Metacognition

The Thai ajaans often say that when you begin meditating, you should take stock of your mind. In other words, pull back a little bit and look at which direction your mind is leaning. Does it have a lot of energy or just a little energy? Is it thinking thoughts about the past, thoughts about the future? Things it likes, things it doesn’t like?

Try to do some course correction. There’s an English term for this: metacognition, when you step back and observe your mind—the mind observing the mind in action. It’s an important skill in the practice as a whole.

It starts from the very beginning. Think about the sutta with the Kālāmas, when they were uncertain about what teaching they should follow, and the Buddha said, Put a teaching to the test. When you act on certain teachings or develop certain qualities in the mind, what are the results?

That means that you don’t fully commit yourself yet to the teaching. You try it out, then you step back a bit to see it as part of a cause-and-effect process. You have to look at it from outside the process. If you’re totally lost in a particular thought world—your perception of things, your understanding of who you are—the world you’re in is going to be colored by that world. It’s like being in a bubble. Some bubbles are pink, some bubbles are blue, and as long as you’re in the bubble, everything you see is colored pink or blue by the bubble. To see clearly, you have to be able to get out.

The Buddha talked about this particularly in terms of dealing with skillful and unskillful thoughts in the mind. He said he got onto the path when he realized that he could divide his thoughts into two sorts: those that were of the type he later labeled as wrong resolve—imbued with sensuality, ill will, or harmfulness on the one hand—and those that were aligned with right resolve—imbued with renunciation, non-ill will, and harmlessness on the other.

Instead of just thinking those thoughts, he stood back and observed them. Where did they come from? Where did they go? He realized that the ones he labeled as wrong resolve, he had to keep in check. The ones that were right resolve, he could allow them to wander as they like.

So notice: He’s stepping back—and he’s not just engaging in bare awareness. Observing cause and effect, he could see which thoughts deserved being held in check and which ones should be allowed to have some free rein. That means you don’t hang on to your thoughts simply because they’re your thoughts, your opinions. You look at where they come from and where they lead.

This ability to step outside of yourself and observe your mind in action—metacognition—allows you to change course. After all, we’re not here just to observe what we’re doing and say, “Well, that’s the kind of person I am” and leave it at that. You realize that if you’ve got any unskillful habits, you’ve got to change them.

But then, even with skillful thinking, the Buddha saw that it had its drawbacks. You could think skillful thoughts for twenty-four hours a day, and even though they were skillful, they could tire you. When you get tired, it’s easy for unskillful thoughts to slip in. So the mind needs to be concentrated to gain some rest.

What you’re doing is observing cause and effect in your own mind, and developing a sense of dispassion, first for unskillful thoughts, and then even for skillful thoughts.

Turn your mind toward concentration, and the same principle applies. Here the powers of observation are directed thought and evaluation, as you try to get the mind to settle down. Even though you’re trying to get past thinking, you need some thinking to adjust the breath and the mind so that the mind can settle down comfortably, because it has to have a sense of enjoyment in its concentration object if it’s going to be happy to stay.

That’s why we’re working with the breath. How can you enjoy your breath, right now? You can read Ajaan Lee’s instructions for dealing with it. But do you enjoy adjusting it that way? If you don’t, what would you enjoy? There’s lots to play with in breath energy in the body. Give your imagination some free rein.

Think of the breath coming in and out through your eyes, through your ears. Think of it coming up through the soles of your feet. If there’s too much pressure in your head, think of things draining down through the spine, and then from the spine going down into the ground. Play with different perceptions and see what kind of results you get.

Again: metacognition, stepping back a bit to watch and pass judgment.

Then, when things are well adjusted, you plunge in. This is where the mind really does get to rest, where it really does get absorbed. Allow the mind to stay there for a while.

It’s like cooking a dish in the oven. If you put it in and you pull it right out, it doesn’t get cooked. Or if you turn up the heat high so that it gets cooked fast, it burns. So you’ve got to set it at a steady lower temperature and let it stay for a while.

When the Buddha gives his examples for the kind of discernment that develops out of concentration, he says that first you’ve got to get really good at the concentration. So let the mind mature. Then, when it’s mature, you can observe it.

Here again, metacognition: You step back a bit and you notice how the concentration is fabricated, how it’s composed of aggregates. You learn to regard them as inconstant, stressful, not-self, alien, empty—whatever perception allows you to see that the concentration, even though it’s better than other ways of managing the mind, still has to be maintained, still has to be directed. It still requires effort to keep it going. Then the mind inclines more and more to something that doesn’t have to be fabricated.

