Truth Is Where You’re True

The Buddha says that you are your own mainstay. You’re your own protector. Who else would you look to for protection? When he says this, you have to take a good and hard look at yourself. What inside you can you really trust as a mainstay? What inside you can you trust as your protector? You can see a lot of things in yourself that you can’t trust. That leads you to question: How can you be your own mainstay? What he’s basically saying is that you have the potential to be your own mainstay. You have to look inside yourself for what qualities of mind you can trust and then you have to develop them further.

One way of approaching this issue is to look for the qualities of mind you can’t trust. One very obvious one is the tendency to make excuses for yourself—one, about your intentions, and then two, about the results of your actions. If you can lie to yourself about your intentions or about what actually happened as the result of your actions, that’s a part of the mind you know you can’t trust. You’ve seen it many times before.

Looking at the other side means looking at the part of your mind that’s very honest about your intentions and about the results of your actions. That’s something you can trust. And it’s precisely that quality that you develop in meditation: really looking at your mind, seeing what your main intention is, trying to be very clear about any other intentions that challenge it, and seeing what comes about as a result of your meditation. These are the qualities of mind we’re developing here.

One of the early problems you run into as you meditate is the way the mind slips off without telling you. You suddenly find yourself someplace else, thinking about what you did last week or about what you’re planning to do next week, and you wonder, “How did you get there?” Well, it’s this ability of the mind to lie to itself. There’s a part of the mind that knows it’s going to slip off, and yet it can hide itself from itself, as if it were pulling a curtain down over everything. Then, when the curtain comes up, you’re someplace else, and you don’t know exactly how the scenery changed.

This is one of the issues we have to deal with as we’re meditating, knowing that the mind is going to slip off and watching for it, trying to catch the first little signs that something is amiss. It’s bored with the breath or it’s got something else it really wants to think about, so it pretends to stay with the breath for a while. In the meantime, it’s planning its escape. Like a prisoner who stays in his room when the wardens come by and who has been tunneling under the wall when the wardens aren’t looking. When the opportunity comes to escape—Zip! He’s out through the tunnel and gone.

So don’t regard distraction as a minor irritation. It’s actually one of the main things you’re trying to understand as you meditate. And you understand it best by trying to fight it, sticking with the breath as best you can, and noticing as quickly as possible when you’ve gone off. You’ve got to learn to look for any warning signals that the mind is about to go, learn to recognize them, and try to reestablish mindfulness with extra strength.

What you’re doing here is developing the mind’s capacity to keep tabs on itself, to be honest with itself. If it’s going someplace, you want it to come and say, “Hey, look, I’m going here, and these are my reasons.” If you think the reasons are good, okay, then the mind can go and think about those things and then it can come back. Everything is all open and overboard. That’s the kind of mind you want. That’s the kind of mind you can trust. That kind of mind can be your mainstay.

But this business of sneaking off without asking permission: You certainly don’t want that in your family, so why do you want it in your mind? As long as it’s there in the mind, you really can’t trust yourself. As the Buddha said, if you can’t trust yourself, how are you going to trust somebody else? And how is anybody else going to trust you? We take refuge in the Buddha and the Sangha as examples of truthful people, because we recognize in them the Dhamma of the truthfulness we want to develop. We don’t yet really know how far that truthfulness can take us. When the Buddha says, “Nibbana is the greatest happiness,” we have some doubts about that. But the only way we’re going to find out for sure whether it truly is the greatest happiness is to learn how to be true to ourselves.

This is one of the really fine things about the Dhamma: People who aren’t true to themselves will never know the Dhamma, what the Dhamma truly is. It requires that you be a very truthful person in order to understand it, in order to experience it. And when you stop to think about it, would you want to believe in any kind of religious goal that would allow you still to be dishonest with yourself, that simply speaks to your desire for things to be easy, for somebody else to come in and do things for you, and that would still leave you dishonest, still leave you with a lot of confused mindfulness? Would you trust a goal like that? Many people would like to. That’s the problem. They’d like to. They don’t want to deal with their own inner dishonesty.

For this path, though, everything starts with this ability to look truthfully at yourself. The Buddha’s instructions to his son, Rahula, started first with the issue of truthfulness. He says you can’t be a true contemplative, you can’t be a true meditator, unless you’re truthful. This means truthful not only when you’re talking to other people, but also when talking to yourself inside. Then he applies this principle to precisely this issue of looking at your intentions, looking at your actions and results, and then looking to see if you can detect any mistakes, any dishonesty, any harmfulness in the intention, in the action, in the results. If you do, you make up your mind not to repeat that action.

Develop that basic faculty of the mind that you want to learn, what you’ve found that you can trust in those random moments when you’re truthful to yourself. Try to keep those moments from being so random, to be more consistent in being truthful, to be more sensitive to whatever harm you’re causing yourself or causing other people, even in your meditation.

We were talking yesterday about the Buddha’s instructions on emptiness. They basically come down to looking at what disturbance you’re causing, given whatever perception you’re holding on to, and seeing if you can replace it with a more refined perception that causes less disturbance. Settle there, and then look again to see which parts of the mind are empty of the disturbances you had before, and which ones are still disturbed. Then try to locate the cause of that disturbance, and replace it with a perception that’s still more refined. That’s a development of the quality of truthfulness.

So you’re taking this quality that you know deep down inside is one of your more reliable qualities, and pursuing it to see how far it can take you—because it’s precisely that quality that’s going to open things up to the deathless, to the unlimited freedom that the Buddha taught as being the only true health for the mind. You may not trust him yet, but he says it’s by developing this quality that you’ve learned to trust in the past, that you’re going to see whether or not what he says is right.** **

So in one way, that’s all he’s asking you to do: Develop your more reliable qualities of mind, particularly the mindfulness and alertness that allow you to be honest about your intentions and your actions. You don’t have to look far away. He’s not asking you to believe that there’s some greater metaphysical principle hiding behind the surface of reality. He says just look at the way the mind lies to itself. Look at the moments when the mind is truthful with itself. Develop the truthfulness, and then see how far it goes.

What better path could you want? What more reliable path could you want? The greatest truths in the world come from being truthful right here, right now, with yourself. The quality of mind that allows you to see what you’re doing right now, and to be honest about the results of what you’re doing, is the same quality of mind that’s going to allow you to find true freedom. We trust the Buddha, because we know that he asks us to trust what is most trustworthy within ourselves—simply that he asks us to develop that quality more than we’ve developed it in the past. We’ll find that it’ll take us to places we that could otherwise never imagine. That’s one of the reasons why we keep focused right here—because right here is where that quality is, where it functions, and where it can be trained.