The Middle Way
July 04, 2024

We chanted the factors of the noble eightfold path just now, and it’s important that you understand how they come together.

They’re not just eight random things.

Right view is seeing things in terms of the four noble truths. The main point of the four noble truths is that the cause of suffering is inside, and the suffering itself is something you’re doing. Clinging-aggregates are not just things sitting around. The compound means the act of clinging to the aggregates, and it’s related to craving, which is the origination, and which also comes from the mind.

Both the craving and the act of clinging are defined as passion and desire.

The difference is that the word for craving in Pali, tanha, also means thirst. The word for clinging, upadana, also means the act of feeding. So, you start out thirsting for something and looking for something to feed on. When you find it, you latch on.

This means that the craving is still there in the clinging aggregates. After all, while you’re feeding, it’s a sign that you’re still hungry. If you were totally satisfied, you’d stop.

The main point here is that if you’re going to put an end to the cause of suffering, you’ve got to look inside. This is why we meditate looking inside.

When you resolve not to engage in unskillful qualities, unskillful states of mind; when you try to figure out which ones are skillful, which ones are not, that’s basically right resolve. The Buddha lists the unskillful qualities as sensuality, ill-will, and harmfulness.

A lot of people can see easily how ill-will and harmfulness would be bad things to resolve on. Sensuality, though, is a little more difficult. Time and time again people say, “Well, yes, but…”

How does the Buddha define sensuality? Not as sensual pleasures, but as your fascination with thinking about sensual pleasures, your plans for getting sensual pleasures. There’s a passion there. So, the Buddha’s saying, basically, that you should try to renounce that kind of thinking.

But he’s not going to starve you of pleasure. This is another reason why we meditate the way we do. We give rise to a sense of well-being through letting the mind settle down with comfortable breathing. It starts out with right effort, which carries over from right resolve. Anything unskillful coming up in the mind, you’re going to let it go. As for skillful things that are not there yet, you try to give rise to them and then to develop them.

The instructions for how you do that are in right mindfulness. You focus on the body in and of itself. You’re ardent, alert, and mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. That’s the definition. How it works out in practice is that you focus on the breath without any reference to anything else outside—just what it feels like to be breathing right now. As for any thoughts that’d pull you away to something else, you say, “Not now. This is not the time.” And you bring three qualities to this.

Ardency is the desire to do this well.

Alertness is watching what you’re actually doing, both watching the breath and watching the mind.

Mindfulness is remembering to keep something in mind. When you see something unskillful coming up, you try to remember: What do you do with it? This refers back to your right view and right resolve. When unskillful qualities come up, things that would pull you away to thoughts about the world, you learn to let them go. Things that’ll get you more firmly planted in the breath, you develop them. When you do that properly, you give rise to a sense of ease, a sense of well-being.

That’s when you’re getting into right concentration. When the Buddha describes mindfulness of breathing, which is one of the ways of applying the principles of right mindfulness, very early on he says to breathe in a way that gives rise to rapture, breathe in a way that gives rise to pleasure. When he talks about breathing, he’s not talking about the air coming in and out through the nose or the touch of the air at the nose. He’s talking about a quality within the body itself: the flow of energy.

So sit here and make a survey of your body. Where do you feel the energy as the breath comes in, as the breath goes out? Where is the movement most obvious? And also, which parts of the body are most sensitive to that movement? They’re usually in areas around the heart, around the throat, or in the stomach. They’ll tell you: Now the breath is too short, now the breath is too long. They’ll tell you what kind of breathing would feel good, what kind of breathing would feel satisfying.

You’re free to decide what you like right now, but then you’ve got to test it. Does it feel good over the long term? You can try long breathing, and it may feel good for a while, but then it feels excessive. Okay, if it feels excessive, you can make it shorter. Or if it feels too short, if you feel like you’re not getting your full measure of breath energy, make it longer. Make it deeper, more shallow, heavier, lighter, faster, slower. Ajaan Lee adds that initially you might want to breathe in long and out short, or in short and out long. Try to be really sensitive to how the breathing feels.

