Curious About the Process

Ajaan Fuang divided beginning meditators into two sorts: those who think too much and those who don’t think enough. There was no third sort, those who think just right. So as you’re beginning with the meditation you have to figure out in which direction is your mind leaning. Those who don’t think enough, he said, tend to get into concentration easily. They have no worries that they burden their minds with, so it’s very easy for them to settle down. The problem is that when they do have issues that are bothering them, they can’t get the minds to settle down at all, because they haven’t figured it out. They’re not used to having a problem, and they don’t know what to do when they do have a problem.

As for those who think too much, he said he was concerned about them because they can get frustrated very easily. The mind just won’t settle down. In a case like that, it takes some figuring out. This is where it’s important that you use your tendency to think to help with the meditation. Ajaan MahaBua gives an analogy. He says it’s like a person who wants to cut down a tree. If the tree is out in the middle of a meadow, with nothing else around, there’s no difficulty. You can cut it so that it falls in any direction at all, and it’ll come down nicely. But if the tree is entangled with other trees in a forest, if its branches are entangled, you have to think very strategically about which branches to cut off first, which direction you want it to go, so that it actually does land between trees and not on top of another tree.

An important thing is to take an interest in what’s going on in your mind and to be curious about it. The part of the problem may be that you just don’t feel comfortable settling down. So a good first stage is to think about the other practices we have in terms of generosity and virtue. When you’re preparing something to give to other people, or you’re in the process of trying to observe the precepts and you come up against a problem, and you can handle it well, that’s when it’s pleasant to look at the mind—to see how it talks to itself, to be happy, to be generous; to see how it talks to itself so that it can effectively say No to a temptation, say, to lie, or to take something you shouldn’t be taking, or to kill an inconvenient little animal.

When you can say No to those things effectively, try to observe the mind. Because it’s the processes of the mind that are the big problem we’re trying to solve here. And they’re easiest to observe when you’re doing something good.

Then as you come to the concentration, you’ve got the problem, of course, with distraction. How does it happen? You make up your mind you’re going to stay with the breath, and five breaths later you’re gone. What went on in the mind? You want to catch the steps. The first thing, of course, is to catch it right after it’s gone, as quickly as you can. As soon as you realize that you’ve wandered off, come back. You might think that you should finish off the thought first, to round it out, but you’ve got to learn how to treat your thoughts a little roughly, because we give too much credence to our thoughts. One way of not giving credence is just to cut them off, come back, and be prepared that the mind is going to wander off again.

So you want to see the symptoms. Which little voice in the mind says, “Wait until the third breath and then we go.” These voices will say their thing, and then they’ll pretend that they haven’t said anything at all. They’re there. You want to be aware of them. So when they do make up their minds, you can say, “No, we’re not going.” You can begin to counteract these things to the point where you can actually head things off before they happen.

That’s when you realize you’ve learned something about the mind, its processes. And what could be more interesting? How the mind lies to itself, how it has many layers of conversation inside, and yet it thinks it’s a unified mind: How does that happen? And how does it happen that there are different voices in the mind that don’t really have your long-term welfare and happiness in mind?

They’re the ones who want instant gratification, and sometimes they get their gratification out of making you miserable and getting in the way. Why do you give credence to them? Why do they have their power? It’s good not to view them as a block. It’s better to see them as individual instances. Take them apart one by one. When a particular argument comes up in the mind for why you shouldn’t be here or why you’re no good as a meditator, take apart that particular argument. Ask, “So why on earth would I believe that?” As you take them apart one by one by one, eventually they run out of tricks. If you just treat them as a block, they’re going to have lots of tricks that they won’t reveal.

So it requires some patience. You have to be meticulous. But then again, the processes of the mind by which you process your experiences are very detailed. You’re creating whole worlds all the time. And it’s the process of creating those worlds that you really want to see.

That’s what’s fascinating about the meditation. You’ve got the challenge of getting the mind to settle down, and then you get the challenge of trying to keep it settled down. In the course of that, you’re going to see the processes for what they are. You realize that the Buddha was right. The cause of suffering is not outside. It’s not other people doing things that you don’t like or you think are wrong. It’s the mind’s own way of processing things.

It’s like the way they make processed cheese. Part of the problem, of course, is with the raw material. But the big problem is the process. No matter what kind of good cheese you put into the process, when it comes out, it’s just processed cheese. We tend to blame the raw materials, but you have to look at the process, because that’s the problem. And the practice of getting the mind to settle down, trying to keep it settled down, and seeing what comes up to pull it out of its concentration: That’s how you see the process in action.

You begin to realize that a lot of the processes are things you’re doing as you get the mind in concentration itself. The Buddha lists one factor he calls name and form. Form is how you sense the body from within in terms of the four properties. And you want to get sensitive to that. We move the energy around in the body, but oftentimes we move it around in a way that’s going to cause trouble because we’re not paying attention.

But as you get the mind into concentration, that’s going to be one of the issues: how you move the energy around. Part of the movement of the energy in the body is the breath element, and part of it is the water element, the blood moving around. Sometimes we think we’re moving the breath here, moving the breath there, but we’re actually pushing the blood here, pushing the blood there. That leads to pressure.

Remember, breath doesn’t have pressure at all. It moves smoothly through all the little spaces that are there between the atoms. Can you see the distinction? Can you see the difference? That’s one thing you could look into.

Then there are the factors that go into name. There are perceptions, feelings, acts of attention, acts of intention, and contact among these things. These are all used in getting the mind to settle down. You have a perception of the breath—in this case, thinking of the breath as a whole-body process. You can think of it flowing along the nerves, flowing along the blood vessels. You can think of each little cell breathing in, breathing out. And you can focus on one spot in the body, or you can focus on two or three spots all at once. That’s a way of really nailing yourself down in the present moment. Or you can think of all the cells breathing in, all the cells breathing out, without emphasizing any one of them. Which perception is most conducive to getting the mind to settle down?

Of course, you’ve got the intention to stay here, and you’ve got the question of which things to pay attention to. For instance, you can sense after a while that there may be a little bit of chatter around the fringes of your mind, but you don’t have to pay attention to it. If you pay attention to it, you feed it, and it takes over. Or as Ajaan Lee says, it’s like having a shadow, and you spend all your time trying to scrub the shadow. Well, the shadow’s not going to get scrubbed white. It’s always going to be dark. But in the meantime, you’ve lost your breath.

So you don’t have to straighten out the thoughts that are on the fringes. Let them chatter as they will for a little while. And after a while, they’ll stop, because you’re not feeding them.

So you’ve got these elements of name and form right here. And here’s your chance to look into them, because they’re the things that are processing your experience, and they’re turning everything into processed cheddar cheese. You want something better. You’ve got to change the process. Bring more light to it.

So try to get interested in that. Try to be curious about how it happens—because what could be more curious than a mind that creates suffering for itself? Which means that there’s a lot to figure out here. There’s a lot to observe. Simply in the process of getting the mind to settle down, and to stay settled down, there are all kinds of things you can learn.

So take an interest. Realize that the questions you can answer this way, the questions you can answer through this practice, are the big questions. When you die, the mind here is a big black box for most people, yet it’s what’s going to lead the way. If you’ve been able to peer into the process, see how it goes, learn how to direct it in a useful direction, then you’ve developed a skill that you’re really going to be able to use at that point.

We don’t know when that point is going to come. So take an interest now.