Independence Day

Close your eyes. Take a couple of good, long, deep, in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breathing in the body. Focus your attention there. And if long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you can try shorter breathing, faster, slower, heavier, lighter, even deeper, or more shallow.

Try to see what kind of breathing feels good for you. If you’re feeling tired, you want some breathing that’s energizing. If you’re feeling tense, you want something that’s more relaxing. So figure out what you need and then see what the breath can do to provide it. This way, you have an independent source of happiness inside.

It’s important that you have that kind of independence.

Today is Independence Day. What they meant by that when they declared it was that they were claiming independence from outside arbitrary power, which is the sort of independence that comes and goes. From the Buddha’s point of view, there are two other kinds of independence that are really more important.

One is that your goodness is independent of people outside. In other words, people can be behaving really badly, but you don’t take that as an excuse to behave badly yourself. You realize that your actions are your possession. Their actions are their possessions. Just because they’re throwing their good possessions away doesn’t mean that you should throw your good ones away. So you need a source of strength inside, a sense of conviction that what the Buddha said was true: that your actions really do make a difference in your life. And the quality of the results you get from your actions will depend on the quality of the intention behind them. So you want to act only on good intentions.

That conviction is something you have to stir up from within yourself. That’s your inner strength. And it’s on that, that your independence is based. That’s one kind of independence.

The other kind of independence is when you’re independent of your greed, aversion, and delusion. As the Buddha said, we go around with craving as our companion all the time. And we’re a slave to craving. We think it’s our friend, but it tells us to do things very arbitrarily. When we do them, sometimes we get fairly good results. Sometimes we get really bad results.

But craving is the kind of friend that tells you to do something wrong and then goes running away when the police come and he leaves you holding the bag. You’re the one that’s going to suffer; the craving doesn’t suffer. It comes back, and it’s got plenty of energy to whisper into your ears again. So you want to learn how to develop some resistance to that kind of power, because it’s arbitrary too. Ut’s an arbitrary power that controls everybody, even the people who are controlling the levers of political power, when they’re slaves to craving. Not only do they suffer, but the people around them suffer as well. That, on the smaller scale, happens to you too. If you’re a slave to your craving, you’re going to suffer. The people around you are going to suffer.

So you’ve got to learn how to develop some independence. This is one of the reasons why we try to create a sense of well-being as we meditate—a well-being that’s not dependent on things outside, so that when craving comes and says, “Do you want to be hungry for this?—be hungry for that?” You say, “No, I’m actually not hungry at all. I’ve got this sense of well-being already.” It helps you resist a lot, a lot of whispers and the innuendos of craving in your ear.

So. You want to have genuine independence. One, learn how to make your goodness independent of the goodness of others. Their goodness comes and goes, but your goodness stays. What you do, say, and think is based on good intentions. And then there’s independence from craving, independence from the unskillful states of mind that would push you to do things that are unskillful. When you have these two kinds of independence, that’s when you have an independence that lasts, and it really is valuable. So make every day your independence day in those two senses of the word.