Verbal Fabrication
November 17, 2023

As you focus on the present moment, remember that you’re not simply watching what’s happening. You’re playing a role in making it happen.

The Buddha talks about three kinds of fabrication, and we’re engaged in all three as we put the present moment together. There’s bodily fabrication—the i-and-out breath. Verbal fabrication—directed thought and evaluation; how you talk to yourself, focusing on a topic, making comments, asking questions. And then mental fabrication—your perceptions and feelings.

As Ajaan Lee would point out, the verbal fabrications are real troublemakers. The way we talk to ourselves can create a lot of problems in the present moment, depending on the kind of commentary we’re making. So an important part of meditation is learning to talk to yourself in a new way.

This, of course, builds on the principles of right speech.

Think about the Buddha’s recommendations for how he would gauge his speech. One, it had to be true. Two, it had to be beneficial. And three, it had to be the right time and right place to be harsh, the right time and right place to be gentle. Three tests for his speech to pass. That’s more than a lot of us apply to our own speech. Usually, for us, a thought occurs to the mind and it comes right out the mouth.

We don’t have a vow of silence around the monastery here. A lot of people take that as free license to speak whatever they want to speak about. But you should regard it as an opportunity to practice right speech. When you open your mouth to talk, ask yourself: What is your motive? Is it really going to be beneficial for the listeners, or is it just showing off your knowledge? Or showing off your opinions? If you really think about your speech before you say it, you find that it becomes a lot more effective, and that it gets a lot easier to speak to yourself in the right way as you sit down to meditate.

As you’re focusing on the breath, you want your speech to be true. You really are making true comments about how the breath is going, where it’s comfortable, where it’s not. And you want your comments to be beneficial. You’re trying to get the mind to settle down. Any speech beyond that is not really necessary. We’re trying to speak in ways that lead the mind to a place where it doesn’t have to speak.

As for whether you’re going to be gentle or harsh with yourself as you speak, that depends on how you read your own mind: how well you respond to harsh speech, how well you respond to gentle speech. This is something you have to pay attention to. When the Buddha talks about directed thought and evaluation as factors of the first jhāna, they’re not just an unfortunate wobbling in the mind that can’t settle down yet. You’re using your inner speech to get things comfortable inside, to get the mind to be happy to be with its object by adjusting the object, adjusting the mind.

Adjusting the object means adjusting the breath to be long or short, fast or slow, heavy, light, deep, shallow; where you’re going to focus; which part of the breath you’re going to be most sensitive to. Then you talk to yourself about how to allow that comfortable breath to spread through the body. You can’t force it. If you force it, it turns uncomfortable. You have to think of it flowing smoothly and easily.

This is where some mental fabrication comes in, as you work with the perceptions you have of how the breath flows. You see which ways of perceiving the breath, which ways of picturing the breath to yourself, gives good results. That’s adjusting the object.

Adjusting the mind means asking yourself: What is your attitude toward the meditation right now? What moods are you bringing in from the day? If need be, you try to counteract them.

Here again, you use directed thought and evaluation. If you’re irritated about something that happened during the day, well, how can you talk to yourself in a way that allows you to put the irritation down? If you’re irritated about people around you, how can you think in ways that remind you that you’re with a group of people who want to meditate. They may not be the best people in the world, they may not be ideal companions, but their values are in line with yours. They value the practice of meditation. It’s good to be with people like this.

Learning how to talk to yourself as an important part of the meditation. We think that meditation often is about not thinking, and there will be stages where thinking is really minimal—all you need is just a perception to hold you in place—but to get there, you have to think in the right way, because we bring narratives in from the day, we bring attitudes in from the day. They may be helpful; they may be not. If they’re not helpful, you have to counteract them.

The ajaans in Thailand often talk about surveying your mind as you sit down to meditate. Is it leaning to the future? Is it leaning to the past? Is it leaning toward things that you like? To things you don’t like? What can you do so that it doesn’t lean, so that it’s sitting straight up? You may have to make a survey like this for the mind to be willing to settle down.

