Commit

Close your eyes and make up your mind you’re going to stay with the breath. Really commit yourself to doing this. As the Buddha said, most people are either committed to pursuing sensual pleasures or committed to causing themselves harm and pain. Very few people are committed to doing what’s right. But it’s a choice you can make. He lays out the path, and all you have to do is commit to doing it.

It takes patience, it takes endurance, and it takes your powers of observation, because when the Buddha lays things out, he tells you where to look, but he doesn’t tell you everything you’re going to see. You have to look intently. You have to look all around.

Sometimes our notion of looking intently means just focusing on one little thing. But that one little thing is also connected to other things, which are connected to other things, which are connected to other things. You want to be able to see the whole picture, which means you have to be here consistently if you really want to see what’s going on. Otherwise, it’s like connect the dots. You have a little bit of something here, a little bit of something there, but you don’t see what’s in between. So you make up your own lines to connect the dots, which may be in line with what actually happened, but all too often is not.

So commit yourself to staying right here consistently, trying to develop an all-around awareness. It’s one of the reasons why the Buddha emphasizes this in his similes for the jhānas: the pond entirely filled with the water of a cool spring at its base; the underwater lotuses entirely saturated from their roots to their tips. You’re not just aware of one point. Wherever there’s a sense of ease and well-being, you let it fill the whole body. You want to get to a point where your awareness fills the whole body as well, because it’s then that you can see. That requires a lot of commitment. Otherwise, we hold back to focus a little bit of attention on the breath but also to have other thoughts in mind—or to wait for something else to come along and then commit. You’ve got to give yourself fully to the practice—which means, right now, fully to the concentration.

As you go through the day, you have to divide up your attention somewhat, whether it’s for duties outside or duties inside. But try to maintain a sense of consistency, constancy inside. That allows you to be grounded and to see what’s going on from one thing to the next to the next, without getting carried away, without getting pulled away from your center here. That’s when you begin to see things that are not described in the texts.

After all, the Buddha couldn’t describe the goal. He gave a few hints as to what it’s like, but they’re just hints—just enough for you to have the conviction that, yes, this is going to be a good path to follow, and it’s going to lead to a good goal at the end.

But you have to develop your powers of observation, so that you don’t rest content with anything less than total freedom: total freedom from suffering, total freedom from all constraints. If you want total results, you have to give your total attention to what you’re doing right now.

So try to commit yourself here. Be alert, be ardent, and you’ll see things you never expected to see.