Mission: Possible

Meditation is precision work. It’s like one of those old Mission Impossible TV shows, the ones that required a lot of very fine, detailed work, and a lot of coordinated teamwork as well.

Your mind has many voices inside. There are many people in there. You want them to get to work together, to support one another, and to bring one another into balance.

There’s a sense of urgency. After all, we don’t know how long we have to live in this lifetime. Even if we live long, we may not have all that much time to practice. But we do have time to practice now. That gives you a sense of urgency.

At the same time, though, the work is meticulous. That’s one of the aspects of mindfulness: The Buddha said you’re highly meticulous in what you’re doing. That requires mental balance, balancing many different factors.

As in the four bases for success: The Buddha said you have to have a desire that’s not too excessive and not too weak. Your persistence has to be not too excessive, not too weak. Your intent, the amount of focus you put on this, has to be not too excessive, not too weak. And your powers of analysis have to be not too excessive, not too weak.

So you have to use those different qualities to keep one another in line. In other words, you use your powers of analysis to notice: When is the desire too weak, when is it too strong? And what do you do when it’s too weak or too strong?

You notice a lot of the problem is in how you talk to yourself, the conversations inside that you listen to. What you need as a meditator is kind of like a playlist: a list of songs you have for different moods. In this case, the inner songs, as Ajaan Mun would call them, have to be the sort that counteract the mind when it’s going off too far in one direction.

In other words, when you’re feeling discouraged, you need to think of something that’s inspiring. The Buddha recommends that you either reflect on the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, the examples they give, or on your own generosity, your own virtue, remembering that you do have some good to you. Or you can reflect on the fact that you’re here, you’ve got this opportunity, which means you’ve got the merit someplace that allows you to practice. Use that thought for encouragement.

There are other times when you’re in too much of a hurry, and you have to calm down. That’s when the playlist calls for something else. Remind yourself that, yes, this is precision work, this is a detailed job, and if you rush through things, you’re going to miss everything.

We’re looking for the details of the mind, how the mind creates a little thought world inside, and how that thought world can suddenly blow up. Like the old pictures they had of the Big Bang: Out of nothing comes a huge sudden expansion. How does that happen? You want to watch it carefully. You want to see what those first steps are. That requires that you be very, very calm. So you think of things that are calming, like the fact that the Buddha worked on this for many, many lifetimes. He stuck with it. It requires persistence, combined with patience.

This is where you might want to think of the devas, not the fact that they might be helping you, but the fact that, as the Buddha said, the qualities that make people into devas are qualities you already have to some extent. You have conviction, you have virtue, you have generosity, you’ve learned some of the Dhamma. You have some discernment.

There was a time when Ajaan Fuang said I needed to use more of my discernment. I told him I didn’t have any. He said, “Of course you have. If you didn’t have any discernment, you wouldn’t be a human being.” So you’ve got some discernment, simply that you’ve got to learn how to use it well. So, you’ve got good qualities already—not that you can rest on your laurels, but simply for encouragement.

In other words, you have to learn how to look at your thinking from the outside and remind yourself that you have many alternatives. You’re engaging in directed thought and evaluation almost all the time. Remind yourself that you have different recordings, so to speak, that you can slip into the mix. Just because a thought pattern seems to be going through your head and is very insistent doesn’t mean that it has to stay there and that you can’t let it go.

The Buddha gives you all kinds of instructions on how to let go of unskillful thinking. You either can replace the unskillful thoughts with more skillful thoughts, or you can reflect for a while on the drawbacks of that unskillful thinking, to realize, stepping aside from it and watching it from the outside, that it really isn’t good for you.

Or you can simply decide not to pay any attention to it at all. Let it chatter away in some corner of the mind, while you get to work.

Or you realize that that thinking involves a certain amount of effort. Where do you feel that effort, especially where do you feel that effort in the body? Where is there a pattern of tension in the breath energy that allows that thinking to have a foothold in your mind? Can you breathe through that?

Then, as a last resort, you crush that unskillful thinking with your determination simply not to think it. That’s when you think thoughts of Buddho, Buddho, Buddho really fast, like machine-gun fire. Then you clear the air.

So there are ways you can turn off your old thoughts, just like those songs that go through your head that seem to repeat over and over again. They do have their limits. It’s not the same song all the time. One of the best ways of dealing with them is to start thinking of the different chants we have. Repeat those in your head. If you’re going to have something running through your head, have something connected with the Dhamma.

In the same way, if a thinking is pulling you off in the wrong direction, getting you too nervous, getting you too tight, or getting you discouraged and lazy, replace it with a much better, more Dhamma thought.

Of course, there are some Dhamma thoughts that would get you upset, like the ones we talked about the other day, when we were talking about the urgency of all this and how you should act as if your head is on fire. Okay, you use that kind of thinking when you need to be more stirred up in the practice. But if you’re already stirred up, don’t think those thoughts. Think another Dhamma theme that’s more calming.

They have a saying in Christianity that the devil can quote the Bible to his purposes. Well, Mara can quote the Pali Canon to his purposes, too. And your unskillful mind can just latch on to anything and say, “This is Dhamma,” and drive you crazy.

Remember, the Buddha’s instructions for speech: It has to be true and beneficial and timely. A lot of things that are true are not beneficial right now because they’re not timely right now. “Timely” has to do not only with whether it’s appropriate for the occasion, but also with what kind of tone of voice you’re using with yourself, whether it’s gentle or harsh. There are times when you do need to give some harsh instructions to yourself: Stop being so lazy. Stop being so self-indulgent. Other times, you need to adopt a more gentle treatment when you’re feeling wounded and tired.

So remember, we’re looking for balance: balance in our desire, balance in our persistence, balance in our intent, balance in our analysis.

There are times when you start analyzing things just too much. There’s no quietude in the mind. That’s why Ajaan Mun—when a student came, especially one who had some background in Dhamma study—would say, “Put what you’ve learned in the books into a heep.” It’s kind of a chest they have in Thailand. “Put it in a chest and just focus on your mind right here, right now.”

In other words, put a lot of emphasis on just getting really quiet right now. If a part of the mind says, “Well, I’m supposed to be doing insight work, and I’ve only got a few more days here at the monastery,” get the mind quiet. Because it’s in the quiet mind that the real work is done.

So keep things in balance. Remember, you have a repertoire here. Again, it’s like having lots of different songs on your playlist. Which song is appropriate for right now? Which one will bring things into balance, will correct an attitude that makes it impossible to actually do what you need to be doing?

Remember, we’re working on a mission possible here. This can be done. It just requires a lot of changes in your attitude. Instead of indulging in your moods, you have to stand outside of them. Instead of identifying with your moods, you stand outside them. See when they’re useful, see when they’re not.

This is what the middle path means. It’s not that you avoid pleasure and pain, and go for something neutral in the middle. You learn how to use pleasure and use pain for a higher purpose.

There’s precision work in dealing with your defilements that get in the way of your concentration, in dealing with the ignorance that gets in the way of release.

It’s urgent work, but it requires that you be very patient.

As I said the other day, it’s a middle path, and it’s the middle paths that exercise your discernment. For an extreme path of urgency or an extreme path of very quiet do-nothingness, that would be easy, but it wouldn’t exercise your discernment. You wouldn’t have the discernment you need to deal with the defilements.

So learn how to read things. Learn how to step aside from what you identify with in your thinking. Learn how to manage it so that the teamwork inside works together, and they’re here to help one another inside—so that you see, Yes, the mission really is possible. It can get done.