Trust in the Power of the Mind
July 31, 2024

The path starts with right view. Notice, that’s not right knowledge, it’s right view. Knowledge comes later, with the different noble attainments. With right view, the Buddha’s letting you borrow some of his insights, borrow some of his knowledge. You take it on as a working hypothesis that this is going to be a good path to follow. As the Buddha said, it’s admirable in the beginning, admirable in the middle, admirable in the end. But the best is saved for last.

In the beginning, you’re making a gamble. You don’t know if the Buddha’s right or wrong about things like rebirth or karma. But you do know that they’re good things to believe, in the sense that they affirm your power to shape your life in a good way.

Think about that reflection we chant regularly: “I’m subject to aging, illness, death, separation from all that is dear and appealing to me.” Those are the reflections that remind you that you live in a dangerous world. The things that you depend on, the things that you love, are going to be taken from you someday. So what have you got? You’ve got your actions, and your actions can make a difference.

“Whatever I do, for good or for evil, to that will I fall heir”: That’s affirming your agency, the principle that the choices you make are your choices, and that they will make a difference. That’s good to believe.

If you believe otherwise, that your actions have no meaning or you’re not really responsible for them, you’re left defenseless. This machine of the world could just grind you down, and you’d have no recourse. But here the Buddha’s saying—based on his experience—that Yes, we can make a difference. It’s a good thing to believe.

There’s a discourse where he says it’s like making a bet: a safe bet. If it turns out that your actions didn’t give good results, no matter how good you made the actions—or if it turned out there was no rebirth—then at the very least you’ve lived an honorable life. That’s a thought that can sustain you. Here the Buddha is calling on your sense of honor, that you’re willing to do good even without a reward.

But then again, he says, it’s not going to be without a reward. So you place some trust in him. After all, are you going to place your trust in people who teach otherwise? What kind of people are they? And where would their teachings lead you if you actually followed them?

I had a strange conversation once with an editor of a Buddhist magazine, talking about how you have to believe in the power of your actions, because otherwise you’re left adrift. You don’t know what to do. He replied, “Yes, I guess, I suppose so—if you act in line with your beliefs.” I wondered: What kind of beliefs do you have if you don’t act in line with them?

You have to realize that there are a lot of things you don’t know in life. The Buddha can’t prove karma to you, he can’t prove rebirth, but he does offer a pragmatic reason for adopting these views as right views—because you behave in a better way, and you behave in a safer way.

It’s only when you get to the first noble attainment—stream entry, where the mind steps outside of space and time for a bit—that you gain direct knowledge of these things. In the course of stepping outside of time, you realize that your experience of time has gone on for a long, long time, much longer than this one lifetime. Even if you don’t see the particulars of previous lifetimes, you know that this has been going on for many, many, many… Would you say, years? Eons? That there seems to be no beginning to it.

But at that point, you begin to see there’s also a possible end, because it is possible to taste the deathless and to know that it is totally free from the stress of ordinary experience. That’s when you can say that you’ve begun to know.

It’s also the point in the practice where the Buddha says you actually begin your training. By that point, you’ve developed confirmed confidence in the Buddha, that what he says on these topics is right. You also know that it was through your own efforts that you reached that experience: through your choices, and through the moment where you have no intention at all—and things open up. That was through your own discernment.

So once you’ve had these things confirmed, then you’re really on the path. Prior to that point you’re on for a bit and then you’re off, and then you’re on again, off again. You try to make it on as much as you can.

But the sense of confidence in the Buddha, the sense of confidence in the path that he taught, gets a lot stronger at stream-entry. People who haven’t had that experience yet are making attempts at the training, but they’re not really in training. But still, to whatever extent you can practice, it’s all to the good.

The Buddha keeps making reference to animals that have been tamed and trained, how much more they can do than if they hadn’t been trained. And your mind is like that: If it just runs all over the place, it’s got a lot of potentials, but it doesn’t make the most of those potentials.

The training is what makes the most of the mind’s power to make choices. And the extent of power of what the mind can do, the power of what the mind can know: You don’t really know those things until you’ve submitted to the training.

As the Buddha says, just in the case of jhāna, the things that can be known through the practice of jhāna, the powers that can be developed through the practice of jhāna, are inconceivable. In other words, trying to figure out what a person with that level of concentration can do and can’t do—that’s inconceivable—to say nothing of the range of a Buddha.

