Into the Light of Consciousness

We talk about the three kinds of fabrication: bodily, verbal, mental. Bodily being your in-and-out breath. Verbal being direct thought and evaluation, the way you talk to yourself. You direct your thoughts to a topic and then you pass judgment on it, ask questions, make comments. Mental is perceptions and feelings, perceptions are the labels you apply to things that give them meaning, identify what they are. Feelings are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain.

We encounter these forms of these fabrications very directly as we meditate. But the three fabrications are also interpreted in another way in some passages in the Canon, where bodily fabrication is any intentional bodily action. Verbal fabrication is any intentional verbal action. Mental is any intentional mental action. In other words, three different levels of kamma: bodily, verbal, mental. These are then discussed in terms of the role they play in taking you to a future destination after you die.

Now, there’s a monk scholar who stated that these two levels of fabrication are totally unrelated, and that when we discuss the three levels of fabrication in dependent co-arising, the macro level is the important one: in other words, actions that lead to consequences in future lives. But that’s missing some important points. One is that dependent co-arising has no time frame, and that’s the whole point of dependent co-arising. Things that happen on the micro level here in the present moment get played out on the macro level in the world outside, over time; long periods of time, sometimes. And they follow the same pattern.

That’s why the Buddha never says that it’s happening just in your mind or in the world outside, because it’s happening in both.

That connects to the second point, which is that both levels are connected. What you do here in your mind is going to play out in the world. So it’s important that you get your mind trained right here, right now.

Knowing about the larger level, of course, is helpful in another way. The Buddha says, in that context, that you can have these fabrications either alert to them or not alert to them.

In other words, they can be conscious or subconscious, and they can still have an effect either way. If you have intentions, and whether or not you’re fully alert to what those intentions are, they can shape your life.

This is the whole principle of a lot of modern psychology—that your unconscious urges and impulses have a huge power over your life, and you have to learn how to bring them up into consciousness. Well, that’s precisely what we’re doing as we meditate.

We’re seeing the beginning level of all these large-term fabrications. Bodily fabrications: Your bodily actions all begin with the in-and-out breath. If you couldn’t breathe in and out, you couldn’t move your body. So every bodily movement starts with the breath. As for verbal fabrication, as the Buddha said, before you break into speech, you have to direct your thoughts to a topic and evaluate it. The same with mental fabrication: Before you have any mental intention, there have to be perceptions and feelings on which that intention is based.

So we’re seeing these things as they begin, right here, right now. This is where we get to know them. And the better you get to know them right here, the less they become subconscious. You’re bringing them into the light of consciousness where you can see them and pass judgment on them well.

That’s another important part about fabrications: They offer us choices, and we need to have good principles in choosing what to do, what to say, what to think.

This is one of the ways you can characterize all the Buddha’s teachings. As he said, his duty as a teacher was to give us a sense of what should and shouldn’t be done. If you’re very clear about the choices you’re facing and the impulses in the mind that would want you to make one choice over another, then you can apply the Buddha’s teachings more systematically, more consistently, and benefit from them more consistently.

So it’s good to know what patterns of judgment you need. We’ve been talking for the past couple of nights about clinging. Well, there are times when the different forms of clinging in your mind are at cross purposes. Your desire for sensual pleasure may go against your desire for what should and shouldn’t be done, and you have to choose.

The idea that meditation is a process of not judging anything is way off base, because when impulses go in different directions, you’ve got to choose. You’ve got to judge, because you’ve got to think about what will be for your long-term welfare and happiness. That, as the Buddha said, is the wise way to judge.

Wisdom is not just seeing the world as it comes and goes and appears on its own. Wisdom is learning how to judge actions well so that you can act for the best purposes, for the best consequences.

In terms of modern psychology, this comes under ego function. Ego tends to get a bad rap, because there are aspects of the ego that can be very selfish and stupid, and because they’re subconscious, you don’t know what’s going on. But the ego is not just selfish. There are wise ego functions as well, and the Buddha teaches all of them. He uses terminology different from that used by psychologists, and he expands on the concepts to some extent. But they’re all there in his teachings: ways of passing judgment, standards for passing judgment, as to which fabrication should be followed and which one should not.

You start with what the psychologists call anticipation, when you think about the long-term consequences of your actions. This, of course, for the Buddha, is heedfulness combined with compunction. When you start thinking about the fact that what you do will have consequences, you can’t just go on what you like to do, what seems pleasant at the moment, because it could cause a lot of problems down the line.

Heedfulness, the Buddha said, is the beginning of all skillful qualities in the mind. And it requires a strong sense of self: that you’ll be the one responsible for acting and who will reap the results of your actions. So you don’t want to cause yourself unnecessary harm.

Then it gets expanded with the next principle for judging, which is altruism; when you realize that your happiness cannot depend on the suffering of others. This principle in Buddhism is called compassion. Compassion begins with realizing that if you cause other people harm or you actually cause them to do harm, and they reap the karmic results of that, it’s going to come back at you, so you’ve got to think about their well-being as well.

