Taking Initiative

There’s a passage where the Buddha talks about how to find happiness in this lifetime, and it focuses on your activities outside. But as is often the case, when the Buddha is talking about things outside, he’s also talking about things inside as well. So it’s good to listen to this lesson and see what you can bring into your meditation.

There are four things he recommends. One is initiative. In other words, you don’t just sit around and tell yourself, “I’ll just be content with whatever I’ve got.” Sometimes you don’t have much to begin with, but you can make something out of it.

Suppose you have an egg, but the egg is raw. Initiative would say, “There’s something you can do with it.” You can cook it in various ways. If you just left it raw and tried to eat it, you could easily get poisoned.

In the same way, if you want to find happiness in life, you take what you’ve got and do your best to make something good out of it. This is something that’s stressed over and over again in the forest tradition, largely because many of the monks came from poor families. They realized that the only way out of poverty was not to sit around and be content, but to have some initiative, figure out what you can do with what you’ve got, what you can make of yourself. As Ajaan Lee once said, “If you have discernment, you can have just one machete to your name, yet you can still set yourself up in life.”

So initiative involves using your discernment to see what potentials you have in what you have already, how they can be developed. Then you work at it.

That means that the discernment there goes together with the right effort.

The second quality the Buddha talks about is maintaining what you’ve got. In other words, once you’ve gained something good, you take good care of it. You don’t just let it sit around and get damaged by this or that. Take what you’ve got and maintain it well. Like the plastic buckets we have here: Don’t leave them out in the sun. Keep them in the shade, and they’ll last longer.

Ajaan Fuang used to like to talk about being with Ajaan Mun, how Ajaan Mun was extremely frugal. Old rags would get stitched together to use for cloths for wiping your feet. Old coconut shells would be made into spittoons. And then he looked after what he had. He didn’t treat it carelessly.

The third quality is having a sense of proportion in how you spend your wealth. You’re not too frugal, but you’re also not a spendthrift. If you’re too frugal, you become a miser. You don’t get any pleasure out of what you’ve gained. You put all that work in but you don’t allow yourself any pleasure from it: That creates a very narrow mind state. You start resenting other people’s happiness, too. So the Buddha recommends that you get some pleasure out of what you’ve got. But you’re not wasteful. You do save.

Finally, the fourth quality is having good friends. The Buddha talks about four qualities to look for in a good friend: conviction, virtue, generosity, and discernment. People like this will advise you well as to what you should do with your wealth for your true well-being. Their conviction will remind you that what you do has to be skillful. You can’t harm anybody. That carries over into your virtue.

With the generosity, you share what you’ve got, because what you share then becomes yours in a deeper way. In other words, you develop the perfection of generosity. It becomes a good quality in your mind. Your mind becomes more spacious, more open. In Ajaan Lee’s words, the whole world becomes your home. The sky is your ceiling. The sun and the moon are your personal lights. Everywhere you go, you have relatives because you’ve been generous.

As for discernment, you think about what your true well-being involves. That question—“What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?”—that’s the foundation of all discernment. It’s always a good question to keep in mind.

Now, when the Buddha explains these qualities — initiative, maintenance, proper use of your wealth, and having admirable friends — the context is that he’s talking to a layperson about how to have a happy life. But when you take these instructions inside, you realize that they also apply to your meditation.

You have to have initiative in your meditation. You can’t expect the world to make way for you to meditate. You have to do it. You have to be the one who sets your mind on this path, that this is where you want to go. And you don’t just content yourself with what you’ve got.

As the Buddha said, the secret to his awakening was discontent with skillful qualities. It sounds strange. We hear so much about contentment, but the Buddha’s sense of contentment is largely a matter of setting priorities. You content yourself with just what you need in terms of food, clothing, and shelter so that you’re not spending too much time worrying about those things, trying to amass more. That gives you more time to meditate, more time to practice. That allows you to focus on your sense of discontent with where you are in your meditation. You take what you’ve got and you figure out, “What would be the best use I can make out of this?”

Like right now: You’re focusing on the breath. If you just look at it for a couple minutes, it doesn’t seem to have much potential. But if you stay with it over time and give it your full attention, you begin to see you can make something out of the breath — in terms of how long it is, how short it is, deep, shallow, heavy, light, fast, slow. That can have an impact on your body. And you can adjust the breath in such a way that it has a good impact on your mind as well. As you allow that sense of well-being to spread through the body, it becomes really intense. There’s a sense of harmony in the body, harmony in the mind—a sense of well-being that’s hard to find in other ways. And there you are: You’ve shown your initiative in trying to make something out of what doesn’t seem to be all that promising to begin with.

Think of Ajaan Lee in the forest when he had his heart attack. What did he have? The diet he was on, provided by the hill tribes, was precisely the diet you do not want when you’re having a heart attack. Lots of bamboo shoots, which can be bad for the heart. Rice. And lots of peppers. That was it. Nothing much to go on. In terms of medicine, there was even less.

