Uncertainty

One of the biggest obstacles to concentration is the hindrance of uncertainty. It can manifest itself in several ways. One is when you’re not sure if you’re doing it right. Another is when you’re not sure that you can do it. Another is when you’re not sure that it’s worth doing at all. If you’re bothered by these kinds of uncertainty, it’s hard for the mind to settle down.

The Buddha talked about different ways of dealing with this hindrance of uncertainty, and the primary one is that you look carefully at your mind and ask yourself, “What am I doing, and what effect is it having?” You’re not going to overcome uncertainty by looking at other people. Sometimes we hear about other people who can get their minds to settle down really quickly, and you look at your mind and it’s not settling down quickly, so you wonder, “Am I doing something wrong? Can I do this?” Here it’s important to remember that other people’s minds are other people’s minds. One, you don’t really know if they are settling down the way they say are; and two, if they are, what does that have to do with you? Your mind may work differently from theirs, and there’s no reason to be jealous of other people whose minds settle down quickly.

I saw many cases in Thailand of people who would come to practice with Ajaan Fuang. Within a day or two, they were getting their minds into strong concentration, and mine was not getting into strong concentration after weeks. I was envious. But in some cases, I noticed that people whose minds could settle down quickly didn’t know what to do with them when they had settled down.

There was one very sad case of a school teacher who, after she retired, went to practice meditation at Wat Asokaram and developed really strong powers of concentration. She was really quick at getting her mind into concentration and she developed various psychic abilities. Then she decided to make money off of those abilities by setting herself up as a fortune teller, an astrologer. She’d look at star charts, but what she was actually doing was looking in her concentration. The problem was that, after a while, her concentration started sending her wrong messages, and she got stranger and stranger, believing whatever was coming up in her mind. So it’s not the case that people who have strong concentration or who are very quick at getting into concentration are to be envied.

Ajaan Fuang said that people who find concentration easy often have trouble with discernment, just as people who are intelligent and tend to be inquisitive have trouble getting their minds into concentration. Or as he put it, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who don’t think enough and those who think too much. The way you’re going to get your mind into concentration, if you’re the type who thinks too much, will be very different from the way that someone who is very quick at concentration will go into concentration. The advantage of being slow is that when you finally do get the mind into concentration, you’ve been through all the obstacles. You recognize them and you know your way around them. Whereas people for whom concentration comes naturally, when they run up against obstacles, are at a loss.

So that’s the first lesson: If you’re comparing yourself to other people, don’t. Their concentration is theirs. Yours is yours. You’re not going to get into concentration by thinking about their concentration. You’ve got to look at your own mind.

And you’re not going to overcome uncertainty by comparing yourself with other people at any rate. This has to do with whether you’re uncertain about whether you’re doing it right, whether you feel like you’re capable of doing it, or even the question of whether this is a good path or not. You’re not going to overcome uncertainty by looking at other people who are following the path or other people who have abandoned the path. You need to be willing to look into your own mind: What are you doing right now? What are the results? That’s the only way you can overcome uncertainty. The Buddha calls this “analysis of qualities”: when you’re willing to look at your mind in terms of cause and effect, skillful and unskillful, and get very precise about what you’re doing and the results you’re getting.

And give the meditation some time, because not all the results are going to come right away. Sometimes it takes a while for the mind to be willing to settle down. It’s the kind of mind that holds back. Even when the breath is comfortable, it holds back from the breath. It’s like dealing with wild feral cats. They hold back. Even when you’re really nice to them, they don’t really trust you. You may have a feral mind, in which case you have to be patient. There has to be some spot in the body where there’s a sense of comfort. If there were no comfort in the body at all, you’d be dead or dying. So look for whatever area is comfortable and see what you can do to maintain it by the way you breathe. Give it some time and have some confidence in yourself.

Remember that we’re not here competing with other people. And the main questions—Is this comfortable? Do you feel good doing this?—are ones that only you can answer. It’s not as if there’s a correct answer out there someplace that you have to guess. The answer is how comfortable your feel settling down with the breath as it is. Give it a try. If the mind can stay, okay, fine. If it doesn’t stay, you can ask yourself, “What can I do to adjust it? What would feel better?” If it doesn’t seem that any way you breathe is going to be comfortable, just tell yourself, “Okay, I’m just going to let the breath happen on its own. I’m not going to help it. Let it start when it starts, when it wants to start. I’ll step back and just watch.” See if things can come into a balance that way.

After all, this is your breath. There should at some point be a way of getting comfortable with it, because it is the force of your life. It should feel good coming in. If you’re not sure, hold your breath for a bit and then, when you can’t stand it any longer, breathe. It should feel good. Then say, “Well, that felt good. Then another breath just like that should feel good, or maybe something similar to that.” This way, you rearrange the conversation in the mind, because all too often the problem with uncertainty is that you’ve got some really negative voices inside and you’ve learned to trust them. Now they’re getting negative about the concentration, negative about the path. So you have to turn around and ask them, “Are you really skillful? Are you to be trusted?” They’ll insist that they are, but if they’re getting in the way of your well-being here in the present moment, there’s something wrong.

So look around and try to ferret out the voices that are encouraging, that say, “There is a way to put an end to suffering. There is a way to find happiness. It is possible to breathe comfortably in the present moment.” Those are the voices that are on your side. Remember Ajaan Lee’s analogy that there may be lots of different consciousnesses in your body. There’s your consciousness; there are the consciousness of the different animals and worms and whatnot living in your body; and then there are the consciousnesses of whatever spirits may be hovering around. The question is, how do you recognize your voice in the midst of all of that? You have to tell yourself that it’s the voice that has your well-being in mind, the voice that really wants happiness and is confident that it can be done. Find that voice. Latch onto it. That is a skillful voice.

As for the other voices, you have to treat them as distractions, particularly the ones that you have to let chatter away without your getting involved in their chatter. You step back from them and you see that these voices may have been helpful for some things in the past, but they’re certainly not helpful right now. It’s in this way that you apply analysis of qualities to the problem of uncertainty.

So listen to the right voices inside. If you’re going to look at examples outside, look at the examples of people who have practiced and said that this really works. Try to think of what voices were they listening to. It’s not that they didn’t have doubts along their practice. They simply learned how to see the doubts as not worth following. You look at the Dhamma teachings of the ajaans and you’ll notice that a huge percentage of them are pep talks saying: “Yes, you can do this.” The Buddha taught human beings. You’re a human being. The Buddha taught people who have five aggregates. You’ve got five aggregates. The Buddha taught people who were tired of suffering. You have to ask yourself: “Have you had enough?” Listen for the voice that says, “Yes, I’ve had enough. I want to find a way out.” That’s the voice you hold on to.