Maintaining Stillness

Meditation is a way of showing goodwill for yourself, because when we meditate, we’re not causing any harm to ourselves at all. We’re giving ourselves a foundation for happiness that doesn’t change—a happiness that won’t turn on us, a happiness that won’t disappoint us. And of course, when you’re being good to yourself in this way, you’re being good to the people around you as well. Most of the harm and evil you see in the world these days is because people cause so much suffering for themselves. They’re suffering, so they find it easy to make other people suffer as well. The cure is for each of us to turn around and look at the ways in which we’re causing ourselves to suffer, realizing that we have the choice not to do things that way.

This is an important point. This is actually where insight develops out of practice: seeing precisely where we’re causing suffering and realizing that we don’t have to do it. There are other ways of acting. But to see these ways requires that the mind be still, and that we learn to keep the mind still in all sorts of situations. All too often, it’s easy to get the mind to settle down as you’re sitting here with your eyes closed. The trick lies in maintaining that same sense of balance, that same sense of stillness, even in the midst of the movement of the body and the midst of activity of all kinds. You want to be able to see how many different ways you cause yourself to suffer, and they don’t all show up here as you’re sitting in meditation. Sometimes they’ll show up in other situations. So you need to be able to take this ability to see, which requires that you be still, and take it with you wherever you go in the midst of all kinds of activities.

Ajaan Fuang once said there are three stages to the meditation. One is knowing how to do it, the second is knowing how to maintain it, and the third is knowing how to put it to use. The doing is not all that hard. You just focus on your breath, and there you are. But to make it more than just one breath, there comes the maintaining. That’s where you need to use your powers of endurance, your powers of ingenuity, all your mental abilities to learn how to keep the mind here with the breath in the present moment in a way that you can maintain steadily, continuously. Part of this involves getting the breath comfortable, part of it involves learning how to take that sense of comfort and spread it through the whole body.

So you’re going to spread your awareness to the whole body as well. Sometimes the awareness spreads first, sometimes the comfort spreads first. But either way, what you want is a whole-body awareness.

That’s the kind of concentration, the kind of stillness that you can take with you. If your concentration depends just on one spot, then as soon as your attention leaves that spot, it’s gone, it’s dead. But if the range of your concentration fills the whole body, then even though other things come in and you have to deal with other issues in life, you’ve got this background, this whole-body awareness that you’re in touch with. That doesn’t have to get knocked off when the mind works with other things, when it deals with other issues in life. It’s then—when you learn how to maintain this sense of being centered, this sense of being established, firmly based—that you can really put your concentration to use. Because it’s from that frame of reference that you can see the movements of the mind.

When the mind goes running out after an object, you actually feel it as a current coming out of the body. Sometimes it comes right out of the heart area. It runs here, it runs there, and normally we just run along with it. But when you have this foundation and you’re learning how to maintain it in all situations, there will have to come a point when you see the current run, but you’re not running with it. You realize you have the choice. This is the choice right here. There’s a point where you made the choice not to run. In the beginning, you might not have been too conscious of that choice, but after a while, you begin to see the earlier and earlier stages of that current as it begins to form. In that way, you get quicker and quicker at not following it.

You begin to see the whole process of how these currents form to begin with. Exactly what is the process of ignorance and attachment and clinging and craving? Where do these things get involved so that these currents form? Sometimes there are currents that are the result of past action, but what you’re really interested in are the ones that are the result of present action—that are the present action, basically. You want to see what you’re doing, to see at what point in the present you begin to play along with impulses from the past. After all, no matter what you experience, there’s always an element of present intention. That’s hard to see unless you get the mind very still and used to being still in all kinds of situations.

This is why in the monastery we have a fair number of activities that everybody has to be involved in, instead of finding a staff that does all the work while the meditators do nothing but walk and sit, walk and sit. A meditation that can last only when you walk and sit doesn’t really give you the opportunity to see the mind in other situations. So although there are lots of things that don’t happen in the monastery, lots of jobs that we don’t take on, there’s still enough so that the meditation can get tested to see how continuously you can maintain this sense of being established, grounded, centered, with this full-body awareness. That gives you the context from which you then can see things as they’re happening in the mind. You see the choices that are being made. Each time you see a choice, you can begin to notice which choices lead to suffering, even the slightest little bit of disturbance, and which ones don’t. Again, you have the choice here as well.

You can pursue this issue in all kinds of contexts. Those teachings that the Buddha gave to Rahula about looking at your intentions, looking at your actions, seeing what kind of results you get, learning to stop doing things that cause harm—those apply in all areas of the practice. When you’re sitting here in concentration, you can move from one level of concentration to another by simply noticing that fact, that the type of concentration you have has a certain amount of stress at some point. It’s an integral part of that level of concentration. Can you let go of what you’re doing that causes that stress? When you find that you can, that you have a choice of another way of staying concentrated that doesn’t involve that stress, you go immediately to the other level, a deeper level, more refined. You keep this up until finally you get to as far as concentration can take you. From that point on, the next things are going to be let go or a lot more important.

But again, it’s simply a question of seeing where the mind is causing stress for itself, disturbance for itself, even in the slightest refined form. When you catch yourself creating that stress and you see precisely what’s causing that stress, then you can let it go. That’s the path.

In other contexts, simply be aware of your sensory processes, noticing how you focus the eye on certain objects, what thoughts build up around those objects, seeing the process as it’s happening rather than running along with the current, but simply looking at the process and seeing exactly where in the process you’re causing yourself stress and suffering, either physical or mental. Notice what you’re doing and notice if you can look at things in a different way.

Take for instance when you see something and you like it. The act of seeing and the act of liking are two separate things. We’re so used to them coming together that we don’t really notice. But they are separate. When you see they’re separate, it’s like the old koan about the one hand clapping. The two hands clapping, of course, is seeing the thing you like and then immediately responding with liking, or seeing the thing you don’t like and responding with a disliking. The seeing and the liking or disliking are the two hands clapping. But if there’s a seeing without the liking or disliking, when you can stop yourself from taking that next step, it’s like one hand clapping. It’s just the seeing, just the seeing, just the seeing. You realize you have the choice to clap with two hands or clap with one.

That’s just one example. You can look at the process of sensory involvement or your engagement with the senses and follow the same principles that the Buddha taught Rahula. Notice where you do things that cause suffering simply in the way you look, the way you listen, the way you think, and learn how to let go of those things. The principle is the same across the board: looking for where there’s stress, where there’s disturbance, and seeing what you are doing to cause that.

This is why the Buddha had Rahula start with that issue of what you’re doing, because the doing is the important part. That’s the part you can change. You test it by learning to be very, very sensitive to it.

This is why we make the mind still. This is why we give the mind a sense of real ease in the meditation. The more ease the mind experiences, the more quickly it can detect stress and suffering.

So this is how you do the meditation, this is how you maintain it, and this is how you put it to use. Make sure you understand all three steps and that you work at the maintaining, because that, of all the steps, is the one that requires the most effort and the most determination: to make it as continuous as possible through all sorts of circumstances, so that the opportunity to gain insight will be present in all circumstances as well.