Q & A
Q: Ajaan, I’ve been taught to make as little noise as possible when breathing during meditation, and to avoid any yoga type of breathing, like prānayama. Could you please give your thoughts on this? Is this in line with your teachings on Method Two? Thank you.
A: When breathing with a group like this, try to breathe quietly. Otherwise, other people who are trying to observe their own breath will end up observing yours. When you’re meditating alone, it doesn’t matter how much noise you make with your breathing.
With prānayama, you make up your mind ahead of time how you’re going to breathe. There may be times when that’s useful, but it’s more important that you learn how to be sensitive to what really feels good in the present moment, and adjust your breathing accordingly.
Q: I find that when I meditate outside in nature, the sounds help me focus quicker than when I meditate inside. Is that a hindrance?
A: You want to learn how to meditate in any situation. If you’re meditating outside and the sounds of nature help you, that’s perfectly fine. But also try to find a way that when you’re meditating inside, without the sounds, you can still get the mind to settle down.
Once we had the opposite problem at the monastery: someone who had learned to meditate only inside at meditation retreats. After his first day meditating outside in our grove, he complained that the grove was too noisy. There were the birds singing, the insects crawling through the leaves. So I had to tell him, “If the sounds come in, just let them go right through you. Think of your awareness as being like a large screen in a window. And just as the wind can go through the screen because the screen doesn’t try to catch the wind, in the same way just let the sounds go right through you without your trying to catch them.”
Q: You said yesterday that the path is admirable in the beginning, in the middle, and in the end, but I am rather trying to develop happiness. So does it make the practitioner happy in the beginning, middle, and end? Or only in the long term?
A: A lot of this will depend on you. You can make yourself happy being here. You can think about how good it is to be on this path. Or you can make yourself miserable.
There was one time we were meditating as a group outside at the monastery. One woman had brought a friend. It was a day like today: The weather was nice, the birds were quiet, there wasn’t much sound. At the end of the session, the friend opened her eyes and said, “I have never suffered so much in my life.” So it’s really up to you to find joy in the path. And of course, as the results begin to come, you can talk to yourself about how good it is that you’re getting good results. Otherwise, if you say, “I’ve spent 15 minutes on this and I haven’t gotten to the first jhāna yet,” it’s going to be a long, hard slog.
Q: Generally, one should not think about other people breaking the precepts or their other unskillful actions, but if you desire someone, i.e., through attraction, can you think about their unskillful actions as a way of breaking the spell or developing dispassion?
A: Of course. Anything you can think of to break the spell is fine. In French, do they have the expression “vipassanā romance”? Vipassanā romance is when you’re sitting meditating in a group, and you see someone else in the group who’s very attractive. So, instead of looking at your breath, you spend your time thinking about what a wonderful time you could have together.
Once I read about a woman who was very much attracted to a young man in a meditation group. She spent the meditation session thinking about him. Well, it turned out he was thinking about her. So halfway through the retreat, they left. She discovered that he was not at all like she thought he was. So she came back to the meditation hall and had a vipassanā divorce, imagining all the things about him that were unattractive. That can be a useful tool for staying on the path.
Q: Is it skillful to focus on pleasant sensations in the mind?
A: If you see that these sensations make it easier to stay in the present moment, it’s perfectly fine. If you can relate these sensations to the breath to make them longer and more established, so much the better.
The problem is that if you focus on the pleasant sensations without relating them to the breath, it’s very easy to go into a state of semi-consciousness, called delusion concentration. You’re sitting here, it feels very pleasant, but you’re not really clear about where you’re focused. Sometimes you come out of it and wonder, “Was I awake? Was I asleep?” This can happen especially as the mind is beginning to settle down but is not yet fully established on the meditation object.
The way to get past it, once you’ve established a sense of pleasure, is to give yourself work to do. You can think about the breath energy going through many different parts of the body. Or you can visualize the bones in your body. In fact, I’ll give you a guided bone meditation in a couple of days.
Q: This is a meditation question. I find that there is a lower and a higher level of working with pain. The lower level is releasing pain bit by bit, for example by breathing into it. The higher level is separating pain from breath energies in the same location, paying attention to the breath part and not letting the pain make inroads. Sometimes I can feel that I’m lazy when working on the lower level. Is this a good way to think?
A: Both approaches are good. The second approach requires more discernment, but it’s a mistake when you’re meditating to say, “I must always use the higher method.” Notice which method works for your situation right here, right now. If the “lower” method works, that’s perfectly fine. It helps get you through a lot of pains that would otherwise be difficult to sit through.
