Stick to Your Duties

As we settle in to meditate, it’s good to remember the duties the Buddha set out for us. Not that he imposed them on us, but he recommended them as the best way to approach training your mind.

We’re not here to figure out the nature of ultimate reality. We’re not here to figure out how we can get rid of our sense of self or sense of “I am.” We’re here to comprehend suffering, abandon its cause, realize cessation through developing the path. So make sure you’ve got your duties straight.

Like right now: We’re focusing on developing right concentration through right mindfulness and right effort—all of the concentration factors of the path. Make up your mind you’re going to stay with the breath and put aside any other thoughts that have to do with the world.

Whatever the world is doing out there right now, that’s not your business. Your business is the fact that you’re suffering and you need to attack the suffering at the cause, and not just try to let go of suffering.

Trying to let go of suffering is like going to a house, seeing that there’s smoke filling the house, and you try to put out the smoke. As long as the fire is burning, the smoke is going to keep coming. You don’t put out the smoke. You find the fire and you put that out.

Here, to put out the fire in the mind, you have to get it quiet first; get it still so that you can really see it. As Ajaan Lee pointed out, this is the most difficult part of the path, because it requires that you really focus on developing a skill.

As for the part of the mind that likes to figure things out, try to figure out concentration. If the mind has trouble settling down, try to figure out why. Then, once it settles down, try to figure out how you can keep it there.

These are all practical problems, nuts and bolts kinds of things. When you’re willing to focus on the nuts and the bolts, that’s when you show that you really are engaging in what the Buddha calls, “delighting in abandoning and delighting in developing.” That’s the kind of delight you want to take, not delighting in figuring out abstract problems—or, as I said, trying to figure out the true nature of reality.

There are schools of Buddhism that say that you’re attached to things because you don’t understand their true nature. If you realized that they were empty of self-nature, then that would be the end of the problem.

But we’re not attached to things because we think they have self-nature. We’re attached to our thoughts, we’re attached to our defilements, because we think they’re worth holding on to. The effort needed to hold on to them, we think, is more than repaid by the pleasure we get as a result. When the mind is obsessed with sensual thoughts, we think that the pleasure we get out of those thoughts is worth it. It’s a value judgment—and it’s a wrong one. That’s the problem.

So the way to solve that problem is not to say that your thoughts have no self-nature. The way to solve it is to focus on what you find alluring about them, and what their drawbacks are.

As you try to comprehend the suffering that comes from these things—and there is suffering—you begin to see that it’s focused on perceptions, thought constructs—all of the five aggregates. The aggregates themselves are not the problem. The problem is, as the Buddha says, the desire and passion you feel for them. So you want to figure out: Why is there the desire? Why is there the passion? What is the allure?

Then you take the desire and passion and you separate them from the form, or the feeling, or the perception, the thought construct, the act of consciousness that you’re holding on to, so that you see just the desire and the passion in and of themselves: That’s what you let go of.

So there’s some figuring out to do here, but it’s not so much figuring out the nature of ultimate reality, it’s more figuring out why you value things the way you do—and how you can get a new set of values by really looking properly at the mind.

How do you look at the mind properly? You get it into concentration. Everything keeps coming back to those duties of the four noble truths. For some people, that seems just too ordinary: the fact that you’re suffering, and you can put an end to suffering. They want to go into the “bigger” issues.

But the Buddha was wise to say that this is the issue that makes a difference. If you get involved in abstractions, they can keep pulling you further and further away from what’s really going on. It’s like going up in an airplane. As you get further and further off the ground, everything in the ground turns into a haze. You can’t see the details.

When you get down to the details, this breath right here, right now, this breath, this breath, this breath: Where is your mind right now as you breathe in? Where is it when you breathe out? If it’s not with the breath, why? That’s the kind of thing you want to figure out.

You’re figuring out how you can complete the duties of the four noble truths. That, you might say, is your assignment, but again, nobody’s assigning it to you. Still, it is the Buddha’s recommendation. So make sure you understand the questions and issues that are really important and the ones that are not.

Ajaan Lee gives the warning. There are a lot of things that people think are really high-level Dhamma—when you start talking in terms of the three perceptions, or emptiness, or dependent co-arising—but as long as it’s just concepts, it’s low-level Dhamma. High-level Dhamma, as he said, is learning how to master this skill: getting the mind to settle down, getting the mind to be clear, mindful, alert, ardent, and then using those qualities to find a sense of well-being in the present moment.

You become a better judge of when stress comes, even in the concentration itself. If the mind hasn’t settled down like this, your sense of what constitutes stress and what constitutes pleasure is going to be pretty crude. Only when you develop a more sensitive palate, you might say, for the ease and well-being of the mind so you begin to see levels of stress that you took for granted and didn’t even see as stress.

We want to comprehend things. As the Buddha said, you attack the problem of suffering at the cause, and you do that by developing the path.

So focus on developing these skills, and to whatever sense you use your sense of “I” to do this—“I am capable of doing this.” “I will benefit from doing this.” “I can watch myself doing this and figure out what I’m doing wrong”: All those ways of thinking of “I, I, I,” the Buddha actually recommends.

There is a problem in Buddhist circles where people tend to go straight for the Abhidhamma, where they’re told that that’s when you’re dealing with true realities. They say that all the images and similes the Buddha uses in the suttas are just like a sugar coating, whereas you want to get to the real thing.

Well, our problem is the way we fabricate the present moment. We do that doing what? By the way we breathe, by the way we talk to ourselves, the images we hold in mind. So when the Buddha gives an analogy it’s not just for decoration, it’s a recommendation: This is how you look at things for the sake of putting an end to suffering.

So we’re not here just to master the concepts. We’re here to master the skills. And one of the skills is learning how to picture things to yourself as you’re trying to get the mind to settle down; how to talk to yourself as you get the mind to settle down; even how to *breathe *as you get the mind to settle down. It’s all very basic. But it’s not beneath us.

There are subtleties in mastering skills that abstract thinking cannot touch. So have a proper sense of what your duties are here. And don’t feel that you’re above them, because they’re there to help you—to help get you out of the suffering you’re causing yourself.

So take on these duties in the spirit with which they’re recommended—to make a real difference—something that abstract thinking can’t do.