Again & Again

Ajaan Fuang had a student who was doing body contemplation one day. She imagined taking her body apart into its various organs. When she was done, another vision of her body appeared right next to it. So she did the same with that. And, even before she’d finished with that one, another one appeared, and then another, then another. She said it was like fish lined up on a counter, ready to be grilled.

She had a strong sense of tedium in the whole process. She went to complain to him. He said, “Yes, we practice to give rise to a sense of the tedium of saṁsāra, but you can’t find the practice tedious. You just keep doing it, because you know this is the way out. It may seem repetitive, it’s something you’ve been doing over and over again, but don’t focus on that. Focus on the fact that this is the way out.”

This reminds me of a conversation between the Buddha and a brahman. The brahman was in front of his house one day with some food, and the Buddha came by. So the brahman put the food in the Buddha’s bowl. The next day the Buddha came by again. Third day, he came by again. The brahman complained, “What is this? Every day, again and again and again.” The Buddha replied, “People farm every year again and again, they gather the crops again and again, they’re born again and again, die again and again.”

Which “again and again” is more tedious? The practice or saṁsāra? You’ve got to keep things in perspective.

Everybody wants stream-entry. Yet we’re even though we’re doing the meditation, it just doesn’t appear. What’s wrong? You could think maybe there’s a secret. But as the Buddha said, the stream is basically when the factors of the noble eightfold path come together into one path.

There’s nothing esoteric, there’s nothing hidden about the teaching. You hear that three fetters are abandoned at stream-entry, and you think, “Well, maybe I have to focus on getting rid of those three fetters.” But that’s not how it works. Stream-entry is what cuts the fetters. The experience of the deathless cuts the fetters. You can’t cut them beforehand.

You can contemplate these issues — particularly the issue of things beings *self *or not-self, when it’s worth claiming them as self and when it’s not—but the practice is the noble eightfold path: doing right mindfulness, doing right concentration, like we’re doing right now, trying to make sure that it’s right. That’s a lot of the doing again and again: How *right *is your mindfulness? How *right *is your concentration? How really observant are you? After all, it’s your powers of observation that are going to make the difference. They’re going to develop in the course of being with the breath again and again, adjusting the breath again and again. You want to be very clear about what you’re doing, because you can catch yourself doing something that’s really unnecessary, that’s actually adding to the stress. When you can see that, that’s what you let go. And you want to make that a habit. It’s called meta-cognition—observing the mind in action.

So keep doing this again and again, because it does have an impact on the mind. You begin to see when things go really well: This state of concentration is the best thing you can put together in the present moment, and you begin to see more and more clearly what you’re doing to do that. Sometimes the mind settles down, and you don’t notice that it’s on this level or that level, or that it has this factor or these factors or those factors. You just know it’s settled down. Okay, try to get it to settle down again, and then again, in different situations—some more difficult than others—until you become really good at observing yourself.

There has to be that question of, “What am I doing that I’m not seeing?” Start by focusing on the breath. Do what you think is the best way of focusing on the breath, getting the mind to fill the body, getting the breath to fill the body, and having a sense of ease to fill the body. Then try to maintain that and notice what comes up to destroy it. See if you can zap whatever it is that’s ready to destroy it. And try to get those distractions more and more quickly, until there’s just a brief little stirring in the mind, you can untangle it, breathe through it, and the potential for a thought goes away. Then try to maintain that stillness as best you can.

Think of a spider on a web. It’s at one spot on the web but it’s sensitive to the entire web. Anything comes and hits the web, it runs over to see what it is. If it’s an insect, it’ll spin its threads around it and then go back to its original spot. In this case, you’re not spinning a web, you’re untangling these little formations that are on the border between your awareness and the body. You disperse them Then you do that again and again and again. It’s because you’re doing something again and again that you can get to see it more clearly, more precisely.

There’s that story of the young Mark Twain on the river. He was going to become a riverboat captain. So he gets in the boat, and the captain says, “Okay, observe the river as we go down it today.” At the end of the day, the captain asked him, “Okay, tell me about all the bends in the river.” Mark Twain thought he was fooling: How could he possibly remember all the bends? The captain said, “If you want to be a riverboat captain, this is what you’ve got to do. You’re going to be doing this day in, day out, and you have to notice when the sandbars have changed, so that you’re not fooled by anything new that comes up.”

Well, it’s the same with the breath: You stay with the breath again and again, and some days it’ll do something a little bit different. Some days the mind will do something a little bit different. That’s what’s really important. You want to be able to notice these things.

So keep in mind that question: “What am I doing, and what am I doing that I’m not seeing?” Then you just do what’s mentioned in the description of the path — again and again and again. That’s when you get to see things that are really subtle, things that you would have missed otherwise.

It’s in seeing how you put things together in the present moment that you can learn how to *stop *putting things together in the present moment. You get to the point when you realize, “I can put together this state of concentration, but it’s fabricated. I can move to another state of concentration, but *it’s *fabricated, too.”

This is where a sense of tedium comes in. You realize that this is the best state of mind you can do, the best state of mind you can put together, but still, these states are all going to fall apart. Isn’t there something better?

This is where the element of the heart comes into the practice. We’re not just doing this as an intellectual exercise; it’s an exercise of the heart, too. After all, we’re looking for happiness; we’re looking for pleasure. We want to get really enamored of the pleasure for the concentration so that we can do it well, so that we can pull ourselves away from our other attachments. But then there will come a point where you say, “Isn’t there something better?” That’s when the disenchantment comes in. You can’t force the disenchantment, but you can create the causes for it by sticking with the practice as you know it, as best as you can, again and again, and asking that question: “What am I doing that I’m not seeing? What am I doing that’s adding unnecessary stress here? Can I stop?”