More than Getting By

Try to gather all your thoughts right here. Gather all your attention right here. We’ve been running around this morning, and our minds have been running around, too. Give them, now, a chance to rest. Think of your mind as being a house, with one seat in the house, and you want the Dhamma to be sitting in the seat. You sit in the seat with the Dhamma in your mind. As for anybody else that comes into the house, they have to stand. In other words, they have to obey you.

What this means is that any thoughts that come into your mind right now that are not related to the breath, don’t give them a place to settle in. They’ll come, but then they’ll go. There’s no place to rest. If you give them some attention, they’ll take over the chair. Then they’ll tell you what to do.

So get back in the seat. Stay focused right here. The mind has been taking on all kinds of responsibilities. It needs some time to be by itself so that it can understand itself. Otherwise, all it knows is it has to do this; it has to do that. It has to take care of this thing out in the world, this thing in the body. It doesn’t have time to get to know itself. That’s the cause of our suffering. When we don’t know ourselves, we do things thinking that they’ll lead to happiness, but then they end up leading to suffering.

So you have to spend a lot of time right here to really get to know the mind. Don’t think of meditation as a chore. Think of it as an opportunity to know yourself. It means sorting things out inside. Things will come up—there will be intentions and desires—and some of them are good and some of them are bad. It’s not the case that all desires are bad. The desire to be generous, the desire to be virtuous, the desire to meditate, the desire to gain awakening: These are all good desires. The Buddha encourages them.

He also encourages initiative. When you see a job that needs to be done, you do it. If people aren’t telling you what jobs you have to do, well, you look around and see what jobs need to be done on your own. This applies both outside and inside.

After all, the Buddha was that kind of person. No one told him he had to gain awakening. It was his internal initiative, his determination. He wanted to find true happiness. He was going to stick with it—with that determination. As for other intentions that got in the way, he just put them aside. It was because of that determination that he was able to gain awakening. It didn’t just happen. It was because he volunteered. You want to have that same kind of volunteer spirit, both outside and inside. You see something that needs to be done, you do it.

There are a lot of things in the world that are not getting done because people don’t want to do them. So here’s your free field. You don’t have to compete with anybody else. You do what needs to be done. When you have that attitude, then you look inside and see what needs to be done inside. You gain initiative, and the practice becomes your own. It’s not just what other people tell you to do, or even what the Buddha tells you to do. He gives you some good ideas and some good places to look, good questions to ask. But how you’re going to handle those is really up to you.

So. Get to know yourself well. The more you know yourself, then the more you’re able to deal with whatever’s unskillful inside and develop what’s skillful and take it beyond what has to be done just to get by.

Again, the Buddha wasn’t the sort of person just to get by. If he wanted to do something, he did it well. That’s the example he sets for us. And we’d be wise to follow that example.