Q&A

Q: You often encourage us to start the meditation with thoughts of goodwill before focusing on the breath. What is your opinion about mettā as a primary practice? Are there people who may benefit from dedicating all of their time to mettā?

A: Mettā is one of the standard topics of concentration that you can use both to develop concentration and as a basis for insight. Some people really need to spread thoughts of goodwill for a long time before their minds can settle down.

There’s a famous incident in the forest tradition. Ajaan Khao—one of the Ajaan Mun’s students—was married before he ordained. He went away from home for a long time on a business trip. When he returned home, he discovered that his wife had been having an affair. His first impulse was to kill the wife and the other man. But then he realized, “No, that’s not a good idea.” He ordained instead. Ajaan Mun realized that Ajaan Khao had a big problem with anger, so he had him practice mettā for a long time. In the same way, if you have a problem with anger, then mettā would be a good practice.

The texts talk about how you can use mettā as a way of getting the mind into the different states of jhāna. You start out with directed thought and evaluation. You think about what goodwill means and what it would mean to have goodwill for all beings in all directions. If there’s someone that you have trouble extending mettā to, then you should think about why you have trouble having goodwill for that person. After all, if that person is misbehaving, mettā means that you wish for the person to see the error of his or her ways and to be willing to behave more skillfully. Is there any good reason for not being able to extend that wish to that person?

Then—as you find it easier and easier to spread goodwill to all beings, including the people you really don’t like—then you can drop the evaluation and just stay with the perception of goodwill extended in all directions. This way, you get the mind into more and more subtle levels of concentration, at the same time that you gain some insight into the process of fabrication, as you deal in directed thought, evaluation, and perceptions. But it’s important to realize that mettā on its own is not a complete practice. In one way or another, you have to augment it with insight practice.

Q: Could you please explain again the steps that the mind goes through in creating suffering? What is this process? Could you give an example from daily life?

A: The Buddha has a teaching called dependent co-arising, which explains how suffering arises. If I tried to explain all the steps now, we’d be here until late in the night. The important thing to realize is that the process starts with an ignorant desire, either for sensuality, for a state of becoming, or to destroy what state of becoming you have now.  So, focus on the question of sensuality first. Sensuality is not sensual pleasures, it’s your fascination with thinking about sensual pleasures. Try to notice, as you go through the day, how much of your time is spent in that kind of thinking, and how much suffering it causes. That’ll get you off to a good start.

Q: Is there anything in life that is not karma, or the result of karma?

A: The Buddha says that everything you experience through the six senses is the result of past karma. The only thing that’s totally not karma is nibbāna.

Q: Does collective karma exist? How does it work? Would it be the case that wars, massacres, natural disasters, floods, plane crashes all count as collective karma?

A: There is no such thing as collective karma, but there are lots of cases where many people have the same karma in their background, done at different times and in different places, and they receive the same result all at the same time. In other words, they did the same thing, but they did it individually. It then so happens they get born in the same place or they go to the same place when there’s a disaster. If they have that karma in common, then they can experience a similar result. But it may happen that there are other people in the same place or in the same situation who don’t have that kind of old karma, so they don’t experience that bad result. Which is why some people survive plane crashes that kill a lot of other people.

Q: I have great difficulty believing in the doctrine of rebirth and past and future lives. However, karma as present conditions shaped by past causes, and future conditions shaped by present causes, seems plausible. Is it possible to follow the noble eightfold path, the doctrine of karma, be a Buddhist, but suspend judgment regarding rebirth, past and future lives?

A: As long as you have an open mind about the topic, you’re okay. It’s important to realize, though, it’s not the case that the present moment is shaped totally by past actions. There are also choices we make in the present moment that are not determined by the past, and yet they help to shape the present moment. As long as you understand that point, you’re fine.

But still, try on the idea of rebirth every now and then as a possible working hypothesis. For example, “How would I live today differently if I really believed in rebirth?” If it has a good effect on your actions, then try continuing with it as a working hypothesis.