You probably know the story: King Pasenadi is alone in his apartment with his queen, Mallikā. In a tender moment, he turns to her and says, “Is there anyone you love more than yourself?” You know what he’s expecting. He wants her to say, “Yes, your majesty, I love you more than I love myself.” That’s the way kings are. But this is the Pali Canon. Mallikā says, “No, there’s nobody I love more than myself. And how about you? Is there anybody you love more than yourself?” The king has to admit, No, there’s nobody he loves more than himself. That’s the end of that scene.

So the king goes down from the palace, goes to see the Buddha, and tells him what the queen said. The Buddha says, “She’s right. You can search the whole world over and not find anyone you love more than yourself. At the same time, everyone else loves themselves just as fiercely.” The conclusion he draws from that is that you shouldn’t harm others or cause them to do harm. It’s in this way that heedfulness leads to compassion.

The third standard for judgment is what the psychologists call suppression, which is different from repression. Repression is when you deny certain things are in your mind and you pretend they’re not there. Suppression is when you say No to some impulses because you know they’re going to be unskillful; they’re going to go against the principles of heedfulness and compassion. In Buddhism, we call this restraint.

You have to learn wise restraint: how to say No without pretending that you didn’t say No. In other words, admitting that, Yes, those impulses are there, but you’ve got to keep them under control. If you deny that they’re there, then you’re in trouble. They become subconscious again. Here we’re trying to bring things up into consciousness. So yes, freely admit that you have some unskillful impulses, some unskillful desires, but you’ve got to get some control over them.

Part of that control, for modern psychologists, comes under the principle of sublimation. The Buddha doesn’t have a term for this, but there’s a lot of the path that follows the principle of sublimation, which is basically finding something else for the mind to take pleasure in that’s not unskillful, so that when you say No to an unskillful impulse, you’re not feeling starved of pleasure. You just find a better way of finding pleasure that’s in line with the principles of heedfulness and compassion.

For us, that’s most directly the practice of jhāna, but the principle applies to all the aspects of the path: finding joy in the practice of generosity, joy in the practice of virtue, joy in getting control over your hindrances. That’s a skillful principle that helps you gain some control over the unskillful impulses without trying to hide them.

Then there’s a sense of humor. Learn how to laugh at your defilements. Laugh at the impulses that would pull you in a bad direction. Otherwise, they turn into monsters. Here again, the Buddha doesn’t talk too much about humor, although he uses it a lot in the Canon, especially in the origin stories for the monks’ rules. And there’s a reason why the humor is there.

If the rules were presented in a stern, confining, overly strict way with no sense of humor at all, they’d be pretty hard to live under. People would rebel against them. But if you present them in a humorous way—in other words, portraying the kind of behavior the rules are designed to counteract, and showing how really stupid that kind of behavior is, stupid enough to laugh at it—then you’re on the side of the rules, which is where you should be.

Finally, there’s one healthy standard for judgment that the psychologists don’t talk much about, or at least they don’t talk about it wisely. That’s the principle of shame. Here, of course, we mean not the opposite of pride, we mean the opposite of shamelessness; and that’s an important ego function, an important standard for evaluating what should and shouldn’t be done.

You think about wise people: If they were watching you right now, what would they say? If they could look into your mind right now, what would they think? You wouldn’t want to act on any impulses that would disappoint them. After all, they have compassion for you, they want you to put an end to suffering if they’re really wise. And if they see you doing things that are going to harm yourself, they’re going to be disappointed. You don’t want to disappoint them.

That desire not to disappoint the wise, not to disappoint people who have compassionate motives toward you: That’s a very important standard for judging what should and shouldn’t be done.

So you can see the process of meditation, the process of the practice as a whole, is to bring all the fabrications of your mind up into the light of consciousness. From the very beginning, before you do anything, you want to be aware of what your breath is doing. Before you say anything, be clear about what kind of conversation is going on in your mind. Before you embark on a train of thought, ask yourself, “What perceptions and feelings lie behind these thoughts?” Sometimes they’re some very unskillful mental properties, some unskillful mental worlds, that can come out of a feeling of restriction, tightness, frustration. Little perceptions go blip through the mind, and then you jump on them. Lust is a big one here.

You want to see these things* *clearly before they build into anything large, before they spawn consequences that go far down the line.

So if you have standards of judgment that allow you to see these things clearly and not go into denial, if you get the stillness and clarity of concentration so you can see them when they’re still small, then you’re better positioned to use this knowledge of fabrications—both on the micro-level and on the macro-level—to lead to your true happiness, to a happiness that doesn’t harm anybody, to a happiness that’s long-term, harmless, open wide, inside in the mind.

That’s when you’re using these teachings wisely. That’s when you’re using them well.