite a lot independently. They didn’t take any of the Pali courses but they did read. They did read the suttas as they were being translated. And the more you know about what the Buddha actually taught, the better armed you are.

I remember when Access to Insight first came out. I got a phone call from one of the Vipassana teachers back east. This was the first time suttas were widely available. This teacher said, “You’re making an honest man out of me. It used to be I could give a talk and talk about what the Buddha taught and nobody else would know whether it was right or wrong. Now people will say, ‘No, I actually read on Access to Insight: The Buddha said xxx, not the yyy you just said.’”

This is why, when the Buddha talks about the different aspects of the path, he talks about learning as being like weapons to use against your defilements. Your soldiers are a right effort. And your right efforts need to be informed. They also need to be protected against a lot of the wrong views that are out there.

So ask yourself, do you know enough about the suttas to be able to tell wrong view from right view? Wrong resolve from right resolve? Down the line. Those are the things that matter. You don’t need to read a lot about emptiness and all the other more abstract topics. Focus on the things that are practical. That’ll be your protection.

The final quality you’re supposed to look at in terms of your strengths and your weaknesses is ingenuity. Unfortunately, this is one of those terms that appears in the Pali Canon but is not really explained. Yet it’s really important in the practice, because you can’t expect that everything that’s going to happen in your mind is found someplace in the Pali Canon or in the teachings of the ajaans. You have your particular defilements, and you have to learn how to take the basic principles and apply them to what’s appearing in your mind right now. And that requires some ingenuity.

There is one interesting passage in the Canon where a monk has been asked whether you have to make a wish for awakening for the path to work. He says, “No. If you do the path correctly, then whether you make a wish or not, it doesn’t really make any difference. On the contrary, no matter how much you wish for awakening, but if you don’t do the path properly, you’re not going to get anywhere.”

After that person goes away, the monk goes to see the Buddha. The Buddha said, “This person would have been more taken with your teaching if you’d given some analogies.” The Buddha then gives the analogy of trying to get milk out of a cow by twisting the horn, trying to get oil out of gravel, trying to get butter out of water. No matter how much you wish for the oil or the milk or the butter, it’s not going to happen, because you’re applying the wrong method. But if you try to get milk out of the cow by pulling on the udder, try to get oil by crushing sesame seeds, or try to get butter out of milk, it’ll happen because you’re applying the right method.

The monk says, “How could I have thought of those analogies because I’ve never heard of them before, and I don’t have the ingenuity to think them up.” That gives you one idea what ingenuity can do: You look at things and see parallels. You see patterns. And then you play with the patterns: This is the pattern of this particular problem in the mind. What is it like that you’ve met before?

There was Aristotle’s definition of intelligence, as seeing relations that have not been pointed out to you. In this case, it’s seeing parallels that haven’t been pointed out to you before. So try to think in those terms because it helps to illustrate your practice to you and make it clear.

There’s a tendency in some circles to say that the real Dhamma is in the Abhidhamma, which is just long lists of concepts and definitions, whereas the analogies as given in the suttas are just like a sugar coating. But the analogies are there to illustrate things for you, to give you parallels. After all, the way we shape our experience in the present moment uses images, perceptions, and the Buddha’s giving you some good perceptions to play with. You can take what he’s got. Then you can think about other ways in which people try to get what they want in the wrong way. You might ask yourself, “To what extent am I doing that?” In that way, you start thinking of new ways of looking at your mind, looking at it from new angles.

One of Ajaan Lee’s questions was, “If something seems true to you, ask yourself, to what extent is the opposite true? And what would be the opposite?” This is a quality you can develop, looking for parallels that are helpful in illustrating where you might be doing something wrong, asking questions from different angles.

For me, one of the most helpful Dhamma books I read was the one where Ajaan Maha Bua was talking to the woman who had cancer. He talks about questions he asked himself about suffering and pain, questions that had never occurred to me before. “Is the pain the same thing as the knee? Is the pain coming at you with bad intentions? Is it actually coming at you?”

That last one was one that I thought up, realizing that I had this feeling that the pains were invading me, coming at me, whereas they weren’t coming in any direction at all. I might as well see them going away, going away.

Once you start asking unusual questions about the pain, you start seeing things in the mind you didn’t see before, strange assumptions you had, that you hadn’t questioned before, but deserve questioning.

So you can ask yourself: To what extent have you tried playing with your notions, playing with your perceptions, asking questions about them, that help you see something you didn’t see before? After all, if awakening were all about realizing the truth of something you already knew, what would be special about it? You have to find something you don’t know yet. It’s here, looking at you, staring at you, but you don’t see it. The things that are getting in the way are right here, and you’re holding on to them because, for some reason, you think it’s better to hold on than it is to let go. There are things happening right here that you don’t comprehend. So there’s work to be done. If you want to get unexpected knowledge, you have to ask unexpected questions. It’s in this sense that ingenuity is really important.

So you can think of this list, the four qualities that typify an admirable friend — conviction, virtue, generosity, discernment — and then you add learning and ingenuity. Those are the standards by which you measure yourself as a practitioner. Then ask yourself, to what extent do you measure up? And if you don’t measure up, what can you do about it?