Judging Mindfulness & Concentration

When the Buddha describes mindfulness practice, he describes two activities. The first is keeping focused on one topic, like the breath, in and of itself. You’re not worried about the breath in relationship to the world outside, just the breath that you’re experiencing directly, right here, right now. Where do you experience it? Where do you feel it when it comes in, when it goes out? Stay right there with it. Sometimes we talk about keeping watch over the breath, but it’s more a matter of feeling the breath. The breath is something you wear. You can feel it anywhere in the body.

The other activity is putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. What that means is that any thoughts about the world, what you want out of it, or what you’re disappointed in the world about: Just put them aside. Don’t let them come barging in right now.

The qualities of mind that you bring to these two activities are three. The first is mindfulness itself, which means keeping something in mind, like keeping the breath in mind, but you’re also keeping in mind the fact that you’ve got to put aside any thoughts that would pull you away. You’re making a value judgment. There are certain thoughts you want to stay with, thoughts about the breath, and certain thoughts you’ve got to put aside.

Sometimes you hear people saying that Buddhist meditation is all about having no value judgments, but how can anybody live without value judgments? We’re constantly deciding what’s worth doing, what’s not worth doing. That’s how we function. So here the basic rule is that any thoughts related to the breath, related to getting the mind to settle down with the breath, are good thoughts. Encourage them. Any thoughts that would pull you away someplace else right now, discourage them. Keep that in mind.

Of course, you’re not just keeping things in mind; you’re also alert to what you’re doing. That’s the second quality. It means you know how the breath is, you know how the mind is, you know whether they’re staying together.

That’s where the third quality comes in. Ardency: You’re trying to do this well. This is the intentional part of the practice. It’s what makes mindfulness, right mindfulness; alertness, right alertness. You can keep all kinds of things in mind. You can be alert to all kinds of things in the present moment. But if you want to do this well, you have to keep in mind things that are related to staying with the breath, putting other things aside, and being alert to whether you’re staying steadily or not.

Ardency is what tells you, when the mind has wandered away from the breath, that you’re going to bring it right back. You’re not going to stop to sniff the flowers or look at the birds. You’ve got work to do here. But it’s good work: work in understanding your own mind, trying to find out how the mind lies to itself, how it’s ignorant of what it’s doing. That should be really fascinating.

Once you are with the breath, try to figure out, “How can I make the breath as comfortable as possible?” Here you can try different rhythms of breathing: fast, slow, heavy, light; long or short; deep or shallow. You can experiment until you find something you like, and then you can stay with it until it doesn’t feel so good anymore—because the needs of the body will change, especially as the mind begins to settle down. So you want to be on top of what the body needs. Those three qualities should help you stay with the breath. But if you wander off again, they help you from wandering off all the way. They bring you back.

Mindfulness: You remind yourself what you’re here for. Alertness: You try to catch yourself as you do wander off, and to catch yourself faster and faster. All too often, we’ve wandered away for a while and thoroughly settled into another thought world before we realize that this is not where we’re supposed to be. But you don’t want to have to wait that long.

You want to get more sensitive to the signs that a thought world is about to form, and just breathe right through them. The faster you can do that, the more interesting things you’ll find about, as I said, how the mind lies to itself, how it does something and then pretends it didn’t do it. Or denies that it did it. Or forgets. Or it’s just not really paying attention. You’re doing things on automatic pilot. You want to catch these things faster and faster so that you can see what’s going on clearly.

As the Buddha said, you want to get to the point where you think the thoughts you want to think, and you don’t think the thoughts you don’t want to think. And you get a better idea of what really is worth thinking about. That’s how you get the mind to settle down.

You’ve got to be alert both to the thoughts that are related to the breath and to any tendency to wander off. Bring the mind right back. Bring the mind right back. And when you come back, reward the mind. Breathe in a way that feels really good, really satisfying. As I’ve already said, you’re trying to develop a sense of well-being in the body so that the mind can be happy to settle down.

Of course, you also try to bring a good attitude to begin with, so that you can give rise to that sense of well-being in the body. You’re developing pleasure in the body through pleasure in the mind, and then pleasure in the mind through pleasure in the body. They help each other along. As you do this consistently, the mind is going to get into concentration.

