Abandoning Old Habits

An important part of the practice is dealing with unskillful mental states that tend to arise either in the meditation or outside of the meditation. As you get more sensitive to what’s going on in the mind, you begin to see that there’s a lot of garbage in there.

One of Ajaan Fuang’s students once complained to him that as her mind was getting more quiet, she seemed to have more defilements than before.

He said it’s like cleaning your room. If you don’t clean your room, dust accumulates day by day by day, and you don’t notice how much dust has accumulated in a particular day because it’s just added onto the old dust already there. But if you clean it every day, then when a little bit of dust comes in, you can’t help but see it.

Just because you see these things doesn’t mean that they weren’t there before. It’s simply that now you can see them more clearly.

As the Buddha said, you can deal with them in two ways. With some causes of suffering—that’s what these unskillful states are, they’re causes of suffering—they go away when you just look at them with equanimity. Others require that you exert a fabrication.

This is why there are some cases where people say that all you need to practice is radical acceptance. Anger comes, anger goes, and you accept it, you don’t act on it, and it has no power over you. Well, that’s true for some cases, for some types of unskillful qualities.

Others, though, are pretty entrenched.

These all come about as a result of past karma. Some of them don’t have much of a hook on the mind, but others are covered with lots of hooks, lots of Velcro. But the step of learning how to accept their presence is an important step, even in the second type. Still, in those cases, you can’t stop there.

The Buddha talks about different stages in dealing with the hindrances, and they apply to all unskillful states of the mind.

The first is that you simply see when they come, when they go, when they’re present, when they’re not present. When they’re present, you say, “This state”—it may be anger or maybe feelings of inadequacy—“is present within me.” When there are times when it’s not, you notice that it’s not there now.

The purpose of this is to get some distance from it. Think of it in the third person: There is anger there. Feelings of inadequacy are there, or then they’re not.

When they’re there, are you more you than you are when they’re not? No. Your awareness is still the same. Getting some distance from a feeling like this helps you overcome a particular problem in dealing with these states of mind.

You sometimes use the state of mind against itself, and it gets you more ensnarled. In other words, if you’re impatient and you get impatient about your impatience, it just compounds the problem. If you tend to be angry, you get angry about your anger. That compounds the problem. If you feel inadequate, then you feel inadequate when feelings of inadequacy come up, because you can’t deal with them and you can’t do anything about them.

So to get out of that vicious cycle, you go through a stage where you say, “They’re present” or “They’re not present.” When they’re present, “They’re present within me,” you say. The “me” is one thing; their presence is something else. That allows you to step back from them.

In some cases, as I said, they don’t have many hooks. You see that they’re there, and just seeing them doesn’t stir up any feelings of liking or disliking in you, and they go away.

But then there are ones that come back again and again. That’s when you move on to the next stage, when you see how they arise, how they pass away, what causes them, what sparks them, what their allure is when they come.

What do you like about your anger? What do you like about your impatience? Some people like impatience because it gets things done. They like anger because they can blame other people for their problems. When you’re feeling inadequate, it’s an excuse not to push yourself too hard. But the real allure in any particular case is going to vary from person to person. Sometimes there’s the allure that you admit to yourself, and then there’s the allure that you don’t.

But it’s important that you see how these things come, how they go, and you actually try to make them go when they come. Some people say that if you push against them, if you’re contentious, that makes them more of a problem than they were before.

Actually, you see more of the complexity of the problem this way. Some of these unskillful states have lots of different hooks, and you’re not going to know about them until you try untangling them.

Or to use the Buddha’s image of a dam: Mindfulness is the dam that you put across the river. In putting it across the river, you’re going to learn a lot about the currents of the river that flow beneath the surface. The dam is contentious. It puts up a block. It doesn’t just let things flow. In putting up the block, you learn a lot. It also gives you a sense that you don’t have to give in to these things.

There will be times when you’re defeated, when they take over. There’s an old principle in boxing: You learn about an opponent by fighting the opponent. Even when you lose, you can learn something about the opponent, if you’re observant. If you just get upset because you’ve lost, you don’t learn anything at all. You should try to figure out, “Why did I let him take over this time? When I tried to counteract it in this way, why wasn’t it successful? Where did I fail?” Again, don’t take failure as a blemish. Take it as a lesson.

Above all, don’t just content yourself and say, “I’m in a position where I can see these things come and see them go, and I’m okay.” After all, the last step that the Buddha recommends is to see that once they’ve been abandoned, they don’t come back.

For that, you have to develop real dispassion. This is where the exertion of a fabrication comes in. When these things come, do you notice how you breathe? Do you notice how you talk to yourself? What topics do you focus on? What kind of comments do you make?

And then finally, mental fabrication: What perceptions do you have? What images occur in the mind when these things come? What feelings in the body or the mind do you focus on?

Can you create something that goes against those fabrications? In other words, what would be the opposite of anger? What would be the opposite of self-deprecation? Try to construct those opposite thoughts. Breathe in a way that would induce thoughts like that.

It may seem artificial, but hey, everything in the mind is fabricated. So you might as well fabricate something that goes in the other direction, the skillful direction. Talk to yourself in ways that would calm down the anger, calm down the impatience. Try to hold useful images in mind.

When you’re impatient about something, ask yourself, “Can I really not stand this? Can I hold some images in mind of people being this able to stand things?” Think of the Buddha’s image of having your mind like earth: Try to cultivate that perception. Your goodwill is large like the Earth. Your goodwill is cool like the River Ganges. Your goodwill is like space: People can try to write in space, but their words don’t stick.

Hold those images in mind. When you’re bothered by feelings of inadequacy, focus on the things that you have been able to do well.

When the mind objects to these images, these ways of fabricating things, ask it, “Why?” Again, you’re digging things up. You’re learning about these things by fighting the mind’s tendencies. But you’re conducting the fight in an intelligent way, a systematic way.

When you can cultivate the opposite of that particular habit, it’s a lot easier to see what was the allure and what were the drawbacks of the old habit. When you see that you don’t have to follow the old habit—and you get so that you don’t want to—then it loses its power and it doesn’t come back. There’s dispassion. There’s an escape through dispassion.

So there are many stages to follow in dealing with unskillful thoughts. The Buddha talks about abandoning, destroying, wiping them out of existence. It’s not that you simply crush these things. You allow them to disperse. And you do that through understanding them. You understand them because you’ve asked these different questions.

First, you’ve learned how to separate yourself out, just noticing when they’re there and when they’re not there.

Then, noticing when they’re not there and when they are, how do they arise? What are the steps? When they pass away, how do they pass away? You sense that these are qualities that appear in the mind, but they’re not necessarily you. You can separate yourself out and you feel less threatened. You feel less down on yourself.

And finally, you get to the point where you understand them so thoroughly that they just don’t come back.

This is abandoning through discernment.

You have to have some patience. Think about this as a prison break. The prisoners try their best to get out of the prison, so they have to be very careful, methodical, and patient. If they push things too fast, they get caught. If they don’t push at all, they stay trapped in the prison.

Try to be methodical about this.

And have a sense of the different varieties of problems you have in the mind: the ones that go away simply by looking at them, the ones that require that you exert a fabrication, and how you exert that fabrication.

The Buddha gives you some ideas, but you can come up with your own. It’s not an impossible battle. It’s not that you’re condemned to just be present with them and accept them. You can get past them by understanding them.

The Buddha gives you some idea of the questions to ask, the things to look for. Then you can take his good instructions and run with them. Make them your own.