A Trained Observer
May 14, 2024

We had a visitor the other day who made a strange comment: that my approach to insight followed Majjhima 64. I always thought my approach to insight followed Ajaan Fuang. Majjhima 64 does talk about one way in which insight develops, in which you analyze your concentration.

First into the different aggregates: When you’re sitting here, you’ve got form, which is the breath. Feeling, which is the feeling of pleasure you’re trying to develop. Perception, the image you hold in mind of how the breath moves through the body, where it starts, where it finishes. Fabrication, how you talk to yourself about the breath, evaluate it, make adjustments. And then consciousness, which is aware of all these things. As you reflect on these things, you’re aware of how they’re inconstant, stressful, not-self. That provides an opening to the insight to release.

That’s one way in which insight can arise, but living with Ajaan Fuang I discovered he had lots of different ways that he would recommend for insight to arise. There’s another way that corresponds to another sutta—I’ve forgotten the number and name of the sutta—in which the insight arises as you go from one level of concentration to another, and you see the different fabrications fall away.

Verbal fabrication falls away as you move from the first to the second jhāna. Bodily fabrication falls away as you move from the third to the fourth. Then mental fabrication would fall away when you move from the dimension of neither perception nor non-perception to the cessation of perception and feeling. That’s way up there.

That’s another way in which insight can arise. You see how the mind constructs things, and how you can move from one construction to another. You begin to see how each is fabricated, how you put these things together, and that insight helps you develop some dispassion for the concentration.

That’s the important thing—how you develop dispassion—and that’s going to vary from person to person: which level of concentration it’s going to happen in, and whether it’s going to happen in the concentration, as you move from one level to another, or as you leave concentration. There are also stories in the Canon where people are washing their feet and they gain concentration and then from the concentration they gain insight. So all kinds of things can spark your insight.

That was one of the things I learned from Ajaan Fuang. He said, “You can hear about other people’s strategies for developing discernment or insight, but you can’t assume they’ll work for you the way they worked for the other people.”

It’s good to read about them to get some ideas of what kinds of things have helped other people, but you’re going to have to look at your own mind and see what works. And you’re going to have to use your own ingenuity.

This boils down to those two words that I keep repeating over and over again, because Ajaan Fuang kept repeating them over and over again: You have to be observant, and you have to use your ingenuity. That’s how you develop in your meditation.

Now, an important part of being observant is something that he would teach across the board, which is that you’ve got to get a very strong sense of *the watcher *or *the knower *in your meditation—the part of the mind that can watch anything and not get excited by it, not get upset by it, but just witness what’s going on. This is an ability that you have to consciously develop. Some people have more trouble with it than others.

But time and again, I would hear people coming to see Ajaan Fuang and say “Well, as I watch my mind, and if something bad comes up, I try to get rid of it. If something good, I allow it to continue.” And he would say, “Well, learn how to watch the bad things, too. You don’t follow them, you don’t act on them, but learn how to watch your defilements because,” he said, “sometimes your defilements have their good side.” This is a point he picked up from Ajaan Lee.

If we didn’t have desire, for instance, we wouldn’t be here practicing. If we didn’t crave the end of suffering, we wouldn’t be here practicing. If we didn’t realize that we have some ignorance, we wouldn’t search for knowledge. So even the defilements can have their good side, but to see that requires developing a very resilient observer inside.

An important part of the observer is learning to be aware of things and then just drop it at that. You don’t continue, as they say in Thai, “weaving” things. You notice the presence of something, you observe what it’s doing, but you don’t play along with its games.

You’re gaining a sense of how to watch something in the mind and yet be separate from it. This is one of the important principles in gaining discernment. You hear so much about the importance of seeing the oneness of all things, but when the Buddha talks about insight, it’s all about seeing things as separate.

Your awareness is one thing. Your greed is something else. Your anger is something else. If you’re watching pain, the pain is one thing, the awareness is something else, the body is something else. It’s this ability to watch, to step back, that allows you to see the whole story of how different things interact.