Our sense of what the mind can do, what the mind can know, has been greatly limited by our education. We’ve become sensitive to certain things that are useful for society. As society gets more and more capitalist, the education gets more and more capitalist, too. Things like the humanities and religion fall to the wayside. The subjects that are actually good for your mind fall to the wayside. You get sensitized to the things that are useful for making a living, but the areas that used to be developed through the training of the mind are getting pretty stunted.

We have this pride in our Western education, but we have to realize it’s very good in some areas and very limited in others. That’s why our sense of what the mind can do has been stunted in those other areas.

There was a British academic a while back who was saying that “When they talk about concentration in the Canon, you have to realize that back in those days they didn’t read, so they didn’t have the powers of concentration that we have now. So when they’re talking about concentration, it’s nothing amazing, nothing beyond what we already know.” Which shows you how ignorant academics can be.

The power of the mind is largely untapped.

So here we are meditating, assuming that the mind does have some power. After all, if it were just the result of physical events, sitting here and meditating wouldn’t make much of a difference. But the fact that you can direct your intentions, direct your acts of attention, in a way that can bring stillness, a sense of ease, a sense of well-being, a sense of rapture, clarity to the mind: That’s because the mind is not just on the receiving end of things.

Mano-pubbangama dhamma mano-settha mano-maya: The mind is the forerunner of all experience. The mind is in charge. Things are made by the mind.

There’s a good reason that they put that verse at the beginning of the Dhammapada. It’s the power of the mind that we’re training here; the power of the mind that we’re cultivating. So it’s good not to have any preconceived notions about what its limits might be.

Each of us has our own karma—in terms of what we can know, how far we can develop these possibilities—but you’re not going to know the potential of the mind until you work at developing it, actualizing it.

This is what the practice of right concentration does: You seclude yourself from your ordinary sensual fantasies and any unskillful thoughts, and you focus attention on one thing. You think about that one thing, i.e., the breath. You work with it so that it gives rise to a sense of ease, a sense of well-being, a sense of refreshment. You energize the body. You energize the mind. Then you allow body and mind to grow calm.

As you work with calming the mind, calming the breath, things begin to peel away. Things that you never saw clearly right in your own mind become a lot clearer.

Fortunately, that’s the aspect of meditation that’s really important. You read about the other powers that can be developed through concentration, and you can say, “For the time being, I know nothing about those, but I do know that the Buddha says I can put an end to suffering. That’s something I want to try.”

It’s all laid out and it all makes sense. But it requires that we have a sense of how limited we are in our ability to know the Dhamma until we’ve done the Dhamma—and how little we know about our minds until we’ve tried to train them.

There are people who give up right at the beginning. They say, “I can’t do this; I’ll try to depend on somebody else.” But as the Buddha said, you have to be your own mainstay. Nobody else can do this work for you. And if you don’t do it now, when are you going to do it? It doesn’t get easier as you get older.

So you commit yourself now, because it’s a good thing to commit yourself to, and then you learn from what you’ve done. It’s not just a matter of doing what you’re told.

The Buddha does give you some examples, some ideas of what you can do with the breath. But they’re more like riddles. He said to breathe in a way that makes you sensitive to rapture. But where are you going to sense the rapture? Where’s the potential for rapture? How are you going to breathe in a way that sensitizes you to that potential? That’s something you have to learn by trial and error. “Breathe in a way that makes you sensitive to pleasure:”: same thing. Breathe in and out gladdening the mind, concentrating the mind, releasing the mind: Each of those is a riddle.

So you’re not just forcing your mind into a mold by being obedient. You’re learning how to develop your own powers of commitment and reflection.

When the Buddha talks about that question that lies at the beginning of discernment—“What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term harm and suffering? What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?”—there are some places where he gives the answer that you can get from other people: Practice generosity and virtue. Develop the qualities of goodwill in the mind. He teaches the precepts for the areas of virtue that can be taught.

But then there are a lot of areas are not covered by the precepts, not covered by those three answers. That’s where he’s saying: Here’s how you go about answering those questions yourself.

You start by asking them of other people, people you trust. But then you have to learn how to provide the answers yourself.

He teaches you how to reflect as you commit yourself to the practice. So the practice requires your own act of participation, your own act of training of yourself—and that’s inspiring.

The Buddha puts a lot of trust in you:* *that this is something you can do; that you can master your unskillful thoughts; you can develop the good qualities he’s talking about; and you can do it on your own initiative.

It’s good that he’s placed his trust in us. And it feels good to have that trust placed in us. But now it’s up to us to live up to that trust.