Potentials for Awakening

Ajaan Lee once commented that we human beings have a lot of potentials—in our body, in our mind—that we don’t take advantage of. A large part of the practice is learning how to develop those potentials: to find where they are and then to apply what’s called “appropriate attention” to them—in other words, seeing them in terms of what you can do with them that’s skillful, what you can do with them that would not be skillful, and particularly, how you can use them to help put an end to suffering.

The Buddha talks about the potentials that we have for the factors for awakening. In each case, you have to apply appropriate attention to the potential: locate it, identify it, and see how you can change it. Bring the potential out. Don’t just leave it as a potential. You want to actualize it.

In some cases, he explains what potentials can feed the factors for awakening. As in the case of mindfulness, he says the potentials lie in right view, or what he calls views made straight, and purity of virtue.

It’s good to stop and think: Why would these things help make mindfulness grow?

In terms of virtue, think of the precepts. You have to keep them in mind. That’s the mindfulness. And you have to be alert to what you’re doing. This is going to be an important principle all the way through the practice: focusing on what you’re doing and seeing where it fits with the precepts and where it doesn’t. Where it doesn’t fit in with the precepts, you’ve got to change. That’s the quality of ardency. So there you are: mindfulness, alertness, ardency. Those are the qualities that you need for mindfulness practice.

But virtue helps in other ways as well. When you look back on your behavior in the course of the day and see that you didn’t harm anybody—didn’t harm yourself, didn’t harm other people or beings of other kinds—you can keep your mind wide open. There’s nothing you have to hide from yourself, nothing you have to deny. When we hide things from ourselves and deny them, that’s when mindfulness and alertness can’t function, because we begin to forget. It gets in the way of mindfulness.** **When something comes up, we pretend it’s not there. That gets in the way of alertness. So what kind of ardency are you going to develop?

At the same time, when you really are honest with yourself about your actions, about what’s harmful and what’s not, and you do your best not to do what’s harmful, you’re developing a certain reliability inside. You’re taking responsibility, and that’s going to be important for this principle of discovering these potentials and working with them. You realize the problem is not out there. The problem is in here, and you have to look at your assumptions. You have to look at the way you’ve been understanding things and start calling that into question.

For instance, building on mindfulness, the next factor for awakening is analysis of qualities. This, out of the seven, is the wisdom or discernment factor. And it’s interesting here that the Buddha says the potential that you develop to foster discernment has to do with seeing skillful and unskillful qualities in your own mind.

This is why I said actions are important, because the question of which actions are worth doing lies at the basis of discernment. Discernment here is not a metaphysical principle. And notice that the Buddha has you see things in pairs: skillful and unskillful, dark and bright in the mind. We’re not here to see the oneness of things. We’re here to make distinctions as to what’s helpful and what’s not.

That requires, again, that you be really honest as you look at yourself. Then you can detect a mind state that’s imbued with sensuality or ill will or harmfulness, and see that it really does cause trouble.

We actually enjoy so many of those states. We like our sensuality. There are also times when we can think about how other people deserve punishment of one kind or another, and we’d like to see justice done. A lot of our politics right now seem to be based on this. Everybody has ill will for somebody, wants to see somebody punished, and they can invoke all kinds of principles saying, “Justice is being done.” These are attitudes we can really like. The same with harmfulness: You want to see somebody wiped out, wish this person didn’t exist, and the mind can feed on that.

The thing is, even though you may like these things and feel justified in thinking them, you begin to see they’re bad for you down the line. Maybe you should look more favorably on their opposites, like renunciation.

Now, renunciation isn’t just about denying yourself. It’s saying No to all your fantasies about sensuality: your sexual fantasies, your fantasies about food, your fantasies about comforts of different kinds. You’re going to say No to that kind of thinking.

That ability to say No is what allows you to develop concentration, because now you’re going to look for pleasure someplace else. And here the Buddha opens the field wide. Whatever pleasure you can get from concentration is going to be a good thing, because unlike sensual pleasure or the pleasures of sensual fantasies, the pleasure of concentration puts you in a state where you can actually see the mind clearly and feel nourished as you’re looking at what’s going on in the mind. That would be a bright quality or a skillful quality in the mind that you would want to encourage.

The same with thoughts of non-ill will: You learn either to have goodwill for others or just to be equanimous about them. The same with harmfulness: You’re not here to punish anybody. You’re here to look into your own mind, understand what’s going wrong in the mind, and learn how to change it.

This is how analysis of qualities moves into the next factor for awakening, which is persistence—in other words, right effort. When you see that there’s a quality that’s unskillful, you try to get rid of it. As for a quality that is skillful, if it’s not there, you try to encourage it; if it is there, you try to develop it.

As you’re trying to get into concentration, persistence takes you into the next factor, which is rapture. This is a hard term to translate, the Pali term pīti. It can also mean “refreshment,” and it covers a wide range, simply from a feeling of fullness in the body, fullness in the mind, up to really strong states of rapture.

Here, the Buddha’s not quite so helpful. He says there are the potentials for rapture in the body. Well, where would those be? One thing you can do as a little trick is to focus on your hands. As you breathe in, breathe out, think of your hands relaxing, every muscle in the hand. Nothing tenses up as you breathe in, and the muscles maintain a sense of sameness throughout the in-breath, throughout the out-breath. Everything’s relaxed.

