Outside of Your Thoughts

When you have a short meditation like this, you want to get the most out of it. Uou know where the mind likes to settle down when you close your eyes, so go right there. Then see if you can stay right there. Ask yourself if the breath feels good there, and if it doesn’t, you can change it. There’s nothing wrong with changing things, you know. Here we’re making a change by trying to stay with one thing, focusing on one thing and then giving it our full attention. It’s when you give your breath your full attention that you begin to see there’s a lot you gain from it. There are a lot of potentials right there. So stay right here. As for anything else that comes up in the mind, you just let it go. Tell yourself it’s none of your business.

Our problem is that we find our thoughts all too fascinating. Something just appears in the mind. We think it must be something good. It’s as if someone gives us a present. We have to peer inside. The problem is that we peer into the box, then we fall into the box, and it takes us to who knows where. You want to stay right here. You can look at your thoughts but look at them from the outside. Eventually you want to get to the point where we can decide which thoughts are really worth going with and which ones are not. But to do that, you first have to learn how to say No to everything, except for one thing which is right here: your awareness of the breath, right here. So stay with it as steadily as you can.

It’s only when you make changes in the mind like this that you understand it. As the Buddha pointed out, our desire to be free from aging, illness, and death—if we just simply sit there and wish for these things to go away—is going to be a cause for suffering. Yet if we learn how to understand how things work in the mind, how you can actually train the mind so it can go beyond these things, then that desire is part of the path.

So if we’re going to accept anything, accept the principle of cause and effect, that some of the things that happen in the mind are coming from the past, and some of the things that happen in the mind are coming from what you’re doing right now. You can’t change the things from the past, but you can make a big difference with what you do right now. One of the skills of right now is to stay with the breath, giving yourself a comfortable place to stay so that you’ll be happy to stay here. You feel grounded. You have a basis. And then you can look at your thoughts, as I said, from the outside.

It’s like somebody comes to offer you something. You look into the box, but you don’t fall into the box. You examine it carefully and then decide if it’s something you want or not. In other words, you don’t have to go with everything that comes up in the mind. And as I say, you don’t have to believe everything you think.

Just think of it as your past karma showing itself—good, bad, indifferent. You can give it meaning if you want, but you don’t have to. You have that choice in the present moment. In fact, you have a lot of choices in the present moment. But for the time being, you’re going to choose one thing, to settle in right here. This way, even though the meditation is short, you get a lot out of it.