So what did he have? He didn’t have much, but he had his breath. So he figured out, “What can I do with this? I can make this my medicine.” That’s how he discovered the meditation method that he taught from that point on. It saved his life. He lived for another eight years after that and he saw that it could be a good basis for teaching concentration to others, because the important part of concentration is that you get your awareness fully in the body. Get out of your head and into your body. Fully inhabit your body with a sense of well-being.

So that’s initiative: learning how to take what you’ve got and make something valuable out of it.

Then you maintain it. Remember that the breath is there not only as you sit here with your eyes closed, but also as you go through the day. So you can make this your foundation. You may not be able to have full-body awareness with the same intensity that you do while you’re sitting here, but while you’re walking around, while you’re dealing with other things, have at least some part of your body where you can have a sense that the breath is flowing here and it feels good. That gives you your foundation. Keep that going as you go through the day. When the time comes to sit down again and meditate, you’re right here.

It’s as if you’ve kept your dog on a very short leash. When you want the dog to come, there’s no problem. If you leave it on a long leash, it’ll wander off and wind the leash around bushes and trees and lampposts and benches and people. Then when you want it to come and settle down again, you have to unwind it from all those things. So try to keep your sense of being right here fully in the body as much as you can as you go through the day. Maintain that.

Then the question comes, “How do you put it to use?” That’s the third step. You use it to induce a sense of well-being, but you also invest it further. That’s the balance between being too frugal and too spendthrift.

As you come out of meditation, ask yourself, “When the mind runs to something, where does it go? And why?” Sometimes it’ll go out of a sense of duty that you do have responsibilities. Other times, it’ll go for a quick fix: a nice sight, a nice sound, smell, taste, tactile sensation. Try to figure out why.

So use the meditation to create a sense of well-being because, as the Buddha said, your discernment can see the drawbacks of sensuality, but if you don’t have the pleasure of concentration, if you don’t allow yourself to sit in that pleasure — letting it soak through the body, soak through the mind — you’re going to go back to your old sensual ideas, sensual pleasures, sensual fantasies.

So do enjoy the meditation. But remember, you’re here not just to enjoy it, but also to invest it, to figure out what is there in the mind that keeps going for things that are unskillful, that goes for the short-term happiness at the expense of the long-term. That’s how you spend your wealth, getting some enjoyment out of it, without being a spendthrift.

And finally, have good friends. This means, on the outside level, that you listen to the Dhamma, read the Dhamma. Minimize the amount of time you’re spending with the Internet, with other parts of the world, because people will pull you down. What you get out of the Internet is other people’s ideas of what they want you to want, what they want you to believe. You have to ask yourself, “Is this really what I need to know? Is this really what I need to be preoccupying myself with? I’ve got work I have to do inside.”

The message of the Internet, the message of the media in general, is that “What you’re doing right now is not important. What other people are doing, that’s a lot more important. Pay attention to them.” Which is the opposite of the Buddha’s message, which is, “What you’re doing right now is the important thing for you.” After all, you’re shaping your present and you’re shaping the future. So you want to shape it well.

So listen to that kind of Dhamma. Listen to those messages. Those are your friends. The more you listen to those good friends outside, then the more the friends you have inside — in other words, all the different members of the committee of the mind that are on the side of the Dhamma — will get strengthened, too. Your values will be right. And you’ll find it easier and easier to practice in difficult situations because you’re talking to the right people, the people who encourage you, urge you, rouse you to practice.

After all, what do you have in this life? What can you take with you when you go? All you have is the qualities you’ve built into the mind, and the things you’ve done with your speech and your body. The karma in both cases: That’s your wealth. That’s all you can take with you. Everything else you have to put aside, you have to drop. And you never know when the message is going to come that you’ve got to go.

In Ajaan Lee’s image, you never know when you’re going to be forced to emigrate. You can’t stay in this place any longer. You’ve got to go. So what do you have to take with you? What you’ve built into the mind.

So keep your focus right here. What you’re doing right now, what you’re training in the mind, is yours. It’s as if you’re packing your bags to go. If you just let your mind wander around with whatever, then you’re just packing junk into your luggage. And then you have to carry it. As the Buddha says, that kind of karma is heavy. Whereas the karma that comes from the good skills you’ve developed inside, in terms of virtue, concentration, and discernment: That’s light.

So think about these ways of finding happiness. Where are you going to look for your happiness? How are you going to create it? It doesn’t come floating in the air. And it’s not simply there if you allow it for yourself to open to the present moment, because there’s a lot of potential suffering in the present moment. The present moment is not a place to rest, it’s a place to work. You’re constantly putting it together through your intentions, taking the raw material provided by your past karma, putting it together through your new karma. It’s like a construction site, like the site we saw today. There’s a lot of work going on. You have to be very careful as you walk around the present moment, just as you have to be very careful as you walk around a construction site.

So we’re not here to just stay in the present moment. We’re here to use the present moment as a place to develop our initiative, to learn the skills of maintaining our wealth, using our wealth wisely, and associating with good friends. That’s how we find happiness both outside and inside. A happiness that lasts.