Q: In MN 135 it says that one who is bad-tempered and easily perturbed will be reborn in hell or as an ugly human being. I’m a person who gets easily perturbed, easily disturbed. Here, for example, in the room, the sounds disturb me, the sounds, the smells—lots of things. To summarize, I don’t want to end up in hell. I don’t want to end up being born ugly. What can I do to overcome this excess sensitivity?

A: Look carefully at how you fabricate the present moment, the way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself, the perceptions you hold in mind. It’s usually the case that if you’re easily angered, you’re breathing in a way that’s already adding unnecessary stress to the way you just feel in the present moment. Then look carefully at the way you talk to yourself and the perceptions you hold in mind about the disturbances around you. If you’re creating an unnecessary burden for yourself through these activities, learn how to change them so that you’re not burdening yourself so much. Tell yourself that the disturbances are not really so bad. They’re not killing you, so you can stand them. That way, it’ll be a lot easier to bear with all these other things that disturb you. Right now, it’s as if you’re already carrying a heavy load: Someone puts a feather on top of it and it breaks your back.

Q: I have anxiety attacks and sometimes my blood pressure rises a lot. I have increasingly been able to control the attacks, but sometimes they’re too strong. I feel very bad about my lack of self-control. The doctor prescribed meditation for anxiety. However, when I use it, I believe I’m breaking the precept of not using intoxicants. Does the use of this kind of medication violate the Buddhist precepts?

A: No, this would not be against the precepts. The precept has to do with substances that cause you to lose your sense of heedfulness. These medications don’t have that effect.

Q: Gratitude for the monks. I have been meditating for 10 years and I’m currently in perimenopause. My symptoms are terrible, but the worst one is a mental fog. It’s overwhelming. Within seconds, I feel that all my efforts to calm the thoughts disappear and I find myself in a constant whirlwind. At many moments, I feel like I’m a different person. What should I do? Thank you.

A: Try to find some spot in your body that’s not affected by these symptoms and focus your attention there. Think of the breath energy there being good energy and then hold on to that spot until the symptoms in the rest of the body pass. If you can’t find any spot in your body where it’s calm, think of the space immediately around your body and focus your attention there—again, until the symptoms pass—and then you can return to the body.

Q: Lots of gratitude. I’ve been noticing we’ve been talking a lot about anger, but what I’m realizing is that fear is usually in the background of a lot of things. It can be fear of anything: fear of karma, fear of death, fear of getting old, fear of ghosts. Could you please tell us how to deal with fear?

A: There are two kinds of fear. There’s the fear you feel when you’re in a position of powerlessness, and there’s the fear that comes when you sense that you do have some power and you’re afraid of misusing it. The Buddha emphasizes that the second kind of fear is actually something you should pay attention to. You can actually use that fear to become skillful. In other words, you realize that through the power of your thoughts, your words, and your deeds, you’re going to have an influence on your own life and on the lives of others. You don’t want that influence to be bad. This is why he gives you advice on how to act and think and speak. If you follow his advice, you can be confident that you’re handling this power well. When you’ve taken care of this fear, then the other fears become less and less important.

As for fear of ghosts, if you think there are some ghosts around you, fill your body with good awareness and with good breath energy, and then spread lots of goodwill for the ghosts. They’ll leave you alone.

Q: What is delusion in Buddhism? Why do people fall into it? How can one get out of delusion or reduce its effects?

A: Delusion in Buddhism is basically thinking that unskillful actions are actually skillful—in other words, believing that you will benefit in the long run by killing, stealing, having illicit sex, lying, or taking intoxicants. The Buddha provides the precepts in order to give you some guidance here. Once you start taking the precepts, if you find there are parts of the mind that still want to do what’s unskillful, then you can ask yourself, “What are your reasons for wanting to do that?” When you see that the reasons are bad, that’s how your right view develops more and more, and you can overcome your delusion.

