Cooking the Present Moment

The Buddha is famous for his teachings on causality. When he gave the shortest expression of his awakening, it was a causal principle: When this is, that is. From the arising of this comes the arising of that. When this isn’t, that isn’t. From the cessation of this comes the cessation of that. But he was also adamant that the past does not totally determine the present. In other words, causes from the past don’t force the present moment to be one way or another. There is wiggle room in the present moment. It’s not totally conditioned by the past. So the question is, how does the Buddha explain this?

He’s got his image of the salt crystal. You have the salt crystal of bad karma, and if you put it into a small cup of water, you can’t drink the water because it’s so salty. In other words, the effect of past bad karma will be strong. But if you put it into a large, clean river, then you can still drink the water because the water is so much more. In that case, the effect of the bad karma is going to be very weak, depending on the good state of your mind: trained in virtue, trained in discernment, trained so that it’s not easily overcome by pleasure or pain, and trained in the brahmavihāras so that it’s expansive. That’s the broad river. That’s what you want, which means your state of mind in the present moment does have an impact on how influences from the past will be felt.

You can see this in the causal principle that the Buddha expressed. If he meant causation to be totally determined by the past, it would have been just one principle: From the arising of this comes the arising of that; from the cessation of this comes the cessation of that. That’s causation over time. But there’s that other principle: When this is, that is; when this isn’t, that isn’t. That can be independent of past influences. You do something right now, there’s an impact right now. You stop doing it right now, things stop right now. That’s what allows for there to be sudden awakening, a clear experience of right now, and things open up to the deathless at that moment.

You also see the potential for free choice in the present moment in the way the Buddha lists the factors of dependent co-arising. The causal chain doesn’t start with old karma. Remember, old karma is the six senses and what you experience through the six senses. That comes almost halfway through the list. Prior to that, there are a lot of other factors, and these factors can determine how you experience what’s coming in from the past and what you do with what’s coming in from the past. Given the nature of dependent co-arising with its many feedback loops, often our mind states prior to sensory contact fall into old patterns. But they don’t have to.

What are those mind states? This is where you look for freedom. One of them is in fabrication. As the Buddha says, we take the potential for the aggregates—form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, and consciousness—and for the sake of those things, we fabricate them

And what do we fabricate them from? From raw material from the past. This is one of the reasons why fabrication comes right after ignorance, at the beginning of dependent co-arising. If you’re ignorant of the four noble truths, you’ll fabricate in your old ways. You’ll approach the six senses in a way that can lead to more suffering. But you have some freedom of choice. It’s possible to start looking at things in terms of the four noble truths: seeing where there’s suffering, what you’re doing to cause the suffering, and what you can do to stop those causes. That would lead you to fabricate in different ways.

Now, remember: What do we have in fabrication? We have bodily fabrication, verbal, and mental.

Bodily fabrication is the way you breathe in and out. Verbal fabrication is directed thought and evaluation, the way you talk to yourself: Choose a topic, ask questions about it, make comments about it, evaluate things. That’s your inner conversation. Then mental fabrications are perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the mental labels you apply to things, telling you what they are, what they mean, how important they are. Like with a red light: You know that red is red. You know what it means. It means stop. And you know in this case it’s important. You’d better stop. Feelings are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain.

All these fabrications are the things you’re dealing with as you’re meditating.

This is probably one of the reasons why the Buddha chose the breath as his primary topic of meditation: to get you sensitive to how you can shape these factors here in the mind that will then determine how you deal with the results of the past karma coming up in the six senses.

So focus on what you’re doing right now. How is your breath right now? Talk to yourself about the breath. Use perceptions that allow the breath to be comfortable throughout the body and bring a feeling of well-being throughout the body. That’s one of the factors you can use to cook the present moment— because this is what it’s like.

You’ve got the raw material coming from the past. That’s like the food in your refrigerator, the food in your garden. And whatever’s being offered right now, you’ve got to fix your meal out of that. If you’re skilled, you can fix a good meal out of anything. If you’re not skilled, then no matter how good the ingredients may be, you’re still going to fix something bad. Whereas if you’re really skilled, you can take even bad ingredients and make something good out of it—like fish sauce, which is the juice that comes out of rotten fish, but good cooks can make good food out of it. They know how to use it.

So fabrication is one of the factors you can focus on.