So, there are times when you engage in metacognition, and other times when you allow the mind to rest.

This skill is important, not only as you’re sitting here meditating, but also as you go through life. We talk about taking the skills of meditation and applying them in daily life here at the monastery or when you go away, and metacognition is one of the most important ones. You can step back from your old habits, and no matter how much they may have claimed that they’re you—they’re your way of doing things—just the ability to step back and question them, to see them as strange, can liberate you from them. Think of being an anthropologist, watching this person in the twenty-first century, and how this person engages with other people.

This is one of the ways in which having a committee in your mind can actually be useful. You’re not totally committed to one member’s way of doing things or seeing things. We’re trying to train the member that can step back and observe the mind and pass judgment—wise judgment: seeing where things are unskillful or where they’re simply a disturbance, and learning how to let them go.

So, of all the skills you develop as a meditator, this is probably one of the most important—your ability to observe yourself. When the Buddha talks about the luminous quality of the mind, it’s not a quality of the pure mind; it’s just that the mind can know itself, can observe itself, it can watch itself in action. That’s how we train ourselves.

You want to be like the wise cook who knows how to read his master, knows what the master likes, and provides more of that, even when the master doesn’t tell him. The wise cook observes and then knows what to make, knows what to do.

So again, this is not bare awareness or bare attention that we’re trying to promote here. We’re trying to promote the ability to arrive at skillful judgments based on observing cause and effect in your mind. That’s how you keep yourself in line.

Now, this requires mindfulness, in the sense of reminding yourself that this ability to step back is where your true well-being lies. All too often, the parts that are being examined don’t like to be examined. It’s like tracking down criminals and putting a flashlight on their activities—they don’t want to be seen.

Here the Buddha gives you what he calls governing principles to keep the committee in line. The first one is the world as a governing principle: There are beings in the world who can read your mind. What would they think if they read your mind right now, whatever you’re thinking?

Then there’s the self as a governing principle: You got started on this path because you saw that you were suffering, and you realized that a lot of that suffering came from inside. Because you basically loved yourself, you wanted to develop good things out of yourself and for yourself so that you could stop causing that suffering. Well, do you no longer love yourself? Do you no longer want to develop good things?

Then there’s the Dhamma as a governing principle: realizing that this is a very valuable Dhamma we’ve encountered—that there have been awakened beings in the world, and they’ve shown the way. And they did it out of pure compassion. It’s an excellent Dhamma. It’s a path that leads to the end of suffering and it’s a noble path. As the texts say, it’s admirable in the beginning, admirable in the middle, admirable in the end. You start with good principles, you apply them honorably to your life, make yourself a noble being. So it’d be a shame to just let this Dhamma go.

So there are all kinds of ways that you can talk to yourself to encourage yourself on the path. As your concentration develops, it gets easier and easier to see the benefits of this kind of metacognition. Before then, it’s a matter of making sure that everybody—or at least the majority of the people inside your committee—is on the side of genuine well-being, long-term happiness, realizing that it’s worth the effort that goes into it.

So, there will be some back and forth: your defilements trying to convince you that you should be loyal to them because they’re your old friends, and your new friends sometimes seeming really weak. But you can strengthen them. It’s up to you.

Yesterday I received a letter from a woman who’s an alcoholic, and she said she had tried everything, and she wanted me to give her a sure-fire method to stop being an alcoholic. I must admit, making me responsible for this method to be sure-fire struck me as wrong. She’s got to be on the side of making it sure-fire. That’s the attitude you’ve got to have in the practice: You’ve got to be on the side of the Dhamma. You’ve got to be on the side of your own true well-being.

So, whatever you can think and say to yourself, whatever you can do to strengthen this ability to step back and pass wise judgment and to make the judgment stick, that’s how you progress. And that’s how this ability to step back is useful both in daily life and in the meditation, because it’s in this direction that freedom lies—the freedom that comes from pulling out and seeing where you’ve been creating suffering that you didn’t have to.

You realize that you can let it go. You’re not committed to it. And it doesn’t have any hold on you—you’re the one holding on to it. Think of the Buddha’s image of the fire: It’s the fire that’s clinging to the fuel, not the other way around. It’s the fire that’s agitated, and it’s the fire that has to let go. When it lets go, that’s when it’s free.