Q: How can I silence the music in my mind? I let thoughts pass, but every time I try to concentrate to meditate, I connect to some song, some music, and it keeps repeating over and over. Thank you.

A: Two things. One is, if there’s music in the background, try to start chanting in your mind. It’s better to have a good chant in your mental background than some stupid pop song.

The second approach is to remember the third way of dealing with distracting thoughts: Leave them there. In other words, it’s as if you’re doing some work in a corner of a large room, the music is in another corner of the room, and you don’t have to listen to it. You hear it, but you don’t have to listen to it. You’ve got work to do. If you pay attention to it, it pulls you away from your work.

When I was in Bangkok one time, I was staying at the back corner of a monastery, and behind the monastery was a store that opened to sell rice porridge at 4:00 in the morning. It seemed as if all the taxi drivers in Bangkok would go there. To let the drivers know that the store was open, they played really loud rock music. Thai rock music. At first, it filled my awareness, and the more I tried to block it out, the worse it got.

I discovered, though, that I could think of my awareness as being like a screen on a window. The wind was going through the screen, and because the screen didn’t catch the wind, the screen was not disturbed. In the same way, if I didn’t try to resist the music, if I simply let it go through my awareness and out the other side, I was okay. I could stay focused on the breath.

In other words, don’t pay attention to the music in the background. Just stay focused on your breath.

Q: Dear Taan Ajaan, when I skip dinner, I get a little angry and intolerant. How to deal with it?

A: If you’re skipping dinner because of the eight precepts, just focus on your breath. Try to notice exactly where the sensations of hunger are and then breathe through those sensations. Breathe in a way that gives rise to a sense of fullness in their place.

Q: Does the consumption of red meat interfere with the meditation?

A: If it did, no one in Brazil could meditate. No, it doesn’t interfere.

Q: How can I tell whether I’m truly meditating or just feeling drowsy?

A: In meditation, the mind should be clear and alert. If you’re not sure if you’re meditating or feeling drowsy, move your attention around in the body. Start doing the survey of the body like we did in the morning.

Q: A question about back pain: Is it valid to try a little bit of mobility in the act of meditating when we’ve been sitting for a long time? One of the instructions to relieve the pain was to try to look for sensations in the body that bring pleasure, so that we can focus less on the pain. From there, I tried to do some subtle movements that bring some mobility to my spine. During the in-breath, I would feel like that the abdomen was expanding and would result in the expansion of the whole body. During the out-breath, I would feel the contraction spread from the abdomen to the rest of the body, as if it were a jellyfish. This movement brought me some pleasure through relieving the pain. So, can this kind of mobility be okay to use when meditating?

A: Yes, the mobility is perfectly fine. You do have to learn how to take care of your spine while you’re meditating. One way of dealing with back pain is to focus on the movement of the abdomen. That’s a principle that’s applicable throughout the body. If there’s a pain in your stomach, focus on your back; pain in the back, focus on your stomach; pain in your right side, focus on the left, and so forth.

Q: Should we go beyond breathing in the body at some point?

A: When meditating, you’ll find there comes a time when the breath actually stops and you feel no need to breathe. That’s because the breath energy is filling the body and your brain is using less oxygen. Stay with that sense of stillness, and after a while you’ll find that the sense of the shape of the body will begin to dissolve. It’s as if the body becomes a fog or a cloud of little droplets of sensation. Then you can focus on the space between the drops. Hold on to that perception of space, and the sense of the shape of the body will disappear. You’re still right here, you haven’t gone anywhere else, but the mind isn’t holding on to the perception of the body at that point.

That’s the first step in going into what are called the formless states of concentration. When you can do that, we’ll talk about the next step.

Q: With the known distinction between in-breath and out-breath came the understanding of known distinction between pleasure and pain as being merely sensations. Is this understanding correct?

