Distractions

People sometimes ask how to measure whether they’re making progress in their meditation. One of the ways of measuring is to see how quickly you can detect a distraction and pull yourself out of it—because there are steps in the act of getting distracted. The more quickly you detect these steps, the more solid your concentration will be, the better your alertness, the better your mindfulness.

It requires speed, because these steps happen very quickly. You’re here and suddenly you’re off someplace else. And things happened in that brief moment. Little messages were sent in your brain. Sometimes they were sent even while you were with your breath. They were sent in very fast packets of information, like speeded-up recordings. If you were able to take those recordings and slow them back down again, you could see that part of the brain was talking to another part of the brain, saying, “As soon as the boss loses alertness, as soon as the boss slips in mindfulness, we’re going to go.” And the other part of the brain says, “Yes.”

This is why it’s good to think of the committee of the mind and to realize that the committee members are pretty devious—and there are lots of them. If you’re not careful, you get overpowered—if there’s only one of you. You change the balance of power by getting more parts of the mind on your side.

This is one of the reasons why we try to get the breath comfortable. Give the mind a good place to stay right here. Find a topic that your mind enjoys in terms of the concentration. If the breath is too subtle, you can switch over to thoughts of goodwill, contemplation of the body—anything that you find engaging. The parts of the mind that want a quick hit of pleasure will have some pleasure.

There will still be the recalcitrant parts. In Thai, they talk about them in terms of, “The defilements want this, the defilements want that.” It’s as if there is somebody else in there beside you. There actually is, in the sense of all these identities: They were you in the past, and you put aside for the time being. But they have their tricks, and they have their promises for entertainment.

In fact, a lot of them are looking for that entertainment right now. You’re sitting here with nothing else to do, no other responsibilities. You could think of your responsibilities down in the kitchen, your responsibilities with other jobs in the monastery. That’s one form of entertainment—and it’s a self-righteous form, too, because you actually do have work you have to do, you have duties. So in cases like that, you’re facing a double set of arguments, right there.

So you’ve got to be prepared. These parts of the mind will communicate quickly. It’s as if you’re the president of a corporation, but there are factions in the corporation who have their own ideas. They’re not happy with your policies. They’re trying to sabotage them. So they’ll wait until you’re distracted, when you’ll lose consciousness for a moment—because that happens.

You’re in the state of being the meditator in the body, watching the breath. Now, because that’s a fabrication, it’ll stop at some point, and you have to keep it going. But sometimes, in that moment of stopping, that’s when they slip out. They’ve got their audio-visual department with projectors that project images into the mind. And instead of looking at the projector, you look at the screen that it’s projected on. A whole world is projected out there, and you want to get into that world on the screen. That’s how you’ve entertained yourself in the past. That’s the process of becoming, and it’s something that we’re really good at.

But you’ve got to tell yourself, “This state of concentration is a different kind of becoming.” You’re fully here in the present moment, alert to what you’re doing right here, right now. You want this state of becoming—the state of concentration, that allows you to see the mechanisms by which states of becoming are made, first in the way you consciously do the concentration, and then when the mind settles down and is still enough to see subtle things.

To begin with, you have an object you want to focus on. There’s a desire right there. Around that desire, there’s the world of your body. And then you go into that world of the body. The advantage is, you’re right here, where the processes are happening.

But then you lose your focus for some reason or another, and that’s when the other members of the corporation slip in, projecting more images onto screens to distract you. And there’s part of you that really likes this. Remember, these different beings, these different defilements in your mind, have been you at different points in the past. So it feels very natural to take on their identities. You’ve got to remind yourself, “This is not what you’re here for now.” You’ve got a different set of priorities.

This is one of the reasons why we have Dhamma talks during the meditation to remind you that when you’re on the path, your values are different, your aims are different. You’re not here just for entertainment. You’re not here just to pass the time of day. You’re here because there’s work to be done.

And you’re resting not just to rest. You’re resting to gather strength, so that when issues come up like this, you can see them clearly. Then you’re not so tempted to fall into the them. You’re more interested in seeing how they form because you realize that how they form is what dependent co-arising is all about. How they form is how suffering gets created. You want to remind yourself of that over and over and over again, because it’s counter-intuitive.

After all, as I said, these voices in your mind promise entertainment, and the Buddha’s saying that they’re the same voices that are going to make you suffer. They don’t seem to be making you suffer on the surface of things, but they develop bad habits.

Think of when you’re on your death-bed, about to go, and these voices are still projecting images here and there. If you try to go into them, you can go actually into them. They’re not just screens anymore. They’re actual worlds when you leave this body. And what may have seemed entertaining on the surface, you suddenly realize has lots of details and consequences you didn’t expect. That’s the downside. You’ve fallen for the allure and you didn’t look for the drawbacks.

This is why the Buddha emphasized again and again that pattern. See how these things are originated—How do they form in the mind? At what point was the decision made by that group of committee members that they wanted to go off someplace else? Then see how it passes away, as they, too are impermanent. If they’re habitual, they’ll come back again. But they do come and they do go. They’re not there all the time.

Then look for their allure: Exactly how do they tempt you? When you’re bored, how do they promise some entertainment? When you’re sleepy, how do they just slip in and pull you away? When you’re feeling frustrated in your meditation, how do they say, “Well, here’s an alternative. Here’s a quick fix. This is something you *can *do skillfully. You can entertain yourself. You can escape into your worlds of fantasy.”

But then you’ve got to look at their drawbacks. These are the habits that keep you going from one life to the next. This is samsāra. Remember, samsāra is not a place, it’s an activity—an activity you’re addicted to. It keeps bringing on more suffering for yourself and for others. You have to engage in this contemplation again and again and again until it really hits home.

This is why, when you read Ajaan Lee’s early writings on concentration in general, he would have you start out with meditation topics that give rise to saṁvega: thinking about aging, illness, and death; thinking about the unattractive aspects of the body, to remind you why we’re here, working on serious business.

You want to be clear that your awareness of those drawbacks comes quickly, because when you’re on your death-bed and the mind is weak, it’ll go for quick solutions. And if you’re not quick in providing this solution, you’re going to fall for the solution of the audio-visual department or whoever’s behind the audio-visual department.

So be on your lookout for the fact that even though you’re here with a good intention to stay with the breath, there’s part of the mind that’s not on board.

When the Buddha talks about getting the mind into concentration in his description of the activities of right mindfulness: On the one hand, you try to keep track of one object in and of itself, but on the other you’re also trying to subdue greed and distress with reference to the world. In other words, you know there are distractions that will pull you out into the world, so you’ve got to be prepared to subdue them.

Be on the lookout. Be quick so that when they send their quick messages, you can decipher them, you can break their code, and you can double down on your desire to stay with the breath instead. Be confident that if your determination is strong, you can overcome them. That’s why we’re not here just to have a few moments of lucid calm and to be at our ease. We’ve got to be determined that we’re going to come out victorious. We’ve got serious work that needs to be done, and nobody else can do it for us.

So have a sense of how important this work is. Don’t get grim about it. Enjoy the fact that you have found a good path. It’s the path out. But it is serious. We’re here on serious business. So don’t let these lazy, irresponsible voices pull you away.