Things as They Function
September 05, 2022

Often you hear that insight is a matter of seeing things as they are. The actual phrase in Pali, though, means seeing things as they’ve come to be. In other words, we’re looking at processes. We’re seeing things as they function because we want to figure out how to take those functions and use them for a good purpose: putting an end to suffering.

Like right now as you’re meditating: You’re bringing an intention into the present moment, and the intention is to stay with one object. That object is the breath. And it’s good to hold in mind a perception about the breath that it’s not just air coming in and out of the nose, but it’s the sense of energy flow in the body. You’ll notice that when you change the perception, you change what you actually experience.

This gives you some inkling of the fact that what you’re going to experience has a lot to do with what you bring to the experience. After all, that’s the message of the four noble truths. It’s because we approach our experience with ignorance that we’re going to suffer, and part of that ignorance has to do with the processes that follow after sensory contact: sights coming to the eyes, sounds to the ears, smells to the nose, tastes to the tongue, tactile sensations to the body, ideas appearing in the mind.

We’re ignorant about how we deal with these things and shape them afterwards. But how we shape them beforehand is an even bigger mystery, which is why that’s where a lot of the teachings are aimed.

Now, the term, “things as they’ve come to be” has a special meaning because the Buddha says our problem is that we fall for the craving that leads to becoming, and becoming is your sense of who you are in a particular world of experience. Yet that sense of who you are and that sense of the world have been shaped by a lot of things. If you just take them as a given, you’re going to miss an awful lot of what’s going on behind the scenes.

But if you look at the process as it has come to be, you begin to understand how these things form. Once there’s becoming, you have one of two reactions. Either you want the becoming to continue or you want it to be destroyed. You want it destroyed because you find yourself in a particular situation and you don’t like it: You don’t like your identity, you don’t like who you are, or you don’t like the world around you, and there’s a destructive impulse there. That’s called craving for non-becoming.

The Buddha says both of those cravings lead to more becoming, because as long as you think of yourself as somebody in a world, even if you want to destroy that world and that somebody, that frame of thinking carries you on. You cling to that particular idea, and around that clinging comes another sense of self and another sense of the world.

So as the Buddha says, the way out is to look at these things as they’ve come to be. In other words, you look at the processes that lead up to becoming before they coalesce into a state of becoming. You trace them back to clinging and craving, feeling, sensory contact, the senses, name-and-form—in other words, your sense of the body, activities in the mind—consciousness, and fabrication. Fabrication here is three things: bodily fabrication, your in-and-out breath; verbal fabrication, your thoughts about an object, when you direct your thinking to an object and evaluate it, make comments on it, ask questions about it. Then there are feelings and perceptions, which are mental fabrications. These fabrications are usually based on ignorance, which is why we suffer. But if we bring some knowledge to this process, then we can begin to see things as they’ve come to be.

These are the things we’re focused on as we meditate. You watch the breath. You get very conscious about how you talk to yourself about the breath. All too many people, when they hear that the first level of right concentration has directed thought and evaluation, say “How do you do that?” The answer is: It’s something you’re doing already. It’s your internal conversation, and these conversations have been going on ever since you learned language. What’s special here is simply that, for the sake of concentration, you’re going to be very conscious about what you’re directing your thoughts to, and what kind of evaluation is useful. Like right now, evaluating the breath to make it comfortable: That’s a useful use of your powers of evaluation. You’re trying to create a good place here, a good place to stay.

We’re surrounded by the heat right now. And as long as you have that perception of being surrounded by the heat, it gets oppressive. So, switch your perception over to the breath. The breath can permeate the body. Some people even feel a breath energy around the body, like a cocoon. Take that as your object.

Or you could take of thoughts of goodwill as your meditation object. It’s the same sort of thing. You have to breathe calmly as you’re developing goodwill and then you direct your thoughts to all beings: May all beings be happy. Then you evaluate that wish: Are there any beings out there for whom you feel hypocritical about saying that? Why? What’s the problem? In other words, if you want your goodwill to be genuine, you have to think it through.

Remind yourself that very few people feel they’ve been justly punished when they’re punished for their misdeeds. So why do you wish punishment on them? Why do you wish for anybody to suffer? The best thing would be for them to have a change of heart, see the error of their ways, and behave in better ways. Try to wish that for all the beings that you find hard to have goodwill for. Hold in mind that perception that it’s good for you and it’s good for them.

Some people say, “I don’t think they deserve my goodwill.” Well, it’s not the question of their deserving or not deserving. It’s a question of your needing your goodwill to ensure that you don’t do or say or think anything unskillful around them. If you have ill will for somebody, it’s really easy to say, “Well, I’m justified in speaking in unskillful ways and acting in unskillful ways, because that other person has been so unskillful.”

