The Buddha’s Filters

There’s a Romantic notion that we should approach experience as a whole, each moment, without any filters, without any preconceived notions, with fresh eyes—and that we should respond spontaneously with whatever new ideas come up in that unfiltered mind. The problem is that our minds can’t operate without filters. Too many things are coming in and out all the time. What seems spontaneous, what seems natural, is just your old filtration system. The things you tend to pay attention to, the intentions you have around them, your perceptions of the world: A lot of those factors are included in dependent co-arising before sensory contact.

A recent writer was talking about how everything from sensory contact on was very clear, but the earlier factors were pretty murky. Well, that’s because they’re murky in our minds. The whole purpose of meditation is to look at our filtration system and to replace it with a better one. Clean out the gunk, look at the filters, take them out, and then replace them with the Buddha’s filters: appropriate attention. It’s a double-filtration system.

The Pali term, yoniso manasikāra, is translated in a lot of different ways: “wise reflection,” “right approach,” “skillful approach.” Often it’s treated as a very vague “wise reflection” without any clear notion of what’s wise about it. But the Buddha is very specific. It’s a double-filtration system. The first is that unskillful qualities should be abandoned and skillful qualities should be developed. That should be your approach to every situation.

In other words, you’re not going to harm—and you’re not going to tolerate ideas in the mind that would incline you to cause harm. This is your general filtration system for use all the time. When emergencies come up and require an instant response, your instant response should be, “No harm.” Then whatever the particulars, you can pretty much sort those out.

The second filtration system is more refined. That’s the four noble truths along with their duties. When a situation comes up that requires reflected thought, the first reflection should be, “Where is the suffering here? What’s causing it? And what can I do to put an end to it by attacking the cause?” Try to comprehend the suffering, abandon its cause, and develop the path so that you can realize the cessation of suffering. That should be how you frame things.

The Buddha has a long discussion of appropriate attention in Majjhima 2. He talks about the kind of questions that are not worthy of attention. A lot of those questions already slosh around in our minds. They’re the gunk in our current filtration system: “Who am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going?” As the Buddha said, “who you are” is a construct. But it’s not a question that’s worth pursuing, because you can define yourself in many different ways.

If you do have to define yourself, define yourself as someone who’s capable of following the path, who will benefit from following the path, who will take responsibility for the path. In other words, it’s not a question of what you are, but what you do: what kind of actions you do. And those should come under the duties of the four noble truths. So try to keep that filter in mind and approach all the problems that face you from that perspective.

Now, what is the filter of the truth of suffering? It’s not simply that there is suffering. The Buddha certainly didn’t say that life is suffering. He said that clinging to the five aggregates is suffering.

Someone once complained, “How can you say that suffering is a noble truth? What’s noble about suffering?” But it’s not that suffering is noble. What’s noble is the truth, and what’s noble about the truth is its approach to suffering. It means you step back and look at the things you’re attached to and pass wise judgement on them. You’re attached to sensuality, you’re attached to your views about the world, you’re attached to your ideas of how things should be done, you’re attached to your ideas about yourself. Those things seem real. That’s the reality in which you tend to operate. That’s your filter.

The Buddha is asking you to look at that filter and see that all those things are created out of aggregates: your experience of form, your experience of feelings, experience of perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness. When you look at your ideas of reality in those terms, you realize that these things change all the time. They’re strongly conditioned, both in the sense of being socially conditioned and in the sense of simply being subject to conditions that arise and fall away. They’re all very ephemeral. And where did you get these attachments? From your parents? Teachers? The media? You have to ask yourself, “What do these people know?

I remember when I was in my first year as a monk, meditating alone on the mountain. Voices in my mind would come to say, “You’re wasting your time here. What the Buddha taught all those many years ago isn’t applicable now. There are more important things to do in the world.” I had to ask myself, “Where did I get those ideas?” I could name a few people, people who were really important in my life. But then I had to ask myself, “What do they know about the Buddha’s way? They’re totally ignorant about it. So how can I allow their thoughts, their values, to filter my mind?”

That’s what it means to comprehend suffering: to see where the things you hold on to dearly are constructed out of these aggregates, and question exactly how reliable those aggregates are. That way, you’ll be less inclined to cling to them and less inclined to crave them. After all, that’s where the cause of suffering is: It’s in the craving. You crave sensuality; you crave taking on a state of becoming. In other words, once there’s something you desire, you have a sense of the world in which that object can be found and the identity you have to take on in that world in order to find it. And you go into that. All of that is a becoming. It’s something we do all the time.

