Guarding the Truth

The question came up the other day, whether arahants can make mistakes. And the answer is Yes. Sometimes they get the wrong information and they can’t check it, so they act on the information they’ve got. That has to do with information about the world outside.

As for the workings of their minds, how their minds process the world, they don’t make mistakes in that area because they’ve seen the processes clearly.

We’re filtering things all the time. That’s the kind of truth the Buddha would talk about. He wouldn’t talk about the truth about the world outside, or the truth about the self. He said that if you try to find the origin of the world and other aspects of the world—how big the world is, how long it’s been in existence—you go crazy. But if you try to understand why you suffer from the world, you actually gain awakening and put an end to suffering. So, as you mediate, you’re looking at the processes, you’re looking at the way the mind filters things and shapes things.

This is why, when we meditate, we close our eyes. We’re not looking at the world outside. We’re looking at how our minds work—our hearts and minds. The Pali word citta covers both heart and mind. As we practice virtue, we stick with it to know our intentions. We practice generosity to know our intentions.

Then, when we sit down to meditate, we’ve got the right focus, on intention. We intend to focus on the breath—ardent, alert, mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. That’s the formula. We’re trying to get the mind into a state of concentration.

As it settles in, you begin to see what’s going on in the activity of concentration. There’s directed thought and evaluation. The Buddha calls that verbal fabrication.

You’re working with the breath. That’s bodily fabrication.

You have a perception of how the breath comes in and out of the body, and you’re creating feelings of pleasure as best you can. Those are mental fabrications.

You’re doing this by maintaining that intention to stay with the breath.

You’re paying attention to the things that might get in the way, trying to deal with them skillfully.

All these factors—bodily, verbal, mental fabrication, attention, intention—are described in dependent co-arising, and they come prior to your sensory experience. These are your filters, and right now you’re cleaning your filters.

Again, you need to know exactly how you filter things, because if you filter things in ignorance, then no matter what comes in through the senses, you’re going to suffer. If you filter things with knowledge, that becomes a path. These are the kinds of things you can know directly.

Remember, the Buddha said you want to guard the truth. What that means is not necessarily going out and tracking down all the data you can get. It means being very clear about where you get your ideas and very clear about how you process them, because the processing has a lot to do with where you get them. You may get the information from other people, from reading, from listening, from looking, but then it all has to go through the filter, as you choose what to pay attention to and how.

Right here is where a lot of us are blind. We should know what we’re doing. As the philosopher says, “We know best what we do,” but actually, we should know best what we do, yet often we’re ignorant of what we’re actually doing because our focus is someplace else: on the world outside, or on things that we think lie deeper inside. We don’t look at what’s actually happening right here, right now, on the surface of the present.

That’s what we’re doing: We’re right on the surface, where the mind and the body meet here at the breath, where you’re aware of the breath, and then seeing what mental activities go around the breath to create a state of concentration. As you get more sensitive to them, you begin to realize that these are the activities by which you filter everything.

Somebody says something to you. You decide either to pay attention or not to pay attention, and what questions to ask. Then there’s the question of what your intentions are with regard to your conversation with that person. What do you intend to do with that information? Sometimes you get into a conversation with someone who’s actually telling you the truth, but your attention is someplace else. What they say barely registers. If you’re really alert, you notice that. But most of us aren’t very alert. We don’t observe our minds very well. So we end up all confused.

Then there are the ways we talk to ourselves. Again, what are your intentions as you talk to yourself? Sometimes your intention is to put yourself in a bad mood. You get tired of the practice. You tell yourself that it’s not worth it. Too much effort. You’re afraid it’s going to make you, as a person, dry and dull. I’ve never seen any dry or dull arahants, though. But the mind can paint these pictures, and you’re complicit. Part of you knows what’s going on; part of you doesn’t want to know.

This is why guarding the truth also has to watch out for what the Buddha calls “neglecting discernment” or “being heedless of discernment.” Part of your mind can see what’s actually going on and can tell where it’s going to lead, but it chooses to ignore—again, because of its intentions, what it wants.

