Awakening Is in the Details

They say that when European adventurers were exploring the world and encountering Native people, their cartographers liked to ask the Native people to draw maps of their sense of their land.

There was one group that drew very, very accurate maps: the Inuit up north. The reason why was because up north, the atmosphere is very strange. There are lenses in the atmosphere that bend light. So Fata Morgana mirages are very common up there, and they’re very deceptive.

People had to have a very clear sense of where the different islands were and where they were not. They could see mountains on the horizon, and they had to know whether they were real mountains or just atmospheric effects. In other words, they had to have a clear sense of the difference between what things were actually there and how things appeared.

As meditators, we have to develop that same sense, because our minds are full of mirages. All too often, we take them for something real. As we live with one another, we have our perceptions of other people. Maybe they’re based on a single impression we had at one time, and we just hold on to that impression. That makes it very difficult to deal with reality. You’re like an Inuit person with no clear sense of what’s real and what’s not. You get lost.

It’s very important that you realize that your perceptions of other people are perceptions. You can’t get into the reality of the other person.

This goes for your own mind as well. There are lots of mirages in the mind—your ideas about what you perceive, what’s real, what’s not real. You have to learn how to test these things, because your perceptions are actions. If you keep holding on to them, they can block genuine things off. They prevent you from seeing. We use them to try to identify things, but then our identification may have shifted from what the reality is, or the reality may have shifted away from what we saw at one point.

It’s in that gap between your perceptions and reality that realizations can occur. In other words, you realize you’ve been holding on to a perception—either it’s just making you miserable, or it’s not in line with the way things are, and you’re operating in blindness—but when you suddenly see, “Oh, that was just a perception that I applied, a perception I developed and I remembered,” it’s a lot easier to change it. You can develop perceptions that are better and better, more and more useful—because what we’re looking for in the mind is very subtle.

Buddha has a passage where he talks about how you can get the mind into concentration, all the way up through the fourth jhana, and then various knowledges will occur when there is an opening. The most important one, of course, is the knowledge that leads to the end of suffering.

The other knowledges are optional. Some people have them; other people don’t. The people who are looking for them tend to be looking for them for the wrong reasons. You can’t really trust yourself for wanting them. But you can trust yourself when you say, “I want to put an end to suffering. I want to stop doing the things that cause suffering.” That’s an intention you can trust. Try to see where to look for that opening.

As I’ve said many times, the mind is a complex system, and the nature of complex systems is that they have are called resonances, where things that used to be determined by the system, that seemed to be locked in place, get into that resonance, and then they’re freed. Basically, the formula for their motion gets divided by zero, which means they’re out of the system.

That’s the kind of opening you want to look for in your mind. And to look for that, you have to get very, very precise in your perceptions. The best way to do that is to play with them, to see to what extent a perception can change things and to what extent it can’t.

Like your perceptions of the breath: You can think of the breath as an energy coming in from outside. You can also think of it as an energy originating inside. Hold one of those perceptions in mind for a while, and then switch to the other one. See which one is better for getting the mind to settle down, giving it a good place to settle down.

You can think of the breath flowing up as you breathe in. But that often leads to headaches. So think of it flowing down, but not so much that it puts you to sleep. Again, check to see what your actual sensation of the body feels like when you hold a particular image in mind.

As you do this, you begin to see that there are connections between your perceptions and your sensations. You also see that they’re different things. They’re not just one big glob.

As the Buddha said, discernment is a matter of seeing things as separate, but not totally separate. Once you see that they are separate things, you can begin to see, “Oh, this is how they interact. This is how they’re related. This is how one thing depends on another.”

If they’re a big glob, you can’t see those relationships. When you can’t see the relationships, then you can’t see the openings.

So remember, you’re dealing largely with perceptions here. Concentration is a perception attainment all the way up through the perception of the dimension of nothingness. In other words, there’s an image you’re holding in mind someplace, either a word or a picture, that you fasten on, that you focus on. That’s what enables the mind to stay in placel.

Try to hold on to an image that allows the mind to stay with a sense of well-being, a sense of groundedness. It feels good being here. It feels right being here. Everything is in its right place. Your body’s not distorted.

Sometimes in the beginning, as you’re settling down, there’ll be some distortions in the body. The body will feel very large or very small.

One time, I was with Ajaan Fuang in Bangkok, sitting with a group of people, and I had a sense that I was nothing but head. It seemed as if my body had disappeared, or my head had encompassed all of my body. When we came out of meditation, there was a woman who was sitting not too far from me, commenting to Ajaan Fuang that she felt she was a body with no head.

That sort of thing can happen as the mind is beginning to settle down. Once it’s firmly settled down, though, everything gets back into place. Sometimes the distortions can be such that you feel very, very large, as if your body fills the whole room. Or very, very small. Or one part can be exaggerated, while the other part’s disappearing.

That’s an issue of just learning how to settle in properly. Once you’ve settled in, everything is in its place. You have a perception that holds you there.

You also need to have the perception that this is interesting. We’re not just here to bliss out, although it’s important that you have a sense of comfort. But you’re learning about the machinations of the mind, how perceptions are determined by your acts of attention: what you pay attention to, how you pay attention, what’s your framework.

Try to use the Buddha’s framework. There are four noble truths. Think of them as four possibilities. Right now, we’re trying to develop concentration, and sometimes concentration gets advanced by trying to figure out how it’s composed of aggregates. Other times, it gets destroyed if you try to analyze it too much. So learn just the right amount of analysis to keep yourself interested, with a sense of clarity, a sense of all-around protection.

Remember that once you’ve got the mind settled here, it’s not going to stay here unless you protect it. And that can often keep you engaged for quite a while, as you get really determined that when other things come into the mind, you’re not going to allow them any space. You’re not going to allow them to gain a toehold. Too often we allow little excursions here, excursions there. That’s why nothing much develops.

But if you tell yourself, “Any thought that’s not related to the breath, I will not tolerate it. If it comes in, I’ll try to figure out where in the body there’s a tension—a little knot of tension that corresponds to that thought—and then disperse it by the way I breathe.”

Be vigilant. You’re guarding your meditation. You’re going to learn a lot about the mind as you do that. It’s not the case that we get here very, very still and just stay here. We’re trying to get still in a way that allows us to understand what’s going on.

Some people can get still very easily. It doesn’t require much analysis. In which case, they have to analyze what they need to do in order to keep it that way. Their mind will naturally settle down for a while, but then it’ll start to naturally disengage. That’s where they’re got to tell themselves, “This is where we’ve got to figure out how not to slip out.”

Other people have to be more analytical right from the very beginning. Anything that comes up to disturb the concentration, you’ve got to zap it, explode it. Be vigilant.

The important thing is that you learn the details of the mind, because awakening is in the details. See things as separate but also interrelated, rather than just big globs or broad-brush perceptions. You want to get down to the details—because the details make all the difference.