If your good behavior depends on their good behavior, you’re living in a very dangerous world. You have to find the resources inside that allow you to say, “Okay, I can have goodwill for these beings. My heart can be large enough to encompass their happiness.”

As you think that, you realize you’ve learned something important. You do have these resources inside: to do and say and think things that are really skillful. In that case, you don’t have to depend on resources outside—in other words, other people’s goodness or the goodness of the environment. You’re a lot safer if you have this independent source of strength inside.

It’s the same with contemplating the body. When the Buddha talks about the body, he says it’s composed of different properties. The word in Pali is dhatu. Sometimes it’s translated as “elements,” which makes it sounds like the chemical elements, which it’s not. It’s more the qualities of warmth, coolness, energy, and solidity in the body.

As the Buddha notes, many of these properties are really potentials. The heat potential, for example, can get greater or lesser. The same with the coolness of water or the energy of the breath. The theory is that they’re provoked, and you notice this as you work with the breath. Change your perception of the breath, and the breath feels different. Change your perception of the solidity of the body, and the body feels different. Think of all the atoms composing the body. We all know from science that atoms are mostly space. The nucleus of each atom, proportionally, is a tiny, tiny thing. So hold that perception in mind. Your body is mainly space, and it doesn’t have to be heavy.

Or you can think of the coolness of water. That’s a good perception to hold your mind right now: which parts of the body are cooler than the other parts, wherever that might be. Focus your attention there, and then think of that coolness seeping through the rest of the body.

If you can hold to the perception strongly enough, consistently enough, you see that it actually does change your experience of the body. The same principle applies to the qualities of the mind. The Buddha applies the same theory about dhatu, or properties or potentials, to the mind as well. He says you have the potential for a lot of unskillful things in the mind, such as the potential for sensuality. You start thinking about things that are beautiful, things that are attractive, and that stirs up the potential—or, in the terms they use in Pali, it provokes that potential—and you find the mind overrun with thoughts of sensuality.

There are also good potentials. For example, there’s the potential for effort. I remember the very first time when Ajaan Fuang said we were going to be sitting all night in meditation. My first thought was, “I can’t possibly do that. I don’t have enough strength to make it all the way through the night.” On top of that, he was going to be sitting with a group of lay people and he didn’t want me there. He wanted me to go off to sit and meditate on my own. So I didn’t even have the support of the group. But I started thinking, “The ajaans in the past have sat up all night. It’s not that their bones were made out of iron. They probably had the same physical properties that I have in my body. They had the same potentials for weakness, but also potentials for strength. Where are those potentials for strength right now?”

As I was able to think in those terms, I finally could tap into some unexpected reserves and I made it all the way through the night. I realized that a lot of the problem had been the limits I had imposed through my own perceptions.

So be very careful about the perceptions you bring to your experience, because they can provoke helpful things or unhelpful things in the body and the mind. You realize that we’re not here just to see things as they are. We’re here to see things as they function, and to try to take advantage of the potentials of those functions. Among other things, we have the potential for energy, we have the potential for mindfulness, the potential for all kinds of good qualities. Ajaan Lee once said that human beings have lots of potentials, both physical and mental, that they don’t take advantage of, and it’s a shame. There’s a lot of good we can do as we explore these potentials.

So we’re not here to be as passive as possible, to say that we’re seeing things just as they are. Look at the way the Buddha approached awakening. He didn’t just sit there passively. He tried different approaches. He focused his mind in different places. He took different things as the themes of his meditation. Then he evaluated the results. How did it work? What was he able to do? And what was not up to his expectations? Then the question always was, “What am I doing wrong?” He would turn around and check out other possibilities. He experimented, which meant that he had to act and then look at the results of his actions, pass judgment on them, and then decide what to do next based on that judgment.

It was through this process of committing himself to doing what he thought was the wisest and most skillful thing to do and then reflecting on the results that he was able to come up with some good standards for judgment. And that’s what the four noble truths are, standards for judgment: Which kinds of actions are worth doing, which ones are not worth doing, which kinds of actions lead to suffering, which kinds of actions lead away? By applying that framework, he found that he could learn an awful lot about how things function and how he could steer their functioning in the direction of the end of suffering.

So this is why we meditate. If the problem of suffering were caused by sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations, we’d have to go out and change them. But here it’s actually caused by the activities we bring to sensory contact, and those activities are happening in the mind. This is why the meditation aims inside, does its work inside. Now, in some cases, we start the work outside and move in. In other words, we practice generosity, we observe the precepts, and that trains the mind. Then we use that trained mind to look deeper into the mind.

But it’s never a question of just sitting there and looking at whatever comes up in the mind. You’re trying to get the mind to act in as skillful a way as possible in its thoughts, its words, and its deeds. Then you learn from what you’ve done in the quest to create even more skill, which is why the insights that you gain from acting in this way are insights about action: the power of action, the nature of causality, insight into how things function, especially when you can get them to function in the best way possible.