Sometimes we’re told that mindfulness practice is one thing—you’re alert to what’s going on in the present moment without trying to change anything—whereas concentration practice is something else: They say you try to change things so that the mind gets fairly narrowly focused, to the point where it’s not really aware of things going on outside at all. Well, the Buddha never taught concentration like that; his images for concentration are of full-body awareness. You learn how to spread pleasure and even rapturous breathing throughout the whole body, in the same way that when there’s a spring in the bottom of a lake, the water comes up and permeates the whole lake. Or when lotuses are sitting in a still lake of water, the lotuses that haven’t risen up above the water are saturated with water from their roots to their tips. Or when a man is sitting with a cloth wrapped all around his body. That’s an image for awareness all throughout your body. That’s the kind of quality we’re working for.

This takes us into what’s called the second stage of mindfulness practice, where the Buddha talks about discerning origination with regard to the breath, discerning passing away, inside and outside. Origination doesn’t mean just plain old arising; it means causation. You’re trying to discover what causes what. The only way you can do that is by messing with things—in other words, trying this, trying that, experimenting. That’s how scientists figure things out. They don’t just sit there and watch what’s happening on a table, say.

Say you’ve got some rabbits, and just let the rabbits hop around on their own. If you’re trying to figure out what makes the rabbits hop, you’ve got to change things. Sometimes you have to hide their food, to see how intelligent the rabbits are in finding the food. Sometimes, you raise the temperature in the room, to see how they react to that. Sometimes you lower the temperature. In other words, you have to play around if you’re going to learn things, especially to learn causation. You want to notice that when two things happen together, they happen together because one causes the other, and it’s not just a coincidence. That requires experimentation.

So to understand origination, it’s not just a matter of watching things arise, it’s trying to figure out what’s causing what. You do that by trying to get the mind deeper into concentration.

As for contemplating internally and externally, it means basically realizing that whatever you’re experiencing in the breath, other people experience the same sort of thing. Wherever you go, whatever you might be reborn as, you’d still have these same things over and over again.

The Buddha uses that reflection sometimes to give rise to a sense of saṃvega. If you don’t really do the work, you’re going to have to come back again and again and again, and there’s no guarantee that it’s going to get easier. Contemplating externally doesn’t mean that you’re listening to the person breathing right next to you–it’s more reflecting on what you could be, and realizing it’s all the same kind of stuff.

If you have pains in your body now, wherever you go, you’re going to find the same sort of pains. Mental difficulties: Wherever you go, they’ll be the same sort of difficulties. There’s always aging, illness, and death. In all lifetimes—even up in the heavenly realms—they have death as well.

You reflect internally and externally like this to get a sense of saṃvega, so that you really do want to get out of here. Primarily, though, your interest is right here. And again, you’re passing judgment. Without judgment, you wouldn’t know what’s causing what, or what would be a valid experiment to figure out what causes what. You’re using your powers of judgment, but you’re learning to use them well.

A lot of people are afraid of their powers of judgment. They’re afraid of the judging mind. That’s because their judging mind hasn’t been trained properly. You’re not going to get out until you train it. You’re not going to get the mind’s conversation with itself to be really helpful and enjoyable unless you train it. This is how you do it: You learn how to pass judgment on simple things like this. How does the breath feel? Does it feel good enough? If not, what can you do to make it better? What can you do to make the mind clearer to itself? Or to get it really still?

Then watch to see if a thought is going to form, or an emotion. There’s not that much difference, really, between thoughts and emotions. It’s just that emotions have a stronger impact on your experience of the body through the breath. So, one way we can weaken unskillful emotions is to breathe properly. Again, you’re passing judgment, but you’re learning how to do it well. That’s what our powers of judgment are for, that’s how they’re best put to use: to figure out within yourself how the Buddha went about putting an end to suffering.

We read it in the books. We get some general ideas. That’s all you can get from the books: general ideas and a few techniques. But learning how to master the techniques, learning how to apply them, is going to require your own process of observation, commitment, reflection, more commitment, more reflection. That’s how you find out how really good the Dhamma can be.