One of Ajaan Fuang’s students complained to him once that the insights she gained in her meditation were all very fragmentary. He said, “It’s like listening to a record”—he was thinking of the records in the old days, those long-playing records where a needle had to be put into a groove. He said, “The needle has to stay in the groove. It can’t jump around.” When something good comes up you stay in the groove, when something bad comes up, you stay in the groove.

That reminded me of a novel I taught when I was teaching English in Chiengmai University. I had the students read Ford Maddox Ford, *The Good Soldier, *which, admittedly, even for a native speaker, is not an easy book to read, but I wanted to stretch the students, to get them to think about the narrator, because that’s what the book is all about.

This man is narrating basically his wife’s suicide and his best friend’s suicide, and he plays a role in both. He doesn’t intervene, doesn’t help to stop them when he could have, perhaps. But he doesn’t want to assume any guilt for what he failed to do.

As he’s telling the story, anytime he comes across some incriminating evidence of his own complicity, he jumps over it. When he’s telling of an incident and it looks as though he’s portraying himself in a bad way, he’ll suddenly switch to something else. So the book jumps around, which is why it’s a difficult book to read, but our minds are just like that.

We’re thinking along and something makes us look bad or just shows us something about ourselves that we don’t like to see, and we jump. The needle jumps out of the groove. When a record is like that, when the needle’s jumping around—screech, scratch, screech, scratch—there’s no sense to anything at all.

If you want to make sense out of your own mind, you have to stick with things, good and bad, and just tell yourself, as Ajaan Fuang told one of his students: “Look, the mind can think good things, so why can’t it think bad things? Just make sure you don’t fall under the power of the bad things.” You learn how to step back from both, because that’s when you get to see the mind in and of itself, because that’s the real culprit.

It’s not the good or bad things that are the culprits, it’s how we relate to them. Like that passage in the Canon where the question is when you have two oxen, a black one and a white one, is the black one the fetter of the white, is the white one the fetter of the black? No, it’s the yoke that’s holding the two together: That’s the fetter there.

In the same way, sights are not the fetter of the eye, the eye is not the fetter of sights, and so on down with all the senses. It’s the passion and desire between the two of them that connects them. That’s what you want to see. Where does the passion and desire come from? It comes out of the mind.

So whatever comes up, you want to learn how to keep the observer in control as you just watch. You don’t act on it, but you see it: “This is an event in the mind.” When you can see the events in the mind simply as that—as events—then you’re going to learn about them, in whichever way your insight is going to come, whatever questions you ask about why something makes inroads into the mind when it doesn’t have to.

That’s what you have to realize: Things don’t have to make inroads into the mind. We let our minds get colored by its objects, but they don’t have to be. Yet we take it so much for granted: Something sad happens and the whole mind gets sad. Something pleasant happens and the whole mind gets happy.

This may be one of the reasons why the Buddha uses the word rāga to describe these fetters—in addition to passion it also means color. It’s like putting dye into a glass of water. You put some blue dye into the water, and it doesn’t take long for the whole glass of water to get blue. You put red in, and it doesn’t take long for the whole glass to get red.

That’s our problem. We allow our minds to be colored by what we see and what we know. But in developing this sense of the observer, you have to learn how to say, “Okay, the observer is one thing, your awareness is something else, the object is something else, and they don’t have to be connected.” That way, your observer and your awareness can stay clear even in the presence of red or yellow or blue or green things.

That’s the part of the training of the mind that’s constant for everyon. Now, how you’re going to gain your insight, what questions you’re going to ask that are going to break things open: That’s going to be an individual matter. We learn from the strategies of others what’s possible, what could work, but that’s not necessarily going to work for us.

This is where you’re encouraged to ask your own questions to understand your own greed, aversion, delusion, your own desires and passions, and to learn to develop some dispassion around them.

Basically, it comes down to that old pattern of seeing the allure, seeing the drawbacks, and catching yourself going for the allure when you realize at the same time, “This is nothing worth going for.”

Now, when that’s going to happen, how that’s going to happen, we can’t say. But what you can create are the conditions for it to become likely to happen. That’s all dependent on learning how to make this sense of the observer strong and independent, and not colored by anything it knows.