When the muscles relax like that, then the blood can flow freely in the hands. A lot of the tensions of the day tend to center in the hands, as you use your hands to work, to type at a computer, to work in the kitchen, or simply when a particularly strong emotion comes in and you tense up in your hands: the old fight-or-flight reaction. Well, think of it relaxing, relaxing, relaxing every little muscle. If you notice any tendency to squeeze the energy in the hands to mark the end of an in-breath or the end of an out-breath, allow that to relax, too.** **Once there’s that sense of fullness of the blood flowing in the hands, think of it spreading up the arms.

You can do it the same starting with the center of your chest—any place in the body where you tend to tense up quickly when anything negative happens, either inside or outside. Learn how to keep it wide, wide open, because a lot of the pleasure and concentration comes not from bearing down on one point. It comes from focusing on one point but having a soft, open focus.

It starts out not all that impressive, just a feeling of “okay.” Well, maintain that “okay.” Don’t allow any tension to build up inside it or around it. When the sense of “okay” seems steady, think of it spreading, because one of the reasons why people have trouble gaining a sense of pleasure out of the meditation is that they’re squeezing things too much, forcing things too much.

All you have to do is think: “Breath.” You don’t have to push the breath around. Just think: There’s breath in your back, there’s breath in your legs, there’s breath in your arms, breath around your heart—as you breathe in, as you breathe out. You don’t have to put any pressure on these things. If you put pressure on it, then you’re actually playing with the water element, pushing it against the walls of the blood vessels, and that creates pressure. That’s why some people get headaches when they meditate. They’re pushing the blood around.

Here you’re trying to tune into a different kind of energy: a free-flowing energy that doesn’t have any clear boundary lines. Think of the energy doing the breathing. You don’t have to do it. The energy breathes itself. Here again we often have the sense that some muscles have to do the work of doing the breathing, and others are freeloaders. The ones that are doing all the work won’t get a chance to have a sense of pleasure or well-being. So to compensate, think of breath breathing breath energy, breathing energy.

And you’ll find that things calm down. That’s the next factor for awakening: calm. Here again, the Buddha’s not all that helpful. He just says there is a potential for calm in the body, a potential for calm in the mind. Okay, what kind of perceptions would be calming for you right now? Perceptions with regard to the breath, with regard to the mind—give them a try.

You think of the whole body breathing in without effort. It’s very calming. Think of your mind being willing to stay and not get bored or antsy. Whenever there’s any sense of “I’ve got to move on, I want to push things on,” just let it relax. Once you get helpful perceptions and a sense of not having to pressure things so much, things will calm down.

When they’re calm, then you can get concentrated. Here again, the Buddha’s not all that helpful. He simply says there is the potential for concentration that goes beyond just calm. The mind gets really centered and really solid. The Thai word for concentration, samādhi, is cit tang man, “the mind firmly established.” There’s a sense of firmness to your mind as it settles in. It’s not just calm and still. It’s firmly there. We think of it as being centered, and centered in all directions—in other words, a three-dimensional center.

As things calm down and get even more solid, then you develop the potential for equanimity, which is the last of the factors for awakening. After you’ve been through the rapture and it’s done its work for you, you let that calm down. You’re here with a sense of being balanced that can get very, very still. It doesn’t get still because you’re trying to suppress it. It just gradually, gradually, gradually settles in. There’s a greater sense of fullness, so that you don’t need to pull any more breath in. There’s a greater sense of everything in the body being connected.

These are the skills of meditation and they’re all based on paying careful attention to what you’re doing, looking for the potentials that are coming in from the past. The fact that you’ve got this body, the fact that you’ve got these feelings and perceptions and everything—those are coming in from the past. But then there’s your contribution in the present moment, and that’s what you’re working on, that’s what you’re going to be studying, and that’s where the discernment comes.

As I said earlier, discernment is not a matter of seeing our interconnectedness or any other metaphysical issue. The only metaphysical issue the Buddha dealt with is karma, the power of your actions. So you want to be very clear about what you’re doing right now. In the process of getting the mind into concentration, settled like this, you get more and more sensitive to the extent to which you are shaping things right now. And now you can do a better job.

Doing a better job means opening up your mind as to possibilities. If you’re just sitting there, developing a lot of persistence, a lot of patience, a lot of endurance, you can go for a while. But you read about the ajaans and their approach to developing discernment. It always comes from asking new questions, looking at things from new angles, and particularly getting a different sense of what you’re doing right now and what you could do to make things better, and where the potentials are for making things better.

This is one of the reasons why we read passages of Dhamma: to give us an idea of what some of those potentials are, new ways of looking at things. They come with the assumption that the way we’ve been looking at things, the way we’ve been acting so far, is not cutting it. There’s got to be something better, and the Buddha’s offering that.

This, again, is one of the reasons why Ajaan Suwat was so insistent on that principle of practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma, instead of saying, “Well, then, the Dhamma has to fit into my preconceived notions and my ideas of what it should be.” That doesn’t teach you anything at all. You don’t learn anything new. You’re just stuffing things into a cubbyhole, stuffing things into your old framework. The whole purpose of the Dhamma is to break your old framework, to consider that there are possibilities out there and in here that you hadn’t heard of before or hadn’t thought of before, and to be willing to try on some new ways of looking at things.

So we do have these potentials. The Buddha’s alerting us to the fact that we have them. As I said, in some cases, he’s specific about what those potentials are. In other cases, it’s up to you to figure out where they are and what you can do with them. In that way, the meditation is not simply putting the mind through a meat grinder. It’s exploration, experimentation. You’re using the active faculties of your mind in a good way. You’re learning to figure things out, because that’s what discernment is: figuring out not so much how things are but how things function, and how you can make them function for the sake of a happiness that’s really dependable. That possibility is there, too.

So open your mind to new possibilities. Only then can your meditation grow.