Sunrise, Sunset

There’s a passage where the Buddha says that you should stop and reflect every day at sunrise that this could be your last sunrise. There are lots of dangers that could happen, lying in wait in the course of the day, and this time around they may actually kill you. Are you ready to go?

The same at sunset: This might be your last sunset. Instead of marveling at the colors, remind yourself, “I could go tonight. Something might happen in my body. A little clot could get wanderlust, wander around, get lodged in an important artery or vein. That would be it. Or things outside could happen.” What inside your mind would make you not ready to go?

If you’re not sure, you don’t have to think in the abstract. Just look at yourself as you go through the day. What kind of thinking does the mind like to settle down in? When you’re trying to meditate and part of the mind wants to get into concentration, while another part says, “Not for the time being. Let me wander around a little bit first,” what are those thoughts?

Do you like wandering around in thoughts of lust? You can excuse yourself in all kinds of ways, saying that you’re still young, so it’s only natural that you have thoughts like this. Well, yeah, it’s natural, but do you want them to take over? Do you want them to be in charge at the moment when you go?

Or do you like thinking about how you’ve been mistreated in life, or how many people are mistreating you now, how things are not fair? If that’s the kind of thinking your mind likes to wallow in, that’s probably where it’s going to be when you go. It’s going to be hard to let go of that. You’ll want to take it with you, and it’ll take you down.

Or do you like pickling in bad moods? You feel insecure when your moods are good, but you feel as if things are settled—they can’t get any worse than they are right now—when you’re in a bad mood/ If you feel secure in a bad mood, you’ll probably want to take that with you, too, and of course that’ll pull you down.

So you don’t have to look far. Just look at your daily habits, the daily habits of the mind, the ones that keep getting in the way of allowing the mind to settle down in concentration. Ask yourself, “Aren’t you tired of these things? Don’t you see they’re dangerous?” Recognize them not as your friends, but as dangers lying in wait.

After all, death has high standards. It’s very demanding. If you want to die well, your mind has to be maintained always in good shape. As that poem that we chant regularly says, “There’s no bargaining with death.” Whatever you’ve got in your mind at the time you go, if you can’t let it go right away, death is going to let it pull you down.

So you have to have high standards for your mind as you go through the day, not allowing it to wallow in thoughts like this. I was reading a piece recently where someone defined goodwill as not holding other people to very high standards. How that gets connected with goodwill, it’s hard to say. It probably comes from the idea that one of the worst things you can do to other people is to have a stern judgment of them. So if you don’t hold other people to high standards, they won’t hold you to high standards. You can get along.

Well, you can get along, but it’s not getting along very well.

I was reading some of the obituaries for my older brother recently. He was a professor of business administration. The former students who were writing about him, commenting on what kind of teacher he was, said they really appreciated him because he was very demanding. He held them to high standards. He convinced them that if they really wanted to accomplish something in life, they would have to do more than they wanted to do, and they would have to learn how to talk themselves into wanting to do it. They appreciated that.

I know in my own case that Ajaan Fuang held me to very high standards. He was able to read my mind, I was convinced, and if any random, unskillful thoughts went through it, their content would be the topic of a Dhamma discussion that evening. And I benefited from that.

It’s what the Thais call high-level goodwill, where you want the best for somebody, which means that you demand good work from them. Ideally, a teacher with high standards gets the students to have high standards, because that’s what really counts. If your work meets high standards, you’ll benefit.

So you have to have high standards for yourself. If something comes into your mind that’s not connected with the Dhamma, you have to tell yourself, “No, I can’t go there,” no matter how attractive it is, no matter how familiar that kind of thinking is, that comfortable-old-shoe thinking. The shoe may not be good for your feet, it may not be good for your posture, but it’s comfortable to your feet because you’ve worn it so long.

Remind yourself that death has high standards. It holds you to being really responsible for what’s in your mind. When you think in that way, you get the most out of your time as a human being.

Time slips away. They say that space-time moves at the speed of light. I don’t know how it moves, where it moves into, but it goes fast. You can’t go back and catch it. We think we can catch the past by holding it in our memories, but our memories are very sloppy, very patchwork. You can go to a place and have a very clear memory of it afterwards, but then come back years later and realize that it wasn’t like that at all.

Over time, each time you bring out a memory, it gets altered a bit. Then you put it back in storage, and then pull it out again, it gets altered a bit as you put it back. That’s what our sense of holding on to the past is: shreds, bits and pieces. The actual past is gone, gone. The present is going, going, going. Even though the future is coming at us, it’s going to go past us at the speed of light.

So take advantage of what you’ve got right now. You’ve got the opportunity to train your mind. You’ve got the opportunity to say No to those familiar thoughts, the ones that you say, “This doesn’t matter. Give me five minutes, ten minutes, to think about this or to wallow in this emotion before I really think about settling down.”

Those are the things you’ve got to watch out for. If you don’t do anything about them now, they become hard to let go. And if you don’t let them go, they’re going to pull you down.

So think about this every day as the sun rises. The sunrise may be beautiful, but it may be your last sunrise. You can’t hold on to it. The sunrise goes in a few minutes, the colors fade, but take advantage of that opportunity to stop and think.

Of course, the Buddha says that stopping to think about death once or twice a day is still heedless, but it’s better than not thinking about it at all. And these are good times to emphasize it, because these are times when we usually stop and think about the day, the day that’s passed, the night that’s ahead of us, the day that’s coming. Be on your guard. Look to see where your mind tends to go when its energy is down.

What kind of basin does it fall into? That’s what you’ve got to watch out for. That’s the kind of thing you won’t be able let go unless you really work on it. Take that as your task for the day, and it’ll be a day well spent.