Another factor is what’s called name and form. Form is the way you experience the body in terms of the four elements: warmth, heat—in other words, fire—water, liquid; breath energy; solidity, earth. That’s how you experience the body as you’re sitting here with your eyes closed. Then with name, again, you have perception and feeling. Then you have acts of attention, intention, and then contact among all these things. Here again, these are the things you deal with directly as you meditate. You’re paying attention to the breath, and your intention is to stay. You try to pay attention skillfully to this, seeing things in terms of the four noble truths. Then whatever comes up in the six senses, you can deal with it skillfully and not have to suffer, or at least minimize the suffering.

Whatever past bad karma shows itself in the six senses will still be unpleasant, but the level of pain you feel will depend on the skills you bring to the senses as you’re sensitive to these processes of fabrication and name and form.

So pay a lot of attention here. This makes the difference between how much you’re going to suffer, based on what past bad karma you have coming in through the six senses. It also allows you to go beyond the six senses, because your experience of the six senses depends on these activities. Without these activities, there’d be no basis for experiencing the six senses.

So it’s in your approach that you actually go out and engage in the world. That’s because you’re hungry. After all, you want to feed on the senses. But the Buddha says that’s suffering. You have to see that it is suffering. He says, actually, we’re being chewed on by these things as well. We don’t see it. Like that old image of the chickens from hell: You’re raising chickens, hoping to get their eggs. But at night they come and they peck at your eyes and peck at your ears. Or another way you can look at it is that in fashioning these aggregates out of the raw material, you’re using passion and desire. Now, passion and desire will create more aggregates for the future. In other words, as you’re feeding on these things, you have some things left over after they’ve been digested, i.e., your excrement. You’re feeding on your mind’s old excrement.

It keeps coming around and around and around again, like the plants that we feed on, coming from the seeds we plant in the soil. What is the soil? It’s made out of organic material, dead bodies of insects and other animals, excrement mixed with minerals. Then we feed on the plants. We go out and create more soil, and then we plant more plants there. It’s around and around, the same old stuff coming back again and again.

However, you can gain a sense of dispassion for these things. You decide you don’t want to keep on cooking. When you get the mind strong enough so that it actually doesn’t have to feed, that’s when you’re in a good position.

Now, you get the mind strong through your conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. These are the five strengths that take the good food of the meditation to nourish the mind and get the mind in a position where it can see things for what they are—and has the strength that it knows how not to feed on things that it knows are bad for it. When your sense of what’s bad for you gets more and more subtle, more and more refined, then you realize you don’t want to feed on anything at all—and you don’t have to. That’s when you can stop cooking. When you stop cooking, things open up to another dimension that’s beyond the six senses.

It’s because we’re fashioning the present moment that we can stop the present moment in this way. Otherwise, if things were totally determined by the past, there’d be no way you can get out. Some people say, “Well, you just learn how not to will anything.” But that makes it sound like the fact that you’re willing things in the present moment is what keeps things going, which is true. Yet then they say that you have no choice, or that your choices are already predetermined. It doesn’t make any sense. You do have the power of choice. Not everything is determined by past actions. Not everything is determined by past karma.

So take advantage of that. You have these potentials in the mind for making wise choices in terms of how you breathe, how you talk to yourself, the perceptions and feelings you keep in mind, the things you pay attention to, the acts of attention you decide to hold on to. You learn how to do these things skillfully. You get more and more sensitive to how you’re doing them. Then you get to the point where you don’t have to do them anymore. And when you stop, from the cessation of this comes the cessation of that. When this stops, that stops. That’s how those principles play out and how they allow for a real awakening beyond the six senses, beyond space and time.

You realize a consciousness that lies beyond space and time. It’s not in space and time. Some people say all consciousness is in space and time and therefore has to be subject to the rules of space and time. Well, there’s a type of consciousness that is, and there’s a type that’s not. The type that’s not, that’s what’s really worthwhile. That’s what we’re going for. The way the Buddha explains causality allows for it. The way he explains dependent co-arising shows us exactly where we should focus our attention, like we’re doing right now. We’re talking to ourselves about the breath, perceiving the breath, getting a sense of pleasure and ease from the breath. When you focus on this level, you’re focusing on where your freedom of choice is most useful, most effective. So keep your attention here. It makes a difference.