Get Outside Yourself

Ajaan Maha Bua tells the story of when Ajaan Mun had passed away, how he felt lost, like a person who had depended on a doctor and now the doctor was dead. He’d have to be an animal in the forest with no doctors to look after his diseases at all. But then he stopped to reflect. When Ajaan Mun was alive, what teachings did he repeat again and again? One in particular struck him: that when something comes up in your meditation and you’re not really sure whether it’s reliable or not, just stay with your sense of the knower, just bare awareness, awareness itself, and let it pass.

Ajaan Maha Bua decided he would use that principle from that point on to protect himself from the dangers that can happen in meditation when you start getting obsessed with something. If you get down a rabbit hole, this is the way to get out. It’s like that string in the story of the minotaur. The minotaur is in the middle of a maze. A guy goes into the maze and he leaves a string behind him so that he’ll know the way out.

This is one of the most important things you can learn as a meditator: the skills of getting out. Of course, that’s what meditation is all about, getting out of the cycle of death and rebirth, getting out of the cycle of your defilements. But it’s good to have some specific questions to help bring you to your senses, wake you up, because becomings are very much like dreams, worlds that we create. They have some connection with the world outside, but a lot of the connections are made by our own minds. The more often we engage in certain becomings, the more firmly we believe in them.

Children live in worlds of make-believe, but they know very clearly that they’re make-believe. But then as they get older and older, the make-believe becomes more their reality. And this is our problem. Sometimes even our insights are part of the problem.

Upasika Kee Nanayon has a good question for getting out. If you gain an insight, she says, look immediately to see what mind-state follows right after that insight. What’s the follow-up? What kind of defilement comes up? Watch for that. Or Ajaan Lee’s recommendation: “When you gain an insight, ask yourself to what extent is it true and to what extent is the opposite true?” What would the opposite of that particular insight be? That helps to pull you out. You can see the insight from the outside. That’s what this is all about: seeing your mind-states from the outside, learning the questions that can get you out.

The Buddha gives some good instructions in this direction as well. Think about his first sermon. He had labored under the delusion that if you were going to find the deathless, you had to burn the mind with pain, burn away its sensuality. So pain was a good thing. But when he gave up on his painful practice, the five ascetics who had been looking after him gave up in disgust and left him. Then after he found the way and looked them up to teach them, their first reaction was, “You gave up on the practice. How can you have found the deathless?” After he convinced them that he was a truthful person, that he was still worth listening to, then the first thing he said was basically to redefine the question.

For them, a life of pleasures was bad; a life of self-inflicted pain was good. But he pointed out that there was a third option, which was better than both, which made both of those options ignoble. The true noble course was the noble eightfold path, which relied a lot on the pleasure of concentration, which is not a sensual pleasure, but involves getting the mind into a pleasurable state based on how you feel the body from within. Then you look at it from the standpoint of the four noble truths.

So by asking a different question, he helped get them out of their preconceived notions, seeing there were not just two options, there were three.

Think of the Buddha’s approach to questions in general: There are questions that deserve a categorical answer, those that deserve an analytical answer, those that deserve cross-questioning, and those that deserve to be put aside. All too often, we assume that when a question comes, it deserves a categorical answer. We get trapped, like the prince who wanted to trap the Buddha with the question, “Would the Buddha ever say anything unpleasant?” If the Buddha said Yes, he’d say, “Then what’s the difference between you and ordinary people?” If he said No, they had him on record to have said some unpleasant things about Devadatta, how Devadatta was going to go to hell. That was very displeasing to Devadatta. When the prince posed the question with the hope of trapping the Buddha, the Buddha said basically, “This doesn’t deserve a categorical answer.” The fact that it deserves an analytical answer is what got him out of that trap.

So when you look at questions and ask yourself, “What kind of question is this?” you can often see that it can get you outside the question. From the outside, you can see what to do. There are some questions that simply don’t deserve an answer—like the question of whether or not there is a self, or the questions of whether the world is finite or infinite, eternal or not-eternal. Those just don’t deserve answers. They’re a huge waste of time. That’s another way the Buddha has of getting you out, looking at the question from the outside.

The possibility of a question that deserves cross-questioning, by the way, is not really the total story. You engage in some cross-questioning to see what the person’s misunderstandings might be, and then based on that cross-questioning, you tell whether it’s going to be a question that deserves a categorical answer, an analytical answer, or to be put aside.

Then there’s the Buddha’s five-step program for stepping out of unskillful mind-states. Look for the origination—in other words, what in the mind triggers this mind-state. All too often we’re in the mind-state without realizing how we got in there. We have to be alert to how we get in. So look for the trigger. Then look to see how it passes away. After all, these mind-states don’t last on their own. They have to be maintained. If you just let them pass away, they’ll pass away.

But then they may come back. And when they come back, you may go for them again. That’s when you look for the allure. What’s attractive about this? If you tend to get into a fight-or-flight mode very easily, what are the triggers? And what’s the allure? How do you think you’re protecting yourself by this mode? Actually, you can create a* lot* of trouble this way, too. That’s when you have to look for the drawbacks. ‘=

So you’re stepping outside the mood, looking at it from the outside. That gives you some dispassion.

Then again, you have to be alert, or the next time you might be tempted to go back in, because a lot of these moods, a lot of these patterns, are so habitual. They go so fast. Who knows how many lifetimes we’ve been engaging in them? But it is possible to step outside, look at them from the outside. That’s how you look after yourself.

When we say in the chant on goodwill—“May I look after myself with ease. May all beings look after themselves with ease”—that’s how you look after yourself, by getting yourself out—out of these becomings that are so oppressive. That’s what waking up is: getting out.

Take the Buddha’s analysis of how to get the mind into an ideal state, in other words, a state of good, strong concentration—and then how to get out of that. Sometimes you get yourself into the best fabrication you can think of, the best fabrication you can do. Then you want to see that it’s not totally the best thing possible. There has to be something better. You start out by looking for the origination and for the passing away. How do you give rise to these states of concentration? How do they tend to pass away? And how do you prevent them from passing away?

You keep at them, keep at them, keep at them. You get good at making them, maintaining them, and then you analyze them. What’s the trigger? Why do you like these states of concentration? Well, they’re better than a lot of other states of mind. But they do pass away. They have their allure because they’re so pleasant, but the passing away—the fact that you have to continue maintaining them — that’s the drawback.

So you look at the drawback in terms of the five aggregates. These states of concentration are made out of aggregates: form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. But those things—now that you’ve gotten good at them—you want to see them in terms of the fact that they’re inconstant, stressful, not-self, a void, a disease—whatever perception you can think of to induce dispassion, until it really hits home that these things do have their drawbacks. You want something better. You incline the mind to something that’s not fabricated at all. And at this point, the inclination is sincere. If you do this before the mind is in good concentration, you can tell yourself that you’re inclining in that direction, but the mind will sneak off and find something else that’s fabricated. You want to get to the best possible fabrication until there’s no other alternative but to go for the unfabricated. That’s how you get out.

So you question what you’ve got, and in questioning you step outside. That’s how you look after yourself with ease. That’s how you become self-reliant. Those are the gifts we’ve been given by our teachers, beginning with the Buddha, so that the events of the world won’t shake us, and our comings and goings won’t leave scars on the mind. That’s what it means to be self-reliant, and the gift of self-reliance is the best gift that a teacher can give you, to help you teach yourself how to get outside of yourself and to come to a place of real safety.