All too often, we desensitize ourselves to the breath because we have other, what we think are more important things to pay attention to, and we don’t want to be bothered with breath issues. The breath gets pushed into the background. We get less and less familiar with it.

This is the time to get more familiar, because you’re going to be settling down right here and you want something good to settle down with. As I said, when the Buddha says to avoid the pleasures that come with thinking about sensual thoughts, he’s not starving you. He says to breathe in a way that feels good. This is one of his main discoveries in his quest for awakening.

You probably know the story. After living a life of lots of sensual pleasures, he went to the other extreme, denying himself of all pleasures, to the point where he was going to die. He realized that wasn’t the path.

Then the question arose, “Could there be another way?” He had tried both extremes. What would lie in the middle?

He remembered a time when he was young and he had spontaneously entered in a strong state of concentration while sitting under a tree. The question arose in his mind, “Could that be the path?” And the answer came, “Yes.” “Then why am I afraid of that pleasure that comes with that state of concentration? There’s nothing unskillful about it.” It doesn’t intoxicate you. In fact, it actually helps you to see your mind more clearly. At the same time, it doesn’t harm anybody at all.

So right concentration was the first factor of the path that he discovered. And it’s a central one. There’s a passage where he calls all the other factors of the path the prerequisites for right concentration. Everything else is meant to support this.

So take some time to get sensitive to what feels really good. If you’re not sure, just keep experimenting. Ask yourself which parts of the body feel like they’re being shut off from the breath. Allow them to be participants as well, so that you get a sense that the whole nervous system is involved, all the blood vessels, everything out to every pore. If there’s any sense of tension or tightness or blockage in the body, allow it to relax and to dissolve away. You’ll find that areas of the body that you were desensitized to in the past begin to open up.

Now, there may be some parts of the body that resist, some parts that are especially sensitive. They tend to be related to some psychological issue you’re very sensitive to. So don’t push them too hard. Work around them and show them that they can trust you. You’re here not to push things around. You’re here to listen to what the body needs. Actually, with our emotions we do tend to push the breath energy around a lot, subconsciously, and to treat it pretty roughly.

Fear pushes it in one direction. Anger pushes it in another direction. Jealousy in another direction. So parts of the body just clam up. They don’t want to be pushed around.

Now, though, you’re going to be opening things up and you’re not going to push anything. When we talk about the breath going down the spine, the breath going out the legs, you don’t push it down the spine. You don’t push it out the legs. You just think of whatever tension or tightness may be blocking the spine or the legs, opening up. The breath will flow on its own without your having to push it.

It’s like cutting a road through a wilderness. Once the road is there, you don’t have to push the cars down the road. The cars or the people who want to go down the road will go on their own. All you do is make sure that the road is in good shape. There are no roadblocks, no avalanches, so traffic can flow smoothly.

In this way you find the pleasure of the middle way. Sometimes the descriptions of the middle way sound like you’re avoiding pain on the one hand and pleasure on the other hand, and that you’re trying to develop a neutral state in the middle.

But again, remember: What is that middle way? The heart of the middle way is right concentration. The factors of right concentration start with a sense of fullness, rapture, pleasure. They’re meant to feed your need to have a sense of well-being in order to settle down here. So, the well-being will depend on your getting sensitive to areas you’ve been desensitized to before, releasing tension where you’ve been holding tension before, and getting a sense of the whole body breathing in, the whole body breathing out. You may want to hold in mind the perception that every cell in the body is breathing and they’re all breathing together. You’re just here watching over them, feeling them from the inside, allowing your awareness to spread through the whole body, with a sense of being connected, a sense of being in harmony.

When you do that, it’ll help to make your right views more precise. Your understanding of where there’s craving, where there’s clinging, will get more and more refined as your sensitivities get more refined.

All the elements of the path come together right here. So, try to sensitize yourself to right here. And allow things to open up.