A Rite of Passage

Ancient cultures used to have rites of passage, a point marking where you become an adult. You go out, leave the village, leave your home, into the wilderness for a while. Different cultures would have different ways of dealing with a rite of passage, but it did give the individual a time to get out. And for many people, this was their first time really alone. They’d start thinking about where they were going with their lives now that they were becoming adults, and what that might mean, how they would become more self-directing. At least they’d get a sense of something inside themselves that was separate from being a child. They could look back at their childish ways and decide which things to drop and which things to keep, and think about the things they would have to take on as adults.

We lack that in our culture, which is one of the reasons why you see so many adults behaving like children. They’ve never had a chance to sort things out. And there’s much more of an echo chamber quality to our culture than a lot of old cultures. We tend to think of other cultures as being tied to their ways and set in their ways, and in some ways, yes. But as you look at modern culture, there are a lot of unquestioned assumptions that get bandied around. So we need a place to step away from them to see if they’re really skillful. Those are the two things: step away and see what’s skillful.

Meditation gives you a place to step away, because it teaches you to step away from your thoughts. If you’re going to get the mind still, you can’t get involved with any thought, no matter how wonderful or inspiring or whatever it is. You’ve got to just drop it, drop it, drop it, because you want a place where the mind can step back and see thoughts and other things as processes. You want to see where they’re going.

The Buddha talked about how he got on the path when he was able to divide his thoughts into two. On the one hand, there were thoughts of sensuality, ill will, harmfulness. On the other hand, there were thoughts of renunciation, non-ill will, harmlessness. What was special about this division was that he was looking at the thoughts not in terms of their content, but in terms of what they did, what was motivating them, what lay behind them, and where they were going. Now, to see that, you have to step out. That ability to step out was what put him on the path.

The second part of this is that you don’t just step out and look. You ask the question: What’s skillful and what’s not? When the Buddha talks about the various qualities you can develop through good or bad karma, he talks about how you can become a good-looking person, how you can become a wealthy person, how you can become a respected person, how you can gain discernment. Discernment is the only quality that starts with a question: What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness. In other words, what’s skillful? What’s unskillful? What’s blameless? What’s blameworthy? What leads to my long-term harm and suffering? You look at things as actions and you ask: Where is this action going?

Here we’re talking about actions not only on the level of your bodily actions, but also in terms of the things you say and the things you think. What when you think it will lead to your long-term welfare and happiness? What when you think it will lead to your long-term harm and suffering?

So you step back and ask questions.

This is the Buddha’s rite of passage. This is what makes you an adult. These are the questions that are worth asking. Without the questions, you don’t get any discernment, because a question gives shape to a sense of something not quite right, a sense of something lacking. And you’re not going to know what’ll fill the lack until you get a clear sense of what shape it is. Which is why it’s important to have good questions, because otherwise the shape of the question is like a hole, and you’re going to fill it up. Sometimes you find that the hole is the wrong shape. It doesn’t really correspond to what your real problem is. But this question about what I can do that will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness, what I can do that will lead to my long-term harm and suffering: That’s the right shape, because it points to the right cause, i.e., your actions, and to what you really want. You want something long-term in terms of your happiness. You don’t want long-term suffering. And you have to keep reminding yourself of that, because it’s so easy to go for the short-term.

All too often you hear that Buddhism is all about being in the present moment and not worrying about the past or future. That’s not how the Buddha taught. The only times he taught about being in the present moment were when he encouraged people to work on developing skillful qualities, i.e., qualities that will be useful in the future. He emphasized the present moment because it’s the only moment you know you’ve got in order to do the work.

So we’re not just hanging out in the present moment. We’re in the present moment because there’s work to be done here, and it’s going to have implications now and on into the future.

These are the terms you have to think in. You have to get the mind really quiet in order to do that. That’s the stepping back part. That’s what the tranquility is for. Then the insight comes from the questions. We’re not just noting things coming and going and trying to get dispassionate simply by noting. You have to ask questions: To what extent are you involved in the stress that these things cause? Can you recognize the stress? If you can’t recognize stress, how are you going to know what’s good for your long-term welfare and happiness? You need to know the connection between cause and effect, and the difference between stress and happiness. You have to be very still to watch these things.

You’ll begin to see that the Buddha was right. Suffering is clinging-aggregates—and the clinging is the real problem. The aggregates on their own are not that much of a problem. But we cling to these things. A thought comes in and we just go for it, take it on. A feeling comes in, an emotion comes in—something comes in, and we just take it on without really thinking. So you need to step back and ask questions. Ask the right questions.

Right now, as you’re working with the breath, it’s both stepping back—i.e., stepping back from your other thoughts—and asking some questions about the breath. What kind of breathing will be good now? What way of approaching the breath will be useful? If you find that you stick with a particular way of breathing and by the end of the hour you’re all tensed up, okay, you’re doing something wrong from the very beginning. You’re getting yourself stuck in a feedback loop that just gets worse and worse and worse. So you have to notice, “When I focus on the breath, what do I do? What changes happen in the breath? Can I focus in a way that doesn’t lead to those negative changes?” Sometimes the problem is with the breath on its own, and you can fix that. But sometimes the problem is how you’re focusing on the breath.

So there’s a double stepping back. You’re stepping back from the other thoughts, and you’re also stepping back and watching your mind as it gets settled down with the breath so that you can figure out how to do it well.

Ajaan Lee talks about how, as you’re practicing, you can’t expect the teacher to cure your blindness. The teacher gives you the eye drops, but you’ve got to learn how to put those eye drops in your eyes yourself. In other words, learn how to take note and learn how to be observant of what’s going on. After all, that’s how the Buddha himself learned. The question that led him on his path was, “What is skillful?” This is why he recommended it as the question that gives rise to discernment. How was he going to find out? He ended up having to look at his own actions. He had to be observant on his own.

He gives us directives and he gives us ideas for good places to look and good questions to ask, but the actual seeing is something we have to do ourselves. It means learning how to be very, very observant.

So you’ve got to step back and get out of your old ways of thinking so that you can examine them and see what really is skillful. A lot of things we picked up from our childhood, from our culture, are very harmful. Other things are not so bad. Other things are actually useful. You have to learn how to sort them out and you have to put yourself in a position where you can sort them out with the confidence that you’re making the right choices. So as you meditate, you know that you’re heading in the right direction. As you come out of the meditation, you know you’ve got the right set of values.

You’ve got a foundation inside where you can step back and see to what extent, as you talk to other people and deal with other people, are you getting sucked back into unskillful mental states, getting sucked back into the echo chamber. You’ve got to figure out how to not get sucked in that way. These are all skills that we learn by being observant, and it’s by being observant that our discernment develops. We ask the right questions and we figure out what the right answers are. We learn how to test the answers so that we can be confident that what we’ve got is right. You can’t trust that everything that comes up in the still mind is reliable, because there are a lot of things that can come up in a concentrated mind that are wrong. But the concentration does give you the ability to step back and question, step back and question, ask the right questions. Don’t be just questioning everything. There are some questions that are really useless. Do your actions really make a difference? Yes, they do. You don’t have to ask that question again. Otherwise, if you say, “Well, I don’t really know if my actions make any difference or not,” that puts an end to the path right there. That puts an end to any possible discernment. Discernment comes from believing that your actions really do make a difference, and nobody’s going to come around and clean up after you afterwards.

That places the onus on you, but it also gives you a lot of power to free yourself from the unskillful things in your cultural background or your family background or just whatever happened in your childhood, and to pass over into being an adult.