Correcting, Fostering, Cutting Away

Ajaan Lee says there are three tasks in concentration practice, and they apply to giving rise to insight as well. The three are correcting, fostering, and cutting away.

For example, you focus on the breath, but the mind is not settling down with the breath. The question is, what can you correct? Is the problem with the mind, or is the problem with the breath? What attitudes are you carrying in from the day? What can you do to drop them?

This is one of the reasons why we have the chanting before the meditation. You think lots of goodwill to clear the decks. Anybody who’s wronged you in the course of the day, or wronged people you love or respect, you have goodwill for them.

But you also have to have equanimity. You hope that, if they’re behaving in bad ways, they’ll see the error of their ways. But you realize you can’t make your happiness depend on their changing their ways. And if you carry their issues into your meditation, you’re destroying your own chances to take advantage of this time.

So, we develop all the brahma-viharas.

If you’ve been bringing in thoughts of lust, we have the contemplation of the parts of the body. Exactly which part of the body are you lusting for? Think about your own body first. Which parts in there do you think are worthy of having someone else lust for? Everybody else has the same kind of parts. It’s all pretty foolish. When you see that the object of your lust is not attractive, then it’s a lot easier to see that the lust itself is not attractive. Often we’re more attracted to our own lust than anything else. Try to look at it from the outside and you’ll see that it’s pretty ugly.

These are some things you can think about to bring the body and mind together, by focusing on the mind first, correcting the mind first.

Then, of course, there’s the question of correcting the body. How’s the breath? Too long? Too short? Too heavy? Too light? What kind of breathing would feel really good right now?

Think about this for a while. This is what directed thought and evaluation are for: to do whatever correcting needs to be done.

When you’ve finally got something going well, you foster it. You don’t have to do so much thinking or evaluating. When you’ve got something good, maintain the conditions for keeping it good so that it can grow into a sense of well-being, a sense of ease.

There’s a little bit of adjusting as you go through the various levels of concentration. After a while, there’s a sense of rapture, a sense of extra energy. You’ve got to disperse it if it gets too much. Maybe it gets so that even the breathing seems to be unnecessary. Allow it to stop. If you need to breathe, you’ll breathe. But if you don’t need to breathe, it’s a sign that the mind is really quiet. Your brain is using less oxygen. So you’re perfectly fine.

This shows that sometimes there’s a little bit of correcting that goes along, but it’s very minor course correction.

As for cutting away, there are things in the mind you’ve got to get rid of. Sometimes it requires just a little bit of effort. Sometimes it requires a lot. When the Buddha talks about the middle way, it’s not that your effort is middling or that you’re afraid of being forceful. I was just reading just the other day someone saying that you have to avoid the extreme of forceful goal-seeking. Now, there are times when being forceful is going to get in the way. But there are other times when it’s precisely what’s needed.

Think of those images the Buddha has for dealing with distractive thoughts.

Using a small peg to drive out a bigger peg: In other words, using a skillful thought to drive out a non-skillful one.

Thinking of yourself as being young, looking in a mirror and seeing a dead snake wrapped around your neck: Have a similar sense of disgust with the thoughts that are pulling you away.

Then there’s the image of a person seeing something he doesn’t want to see, so he closes his eyes and looks away. In other words, there may be chatter going on in your mind, and sometimes the best way to deal with it is not to try to force it out, but just say, “Let it be there, but I’m not going to get involved.” It’s like being in one corner of a large room and there are people in another corner of the room, talking. You have the choice: Are you going to get involved in the conversation or are you going to pretend that you’re not hearing anything? In this case, you pretend you’re not hearing anything. Or even if you hear it, you don’t pay it any mind. Let it be in the background. You can get to work, whatever your work is.

Then there’s the image of the person standing saying, “I could be more relaxed sitting down,” or the person sitting saying, “I could be more relaxed lying down.” That’s what the Buddha calls the relaxation of thought fabrication. In other words, every thought that would distract you has to be fabricated. It requires some effort. Where is that effort being expended right now? Where in the body do you feel the effort, the stirring of the fabrication, the little pattern of tension that goes with that thought? If you can breathe through it, the thought will go away.

These are relatively mild ways of dealing with distractions.

Then there’s the image of the two strong men beating down the weaker man. This approach is for times when you finally have to say, “Look, I can’t have this kind of thinking anymore. The other methods are not working.” And the thoughts are taunting you. They say, “You can’t touch us with any strong effort. Remember: middle way.” Well, yes, you can touch them with strong effort. You can use buddho, buddho, buddho, really fast, like machine gun fire. Press the tip of your tongue against the roof of your mouth and tell yourself, “I just will not think those thoughts.” Squeeze them out. Beat them down.

So, the middle way is not middling. It’s more a matter of whatever is appropriate.

Have a sense that sometimes when there’s something that needs to be cut out of the mind, it requires just a little bit of effort. Sometimes, the Buddha says, all you have to do is look at it and it’ll shrivel away. There are parts of your mind that are engaged in thinking that, if you cast the light of attention on them, will get embarrassed. They’ll just stop.

But others will not stop. They’ll just keep on going. That’s where you have to exert effort—what the Buddha calls exerting a fabrication.

So there are lots of ways that you can cut these things out of the mind that are getting in the way.

You realize that you have these three duties as a meditator—correcting, fostering, cutting away. It’s like having a vine growing on a wall. If the vine is growing in the wrong direction, you correct it. If it’s getting rotten, you cut it away. If it’s growing where you want it to grow, you foster it. You train your mind in the same way that you’d train, say, ivy up a wall.

You do have a definite sense of direction of where you want to go. We do have goals here. It’s a matter of learning how to relate to your goals in an intelligent and mature way. You don’t beat yourself up because you’re not at the goal yet. You remind yourself, “This job that needs to be done is a large one.” You learn how to take joy in the steps that you know are heading in the right direction. However long it’s going to take, you keep heading in the right direction as best you can.

This is an important part of learning how to manage your meditation: recognizing when you’re out of balance, when you’ve been fostering things that you should correct, or correcting things that you should just leave alone for a while.

Then remind yourself of whatever Dhamma theme is appropriate. You have the choice to think what you’re going to think. Just because a certain mood has taken over doesn’t mean that it’s your mood for right now and you can’t get out. Step back a bit. Breathe. Breathe through all the clouds of whatever that mood is. When things become clear, then look at what needs to be done. Do what needs to be done.

You have the choice in what to think. So choose whatever is going to bring things into balance and is appropriate for what you need right now—the thoughts that help correct, the thoughts that help to foster, the thoughts that help to cut things away. They all have their uses at different times. See them as tools, not so much as the mood you’re in and the thinking that goes with it. Step out of the mood.

There’s no virtue in just following your moods or in “being true to your moods.” Be true to something higher. Be true to the desire to accomplish something with your meditation. Then do whatever needs to be done, having a good sense of the different tasks you have to master and of the range of tools at your disposal for mastering them.