Being a meditator is like being a skilled craftsman. You’ve got lots of different skills. You’re not always going to use the highest level of skill. Use whatever works at that particular time—and don’t let your pride get in the way.
Q: In Aṅguttara 10:58, there’s a passage that says all phenomena are ruled by concentration. Why is that?
A: When the mind is in concentration, it’s at its most focused and has its highest power. The power of concentration can change things. Now, there will be certain things that the concentration cannot change, but you want to give it a try first. That’s when you begin to see where your ability to change things ends and where you have to learn how to accept things.
Q: There’s not too much clutter in my mind, but my mind is not concentrated enough.
A: This problem usually comes from not focusing enough. Instead of trying to be aware of the whole body all at once, you can tell yourself, “I’m going to stay with one section of the body.” That will give you more focus to the concentration. Once you’re able to do that, then you think about spreading your awareness to the rest of the body.
Q: What are the worlds without form? What do they correspond to?
A: They correspond to formless states of concentration where your sense of the body begins to dissolve away and then gradually disappears.
What happens is that the breath energies in the body get very, very still. You begin to realize that the movement of the breath energies is what gives you the sense of the shape of the body. Without that movement, the sense of where the surface of the body lies begins to disappear. Your body seems to be like a cloud made up of little dots of moisture. You focus on the space between the dots, and there’s a sense that that space has no boundary. This is what’s called the dimension of the infinitude of space.
After a while, you ask yourself, “Well, what’s aware of that space?” Then you stay with that awareness. That becomes the dimension of the infinitude of consciousness. Then that state of oneness with the consciousness begins to disappear, even though your concentration is still very strong. As the sense of the oneness of your awareness begins to dissolve away, that’s the dimension of nothingness.
Some people, when they die, actually die into these states and get reborn in these worlds. The formless worlds can be very pleasant places to be, but you’re totally out of touch with everyone else. When the Buddha’s teachers died, they had attained these states of concentration so they went to these worlds. That’s why he couldn’t teach them. It was as if they had turned off their cell phones. So it’s a pleasant place to be, but not so good if you want to hear the Dhamma.
But while you’re meditating here, if you find that you can get into these states, they’re good states to be in for the sake of discernment because the breath isn’t getting in the way of observing what’s going on in the mind. You actually can use your discernment to gain awakening in these states. So, don’t die into them, but you can use them here and now.
Q: The desire to be safe is driving a lot of my behavior, especially around other people. This causes a lot of tension in my mind and body, which I tend to ignore as I’m so extremely focused. It hinders my meditation practice. How to let go of my fear of being hurt or harmed, and how to advise me to deal with this discomfort that arises when I try to stay with the internal mind-body instead.
A: Your problem is that as you focus inside, you find that you’re neglecting your outside fortifications and you feel that you constantly have to need to keep those fortifications going. What you have to do is to tell yourself that, “As I focus inside, I’m going to find something inside that nobody can touch, nobody can harm.” There is where your true safety is going to be. You know eventually that the body is going to die. As for other people’s opinions of you or power over you, you have no way of controlling them. But you can find this place of security inside that nobody can touch. So instead of running away from your safety, as you’re meditating, you’re actually coming toward a safer place to be.
Q: At the last retreat, you distinguished three types of desire: the desire for sensuality, the desire for becoming, the desire for non-becoming. It seems sometimes that by nature, insatiable desire is unskillful. The desire to do good to others and to oneself: Is it spontaneous, or is it only through training that you can give rise to it? In other words, do we innately have spontaneous goodwill? Do good desires spontaneously happen?
A: Of course, skillful desires like this can be spontaneous, but you can’t depend on them, because they don’t arise spontaneously all the time. You have to learn how to give rise to them when you need them. In other words, sometimes there are cases where goodwill arises spontaneously. But the Buddha is saying that, to be truly safe, you have to be able to give rise to it in all situations. That’s what this retreat is all about: learning to foster skillful desires in all situations because you’re going to need them in all situations. Skillful desires can occur naturally, but unskillful desires can occur naturally as well. Our goodwill tends to be partial. Sometimes we’re told that goodwill is natural to us. But universal goodwill is not natural. This is why universal goodwill is called a brahma-vihāra—something that comes naturally to brahmās, who are devas on a very high level. It’s not a manussa-vihāra, something that comes naturally to human beings on Earth.
If you go on a brahma-vihāra meditation retreat, you can spend the whole week thinking, “May all beings be happy. May all beings be happy. May all beings be happy.” But then it can happen that you get in your car and drive away, somebody cuts in front of you, and you think, “May this being go to hell.” You have to develop the attitude, “May this being learn how to drive skillfully.”