A: It’s not that we’re making no distinction between the in-breath and the out-breath. It’s more a question of not creating a dividing line between the two. That way, there can be a lot less tension in the body as you focus on the breath. But for the idea that there’s no distinction between pleasure and pain, if you could stick your finger into a fire and say, “This is pleasant,” then there would be no distinction. Many pleasures and pains are pleasurable or painful independent of whatever perceptions you might slap on them. But there are cases of sensations in the body that you can either make pleasant or make painful by the way you perceive them. Some sensations are like that. Those are the sensations that you want to study, where you see that it really is your choice as to how you perceive them that makes the difference. But that’s not the case with all sensations.

Q: Dear Ajaan, I hope you’re doing well. In the meditation today, my breath got really short and calm, almost stopping. All of a sudden, the breath changed from short to fast, as if it was afraid. I investigated what happened, but I didn’t identify anything apparent in the memory about any trauma or anything like that. Could you please make a comment on what happened?

A: Sometimes there are unconscious associations with certain kinds of breathing that you’re not aware of, but they will have an impact on changing the way you breathe. In a case like that, consciously return to slow, calm breathing. If there is a past memory buried someplace in your mind that makes the body want to breathe quickly, it may come up into your consciousness. When it comes into your consciousness, then you can deal with it. If nothing comes up, just keep on breathing calmly.

Q: How to counter lust that is not body-centered? One example would be a shape-focused lust, when even a line drawing or a silhouette of a face feature can look attractive. Others are more psychological—desires for a certain emotion, power dynamics, self-expression, etc., that are included in every relationship. How to deal with that kind of lust?

A: In terms of the silhouettes, you might ask yourself, what associations do you have with that particular shape? Then see if you can think of something really ugly that has the same shape. In other words, rewire the associations.

As for the psychology of power dynamics in a relationship, this is usually where the real problem is. Even when a case of lust starts with lust for a particular body, and you’ve dealt with seeing the body divided up into its different parts, you’ll see that the real problem lies in your fantasies about the relationship with that person. This is where psychologists say that you should poison the fantasy. In other words, imagine that the person you’re having sex with is actually cheating on you or despises you. In other words, the original fantasy is lying to you.

There’s a famous short story in English in which a man is at a party with his wife and at one point he sees her from across the room. She’s looking very pensive and he thinks, “Maybe she’s thinking about me?” All of a sudden, he feels strong lust for her. They go back to their hotel room and he starts thinking about all the special times in their relationship, about why she would love him.

But then she bursts into tears and tells him about a memory from when she was young. There was a young man who came to see her one time. It was during the winter, they were in love, and he was going to be shipped away to the army. He had to see her one last time before he left, so he trudged through the cold and the snow to see her at her window. As a result, he caught pneumonia and died. That’s all she could think about, that there was once a young man who had died for love of her. The husband realizes he cannot compete with that. That’s the end of his thoughts of lust.

The story is called, “The Dead,” by James Joyce. It’s one of the best short stories in the English language.

Q: Dear monk, is there a positive role for sexuality, for exercising a life without suffering?

A: You’re asking the wrong people. If you’re in a relationship, just don’t cheat on the other person. Someone asked me for relationship advice one time and I mentioned that when I was still a lay person, if I was interested in a particular woman and the relationship was getting serious, I wanted to do something to make her angry, just to see what her anger was like. That may be one of the reasons I’m now a monk. I still think it’s a wise tactic in a developing relationship, though. You don’t want to find out about the other person’s anger only after you’ve gotten married.

Q: What’s the vision of Buddhism in terms of contraceptives? Is there any karma generated with this?

A: The only contraceptive that’s against the precepts is the kind that would kill a fertilized egg. If the contraceptive prevents conception, then there’s no problem.

Q: What does it mean to make the Buddha bleed?

A: Literally to wound the Buddha with malicious intent and to make him bleed. Fortunately for us, that’s not a possibility right now.