Remember: You have a whole committee in there, so you have talk to them, to convince them that this is a good place to stay. You can do part of that by making the breath comfortable, but that’s not going to be enough. You have to keep reminding yourself of why it’s important to train the mind: We all look for happiness, and yet we’re causing suffering by our actions. We want to know why. There’s some ignorance there. You have to get the mind still, so that you can see where its ignorance is.

As the Buddha pointed out, the suffering of the mind is not just a feeling of pain, it’s the clinging. It’s something you do. And you cling because you like certain things. So we’re suffering because of our likes, which means you have to examine them. That requires that the mind be stable and still in the present moment with a sense of well-being, so that it’s able to step back and examine these things objectively.

We like our lust. We like our anger. We like our delusion, all our opinions about things that have nothing to do with putting an end to suffering. A lot of that the Buddha would class as ignorance: a thicket of views. Yet we like our thicket of views, so you have to examine why. And sometimes the* why* is not as obvious as you might think.

The Buddha talks about pinpointing where your craving is focused. You might say that you crave another person, but do you actually crave the other person? Or do you crave a perception about the other person, or some ways you have of thinking about the other person, or other associations that have nothing to do with the person or only a tangential connection with the person?

If you’re angry about something, are you really angry about that, or is it related to something else that you’re actually more angry about? Or do you simply enjoy being angry? There’s a certain rush that comes with anger, a sense of power. If you’ve been feeling hemmed in and powerless, this gives you an opportunity to exercise a little power—at least that’s what the mind says. Your sense of shame, your sense of compunction, gets thrown out the window, and a lot of things you would ordinarily not do when you’re in your right mind all of a sudden seem fair play, fair game. So when we say that we like being angry, exactly what is it about the anger that you find attractive? You’ve got to look into that. It may not always be the same thing every time you’re angry.

I was teaching in Portland last week. One of the questions that came up was, “Is it enough to just deal with anger as a general phenomenon, or do you have to get to the specifics?” If you don’t get to the specifics you don’t see exactly where your craving is located. And the specifics are there—what’s the allure, what are the drawbacks? How can you develop a sense of dispassion for the specifics—because the specifics are where the craving is focused, and dispassion is what we’re aiming for.

For a lot of us, the word dispassion doesn’t sound all that appealing. But think of it simply as growing up. You had some childish games that you liked to play, and then you realize there’s not much there, and you’re better off just not getting involved in the games.

Well, lust is a kind of game. It’s a childish game. Anger is a childish game. All our delusions are childish games. When you can see them that way, then you can see that dispassion is actually something positive. The Buddha always relates dispassion to escape, freedom, being unfettered. We tie ourselves down to things that we like, and then we complain because we’re constrained. But then we don’t like the idea of leaving those things. The mind is fighting itself.

So the mind needs to get still to figure these things out. This is why we think in new ways, breathe in new ways, talk to ourselves in new ways—to get things to settle down. Sometimes it’s easy. You sit down, the world seems to go away, and you’re right here. Other times it requires a lot of talking to yourself.

Don’t measure your meditation by how quiet it is, because sometimes some really important things require that you talk to yourself well, talk to yourself thoroughly—turn over a lot of stones, turn over a lot of things to see what’s underneath. But if you’re heading toward an understanding, and it’s the kind of understanding that frees you from the things that you use to tie yourself down, then it’s all to the good. So even though, as Ajaan Lee says, our habit of talking to ourselves can be a big problem, it’s also part of the solution.

Think of your use of language as a skill that you have to master. And it’s not just being able to talk a lot. As the Buddha says, the ability to talk a lot doesn’t mean you’re wise. But if you can learn to talk to yourself in ways that are true and beneficial and timely, you take this troublemaker and turn it into part of the path.