The Making Of

You may remember the days of the DVDs. When you’d get a movie and they had extra space on the DVD, they’d include a video on the making of the movie.

Often the video was more interesting than the movie itself. It explained how they created their special effects—these were more interesting before the days of computer graphics, the things they would have to do to create an impression.

Our approach to our thoughts as we meditate is like that.

You get into the thought world, and that’s like being “in” the movie, allowing yourself to be deceived by the appearances. But the Buddha is having you step out to look at the making of your thoughts. That’s where you get some reality, because the thought world is basically make-believe, but the act of making is real.

There’s the word saññā in Pali, which means perception. It’s been taken over into Thai, where it also means an agreement. Ajaan Suwat was commenting one time on how both meanings actually come together. When you agree that x means y, you’re agreeing to make-believe.

So when you’re “in” your perceptions, you’re in an agreement to make-believe. As a meditator, you want to learn how to step out of that, because those thought worlds are states of becoming. As the Buddha said, when you have a craving for becoming, that craving is also going to create suffering. So we have to change our values.

Often we like our thought worlds because they’re entertaining. We use our thoughts to figure things out—and sometimes not just to figure things out, but also to have some fun. And we think it’s innocent fun.

It’s like a novel written by a friend of mine about Chinese deities. They’re male deities and female deities having a storytelling contest. In the novel you see the politics among the deities themselves as they compete in writing the story, and you also see the story as it goes from chapter to chapter.

It’s a sad story, with people suffering all over the place. The deities kill off characters just for the fun of it. Then at the very end, Kuan Yin appears, representing Buddhism and the principle of karma, saying, “Okay, now that you’ve made up this story, you’re going to have to go down to Earth and live it.” The final scene is the deities falling from heaven down to Earth, where they have to play the roles in the story.

It’s the same with our states of becoming, our thought worlds: It’s because of this pattern of making thought worlds that we get reborn, coming back again and again and again. The thought worlds that you like to go for now are the ones you’re probably going to go for when you die, because you’ve etched these grooves in your mind.

So think about that when you find yourself entertaining thoughts while you meditate.

It’s much more interesting to figure out how these things are formed. Look into the making of these things. That’s why the Buddha taught dependent co-arising.

You’ve got these states of becoming. What are they based on? Trace them back: You’re clinging to something, you’re craving something. There was some contact at the senses that sparked that craving.

But those contacts wouldn’t have sparked a craving if you hadn’t had some tendencies in that direction already. That’s why dependent co-arising doesn’t start with contact. It goes back further and further, through name and form, consciousness, fabrications.

When you learn how to see these things in these terms, that allows you to step out. We get practice in these terms as we try to get the mind into concentration—as with fabrication. There’s bodily fabrication—which is your breath. Verbal fabrication—directed thought and evaluation. And mental fabrication—perceptions and feelings. These are the things that create the illusion of a thought world. But they’re also the things we focus on as we create a state of concentration. You focus on your breath. You think about the breath. Ask yourself, “Where is the breath comfortable? Where is it uncomfortable? How is it fitting in with the mind? How is the mind fitting in with the breath?” And when there’s a sense of ease, what do you do with it?

In the Buddha’s images for the different jhānas, the first jhāna has the only image in which is a conscious agent doing something: the bathman kneading the water through the pile of soap powder, mixing it so that it’s perfectly mixed. All the powder is moistened; all the water is absorbed by the powder. As the Buddha said, that’s a symbol for allowing the ease and well-being, the rapture and pleasure, to seep throughout the body. You have to work it through the body. And the man working it through stands for directed thought and evaluation.

Then there are perceptions and feelings. Of course, there’s the feeling of pleasure. The perception is whatever perception allows you to be with the breath, with a sense of ease, with a sense of belonging, allowing the breath energies to fill the whole body, so that the ease and rapture have a medium which allows them to spread them throughout.

While you’re doing this, there may be some thoughts in the back of your mind that you are the person doing it, but primarily you’re focused on your actions—how to do them well. You want to learn to keep thinking in those terms.

The same with name and form: That’s another one of the factors of dependent co-arising that comes just before contact. You’ve got the form of the body sitting right here, and it’s composed of sensations of warmth, energy, solidity, liquidity. You’ve got name, which includes attention and intention. You’ve got your intention to stay with the breath, and the act of attention, where you’re actually paying attention to what’s going on, asking questions to help solidify your concentration. And there are more perceptions and feelings.

So you’re learning how to think in terms of dependent co-arising as you get the mind into concentration. This gets you more and more aware of the making of concentration.

When you’re aware of this, you can start looking at all your thought worlds in the same terms: the making of a thought about yesterday, the making of a thought about tomorrow, the making of the thoughts about your duties here at the monastery, the making of thoughts of things you’re going to do when you leave the monastery.

The mind is doing these “making of” little films all the time. We’re used to just falling into the film, enjoying the illusion of being someplace else, doing something else, but it’s all make-believe.

What’s more interesting is how you make the make-believe. That’s real. That’s where you begin to see things in terms of the four noble truths—where the Buddha talks about the clinging that *is *suffering, and the craving that goes into the clinging.

Ideally, you develop a sense of dispassion, seeing the allure of these thought worlds, but also the drawbacks of just wandering around from one thought world to another to another—like hobos, hopping from one train to another, ending up where? North Dakota?

Where do your thought worlds take you? They drop you here, drop you there. They keep dropping you, but you don’t mind, because you’re going to make another thought world, and then another one, and then another one. That’s the attitude most people have.

They’re not interested in the making of thought worlds, and so they fall for thought worlds continually. So how much longer do you want to fall for them, knowing that they* do* have their consequences?

Certain thoughts have a real pull, and you allow yourself to be pulled. They have their hook, and you allow yourself to be hooked, like a fish. Then, when the body is weak and is about to die, those old habits will come back.

So what kind of habits do you want to develop? Do you want to have the habit of falling for the thought worlds, or the habit of being able to step back and look at the making of thought worlds from the outside?

If you can have that outside perspective, even at the moment of death, the result is going to be much better. You can learn how to stop fooling yourself, stop falling for your illusions, because you see how they’re made.

It’s like the video of the making of a Star Wars film I saw one time. I never actually saw the Star Wars films, but there was a video about how they made some of them. They had these robots that looked like they were walking on two arms. And they really did look like little robots, because you couldn’t imagine a human being fitting into the space of that costume.

Well, it turned out what they’d done was to put out a call for people who’d had their legs amputated. They dressed them up in these little robot costumes, and because their proportions were not like those of a regular human being, it created quite an illusion. But you realize that they had to find people with no legs to do that. So, in the same way, not all thought worlds are innocent.

Even with the innocent-seeming ones, you have to watch out because they get you addicted to your inner films. Then you get some other films that would actually involve some suffering for yourself, or for other people, and you’re primed to fall for them.

So think about *that *as you find yourself interested in your thought worlds. Take an interest, but take an interest in the making of the thought world, and you’ll actually learn something of real substance.