But when you can see these things and can anticipate their consequences, you can deal more effectively with them. You can step back from them based on the sense of well-being and stillness provided by your state of concentration. When the concentration provides a sense of well-being, you’re not so hungry to go after whatever the mind tells you. When it’s still and clear, you can see clearly exactly what the mind is doing. Then you’re in a position to see how you’re filtering things, where the filter is clogged, what you have to do to clean it.

That’s where your focus should be: on how you process things. The information coming in from the world can be bad or good, true or false, but what’s important is how you process it. You can either cause yourself a lot of suffering—and from there it spreads out to other people—or you can look at it in a way that doesn’t cause suffering. The skill lies right here.

This way, when someone asks you information about something, you can tell them clearly that your information is based on what you heard, what you saw, or what you believe, based on logic or analogy. You realize that a lot of those sources don’t not necessarily guarantee the truth, but at least you’re letting people know where your ideas comes from, and you yourself know where they come from.

That way, you can be less attached to a lot of your opinions. All too many of our opinions are constructed in ignorance. We fall back on them as if they were the genuine truth, because they’ve been there so long. But as Ajaan Suwat used to say, suppose you go into a dark cave and you take a light along with you. Even though the darkness has been there for eons, it can’t say, “You have no right to push us out, because we’ve been here first.” When you bring light into the cave, the darkness has to go away. Then whatever food the world feeds you, you know how to fix it, because you see clearly what you’re doing. You know where the pitfalls can be. You know where your strengths are.

It’s in this way that you guard the truth. It’s likely that you will still make mistakes based on wrong information, but do your best in noticing how you process the stuff, because that’s what you’ll learn as you meditate. That’s what matters.

We’re not here to look into the nature of things in and of themselves. We’re here to look at how the mind functions and how it can be made to function well. That’s something you can learn by watching your breath.

When people say they’ve seen the truth of no-self in their meditation, you wonder what they saw: either something that they identified with strongly stopped, or else they blanked out. In either case, it’s not proof that there is no self. It’s simply proof that whatever you identified with couldn’t be you because you saw it pass away. Or you just blanked out, which doesn’t prove anything at all. That’s trying to see into the nature of things in and of themselves.

But you’re seeing the nature of how things function. That’s something you can learn by doing and then looking at the results, and then doing something else, looking at the results, comparing them. That’s something you can do as you watch the breath.

So be very clear about what kind of knowledge we’re developing here. We’re not here to see the nature of the cosmos. People with telescopes that look very, very far, keep seeing further and further, learning that there’s more and more that the early telescopes couldn’t see. And then there are new telescopes that see even further. There’s no end to it. But there is an end to the suffering that you cause yourself by the way you process things: through the processes of fabrication, or through intention or attention, which come under name in name-and-form. These are the factors that come before you even gain any sense-impressions through the six senses.

Those are things you can learn. Those are things you can master. And when you know them, you’ve got the most direct source possible for knowledge about the Dhamma. In my first years as a meditator at Wat Dhammasathit, I had very few books: a collection of Ajaan Lee’s Dhamma talks, Keeping the Breath in Mind, and a few others; Ajaan MahaBoowa’s book of Dhamma talks to the woman who had cancer. That was it. That was all my reading material. That, plus a dictionary.

So I was thrown back constantly to watching my breath, and watching my mind watching the breath. There came a very strong sense that I was dealing directly with things, knowing things directly, clearly, because they were right here. Whatever I was doing, I was doing right here.

Then the time came to start studying the suttas. You begin to realize that as you translate, as you read, there’s a fair amount of conjecture involved. The things you learn from the suttas, the translations given in the dictionaries, are all based on hearsay, putting things together in a way that makes sense, which doesn’t necessarily guarantee the truth. The real test, though, is seeing what impact these ideas have on your mind, on understanding what you’re doing right here, right now. That’s the test. That’s where genuine knowledge can be found.

The information in the texts is like a series of arrows pointing you here. What you’re going to see when you look here will depend on your own powers of observation and your own ability to think outside the box when problems come up. Those two qualities that Ajaan Fuang stressed so much—being observant and using your powers of ingenuity: That’s how you find truths that really are reliable—truths that, when you know them, you really know them. You make no mistakes regarding them.

And those are the truths that matter.