Metacognition

Close your eyes. Notice where you feel your breathing. Focus your attention there. And keep it there. We can think about the breath, and then think about other things. It doesn’t make much of a change. But if you stay with the breath, then there has to be change in the mind. You have to fight off all your other thoughts.

The mind does have this tendency to wander around. It’s what the Buddha meant by samsara. Samsara is not a place. He doesn’t say that you escape from samsara. Samsara is something we do. We wander around. We create little worlds in our mind, and then we go into them. Sometimes they turn into real worlds. We go into those, one after another, and we keep going, and going, and going. And we suffer a lot as we do this.

The Buddha said if you learn how to stop, then there’s going to be no suffering. But first you’ve got to get the mind to settle down and be still for a while. Even though you’re creating a place, you’re creating a good place, a place where you can observe the mind. That’s an important part of the meditation. To stay with the breath, you have to observe the mind to make sure that it’ll stay with the breath. You’re developing a good habit, what psychologists call metacognition. You’re aware of what you’re doing while you’re doing it. You can watch what your mind is doing at the same time that it’s doing it. That puts you in a position of power, because you can then change the way your mind is acting.

If we couldn’t change the way our mind is acting, the Buddha wouldn’t have bothered to teach. It’s not the case that once an emotion arises you’re stuck in that emotion. You can take it apart. You see that you don’t have to follow through with it. And a good place to see that is when you’ve developed the skills that go with the breath, staying with the breath: mindfulness, to keep the breath in mind; alertness, to watch what you’re doing; and then ardency, the effort to do this well. Those are good qualities that you need in any activity. And here’s a good chance to develop them, not only for the activities of the world, but also for the activities for the sake of your true well-being—the well-being of your heart, the well-being of your mind.

So. Do whatever is required to stay right here. In that way, you develop the qualities of the mind that you can depend on. You can become your own refuge. You don’t have to depend on people outside for your happiness, because you can create a source of happiness inside, a sense of well-being inside.

And as you stay here, and you see the mind’s tendency to go wandering off some place else, you can say No. You’ve got a better place to stay.

In this way, we begin to bring some control over the mind, and we put a halt to a lot of our useless wanderings. If the mind is going to think about things, make sure that it’s thinking about things that are useful. If it doesn’t have anything useful to think about, come back to the breath. That way, you have some control over this process of wandering, and you can put a limit on how much suffering you’re going to create for yourself. Otherwise, the suffering is limitless.

So the choice is ours. You learn to develop these skills, and they’ll serve you well. If you don’t have these skills, there’s no guarantee for where you’re going to go. After all, you’ve noticed, probably, the nature of the mind. You think about one thing, and then you think about another thing. There’s very little connection between the two. If you try to trace back your trains of thought, you’ll see that your train system is very bizarre.

So you want to get some control over this, which means you have to be mindful, alert, and ardent in exerting good control. In that way, you can put a limit to your wanderings. You can go only to the places that are really worth going to. That puts you in the driver’s seat, which is where you should be to begin with.