The Buddha’s Dream

When you focus on your breath, you want to have all your attention with the breath. Try to be 100 percent here. You’re not worrying about the future; you’re not thinking about the past. You want to be with what’s going on right here, right now, because this is what you can control. You can’t go back and change the past. As for the future, it hasn’t come yet. But you can shape the present moment. So try to shape it well.

You focus on the breath, not because you’re trying to “get” the breath, but because you want the mind to be in a place where you can watch it. But the breath is the guarantee that you’re in the present moment, so you can see what intentions are coming up, because it’s your intentions that are shaping things.

That’s pretty radical. We tend to think that our life is shaped by outside forces beyond our control. We spend our time with the media, learning about things beyond our control, whereas the Buddha said you’re in control right here. And you have the choice, you can be skillful or unskillful in what you do, what you say, what you think. So take advantage of that opportunity. Thinking about the past is not going to go back and help you.

Thinking about the future is useful only in the sense that you want to prepare well for the future. And you remind yourself: What’s the best way to prepare? By developing qualities like mindfulness, alertness, and ardency—your willingness to do something really well. We’re not just going through the motions; we’re not playing games.

After all, aging, illness and death don’t play games with us. They toy with us, like a cat playing with a mouse, and then they’re going to get us. So you have to be prepared. There’s something that they can’t get. You want to be able to find that inside. That requires you pay full attention to what you’re doing right now.

So. Give this your full attention. Realize the importance of your present moment and your present moment choices. That way, you get more and more control, because the better choices you make, then the better the situations you’ll be facing in the future—the wider the opportunities you’ll have.

They say that when someone’s done something really bad, they get dragged off with not much choice of where they’re going to go. But those who have done lots of good things can have a range of choices. That’s what you want, a range of good choices.

Of course, watch out, because some of the rewards for skillful action can pull you down. This is one of the ironies of samsara. We do good and we’re rewarded with beauty, wealth, power, influence—and it’s so easy to abuse those things. And when you have those things, you become a target for other people’s desires. So you have to learn how to be with those things but not be tainted by them.

Think of the image of the Buddha and the dream he had before his awakening. He had to climb a pile of excrement, but he wasn’t soiled by the excrement. The excrement was all the good things he’d given in the past and all the wealth that was going to come to him as Buddha. But he wasn’t soiled by that because he kept his mind pure. So you have to be extra careful. Do good but also learn how not to be soiled by the goodness. That’s why we meditate.

If it were just a matter of being generous and being virtuous, it wouldn’t be hard. But the real difficulty is in learning how not to be soiled by the rewards of generosity and virtue. That’s why we meditate and get the mind under control, so that whenever bad things come our way, we can turn them into something good. Whatever good things may come our way, we can prevent them from turning into something bad.

That’s the skill we need in order to survive in this world.