I was teaching a retreat recently where someone complained after I commented on how this is how the mind functions. They began to see they were doing it all the time, and it was scary. What the Buddha said is the craving for becoming is not something abstract. It’s a very particular kind of mental activity. It’s our approach to almost everything.

Like beavers: They had some beavers that had been raised in captivity after their parents had been killed. The question was, when they were released into the wild, would they know how to build dams after having never seen one? Well, when they released them into the wild, the first thing they did was to build a dam, build a lodge. That’s a beaver’s solution to every problem. For us, becoming is the solution to every problem. Yet the Buddha says we’re creating a lot of suffering this way through our desire to keep on doing this.

Then there’s a craving for non-becoming, which is to destroy whatever becoming you’ve already got.

These are the causes of suffering.

You attack the causes by developing the path. How does the path do its work? The heart of the path is concentration, what you’re doing right now. You’re creating a state of becoming right here. You’ve got the desire for quietude in the mind, for clarity in the mind. And your world is here in the body, as you feel it from within, in the present moment, and you are the meditator operating here.

As you get clear about that, you begin to see that all the distractions that come up to disturb your concentration are also states of becoming. Some of them have the added appeal of being instances of sensuality. But as the Buddha said, you have to see the drawbacks of sensuality. This is why we have the contemplation of the body, which — along with food — is the primary sensual object. You ask yourself, “What am I attracted to? Exactly what is it? Is it some aspect of somebody’s body, or some aspect of my own body? Is that the only aspect of the body there is? Or are there other parts as well?” Everything you desire is connected to a lot of things you wouldn’t desire.

Then just what is this desire for these things? Where does that come from? You start digging down, digging down into these cravings, and you begin to see that they promise a lot of pleasure but deliver very little, and they deliver a lot of hardship in their wake.

In the meantime, you’ve got the sense of ease and well-being that come from the concentration. As the Buddha said, even though you see the drawbacks of sensuality, if you don’t have an alternative source of pleasure — the pleasure of inhabiting the body fully, with breath energy filling the body in a good way  — then you’re going to go back to sensuality.

So the path helps you get sensitive to this process of becoming, giving you a better becoming here with a state of concentration, so that you can see the processes of becoming as they form in the mind, as these attractions form. You want to get quicker and quicker at seeing them and stopping them. As you get quicker at stopping them, you begin to see that they form in stages. A lot of the stages are normally subterranean, but because you’re very, very still, you can sense them in areas where you wouldn’t have sensed them before.

This is how developing the path helps you to abandon craving. This is appropriate attention.

Now, the work of the four noble truths becomes a lot more delicate and subtle as you meditating, but you want to maintain that same general attitude as you go through the day. What’s the skillful approach to whatever the issue is right here, right now? Block out any unskillful thoughts, any unskillful mental qualities. If an issue comes up that’s making you suffer, remind yourself that the issue outside may be really bad and it may have to be something that you do have to deal with outside, but what’s more important is that you make sure that you’re not suffering from it, that you’re not adding to the weight with your own clinging and craving.

So that’s the Buddha’s filter. It’s there to focus you on what really needs to be done. We can’t approach life without any filters at all. There’s just too much coming in through the senses. There are people who talk about how amazing it can be to be fully sensitive all at the same time to what you hear, see, taste, touch, feel. But it’s hard to really decide what to do when you’re in a state like that. And yet the mind has its duties, there are things we have to do in order to keep on living, in order to shape the present moment and direct it in the right way.

So we’re always filtering things in one way or another. Our problem is that our filters are full of gunk and we don’t know who put them together. They’re pretty jerry-rigged. We put them together from little bits and pieces of this person, that person, this idea, that idea. Often they filter out all the wrong things and allow things to go through that shouldn’t be allowed through. In other words, we get focused and fixated on questions and issues that really have no importance and actually get in the way of putting an end to suffering.

Like that famous sutta about the man who’s been shot by an arrow. They take him to the doctor and he says, “Now, before you take the arrow out, I want to know who shot the arrow, what it was made of, what wood it was made from, what feathers it was made from.” If you tried to answer those questions, the man would die by the time the answers came. That’s where we are right now. A lot of us are shot in the chest but we’re asking the wrong questions. We’re going to die before we can put an end to suffering.

So you want a good set of filters from the Buddha’s two-phase filtration system: the issue of abandoning unskillful qualities and developing skillful qualities, and then the duties of the four noble truths. That focuses you on the things that are important and filters out all the things that are extraneous. That way, we can approach the problem of suffering in the present moment a lot more effectively and find genuine freedom—not just the freedom of responding any old way we want, but the freedom of not having to suffer, which is worth a lot more.