Adjusting the Flame

The Buddha compares getting the mind in concentration to lighting a fire. You want the fire to burn just right. Remember the ordinary mind is like a blazing fire. The mind in concentration is like a well-adjusted one.

So calm things down. Adjust the flame. Remember the verb we’re using here, jhāyati, is used with a steady flame, not one that’s flickering. So, if the mind is flickering, calm things down. The image he gives is that you put dust and water on the fire to calm it down if it’s blazing too much. In other words, you try to develop as much calm, concentration, and equanimity as you can—equanimity toward things outside, equanimity toward the situation right now in your body. This is what you’ve got to work with. How can you best settle down?

That’s what the calm and concentration are for.

What can you do to get things to settle down? You adjust here, adjust there.

Adjust the breath. Adjust the mind.

How do you adjust the mind? You look at what your mind is occupied with. What kinds of thoughts come in from the day? Thoughts of work, thoughts of your family, thoughts of the world outside. What kind of thinking can you use to counteract those thoughts?

You can’t just snuff out the thoughts, because they keep coming back. But when you give yourself good reasons not to be occupied with those concerns, then it’s easier to put them down. So, if there’s somebody you’re worked up about, somebody you’re angry at, remind yourself that you’re burning yourself with those thoughts. You’re not accomplishing anything.

If you’re depressed, what can you think about to lift your spirits?

As for the world outside, remember the Buddha’s image of the mountains moving in, crushing all living beings in their path. In other words, aging, illness, and death are moving in. They’ve been moving in all along. If you want to have something that doesn’t get crushed by them, you’ve got to work on your mind.

So think thoughts that are calming. Let the mind settle down.

Then, of course, there are the times when you’ve snuffed out the fires too much. In other words, you start getting drowsy. Your mind, when it’s not occupied with things outside, tends to fall asleep. That’s an old habit. You’re not occupied with the world, you’re not occupied with your thoughts, so you just drift off. That’s a habit you’ve got to fight.

That’s when the Buddha recommends that you analyze things to stir up the fire. Analyze your breath right now. Analyze your body right now. When you breathe in, where do you feel the breath? From what directions does the breath come in? Where does it come in? When the breath sensations come in, do they fight one another or do they flow smoothly together? Look into that.

And experiment. See what’s just right for right now. What level of energy does the body have? Often you come at the end of the day and you’ve been working all day or just haven’t had much time to rest today. So the mind will be inclined to want to rest.

But you’ve got to tell yourself, “No, you’ve got to lift your energy because there’s work that needs to be done.”

Think about when you’re going to die. The body is going to be pretty weak. Very weak. If the mind isn’t strong, what are you going to do? Where’s your refuge going to be? You’ve got to learn how to lift the energy of the mind, even as the body is still. So remind yourself that what you’re looking for—in terms of understanding the suffering you’re causing yourself and understanding what the suffering is—is all happening right here. Just that it’s on a very subtle level.

So there’s plenty to see here, plenty to observe. But all too often our powers of observation are too coarse, not refined enough.

It’s as if we’re trying to find the sounds in the walls of the house. There’s a mouse in there someplace, making little nibbling sounds. But the problem is that all day long we’ve had the stereo on, we’ve had the computer blaring, the refrigerator’s running. So we have to turn off all the loud things.

Still, even though nothing’s making noise in the house, our ears are ringing, so we can’t hear the mouse. We’ve got to learn how to adjust our ears.

So go through the body very precisely. Start with the fingers: the different bones in the fingers, the first joints, the second joints, third joints, the bones in the palms of the hands, the bones in the wrists, the forearms, the different bones in the elbow, your forearms, up to the shoulders.

Then start with the toes. Go through them joint by joint, up through the foot, up through the ankle, up the leg, into the pelvis and then the vertebrae, one by one.

In other words, give the mind work to do. There’s a teaching in the commentaries about the three levels of concentration. It’s not found in the Canon. The way they define it in the commentaries has to do with the kasina practice. But the terms—momentary concentration, access concentration, fixed penetration—have worked their way into the common parlance of meditation. And because they’re not mentioned in the Canon, not defined in the Canon, when they’re being applied to other types of meditation, you’ll get different ajaans explaining them in different ways.

One of the best explanations I heard is that momentary concentration can’t stand pain. In other words, the slightest bit of pain, slightest bit of disturbance, slightest bit of boredom, anything unpleasant, and it’s gone. To get past that, you sit here and you say, “Well, there may be some discomforts in the body, but I can work with them.” When you have that attitude, you can get past them. The mind begins to settle down. And you can create a sense of ease.

That’s access concentration. You haven’t fully penetrated the object. You’re not fully inhabiting the body. You’re kind of drifting around it. This level of concentration can withstand pain, but it can’t withstand pleasure. The mind starts focusing on the pleasure instead of the breath, and things get blurry. This is when delusion concentration sets in. This is when drowsiness sets in.

To counteract that, you’ve got to give the mind work to do. Try some very detailed work through the bones of the body, the breath around the bones. How does the breath around your spinal column feel right now? How does the breath around your ribs feel right now? What about the different bones in your skull?

When you give the mind work to do like this, even though it may not be quite as quiet as you’d like to be, still you’ve dropped outside concerns. And that’s what matters. You’re getting more and more thoroughly focused inside, developing that quality of mind that the Buddha talks about, where your awareness fills the body, a sense of ease fills the body, and you can stay right there. That’s what you’re working toward. There’s an intensity to the stillness. It’s not just a drifting or comfy kind of stillness.

I’ve heard some people say they don’t like the word “concentration” as a translation for the Pali term samādhi. They prefer “lucid calm,” “collectedness.”

But when you think about the different powers that can come from the mind in samādhi, it’s not just calm, it’s not just lucid. It’s focused. Concentrated. There’s an intensity to your awareness, an intense awareness that fills the whole body. That’s what you’re working for.

So it’s not just a matter of settling down and getting calm. After all, in the factors for awakening, calm and samādhi are listed as two separate factors. For samādhi, you want some intensity. That comes from being very careful and precise in how you look at the breath energies in the body. You’re taking a focused 100% interest in them.

One way of making them interesting, of course, is to play with them. For example, Ajaan Lee in Method Two talks about the breath coming down the spine. But then in some of his Dhamma talks, he talks about the breath starting at the soles of the feet, coming up the legs, and going up the spine. Method Two talks about the breath energy coming in right at the heart and then going down to the liver, the spleen, and the intestines. But in some of his Dhamma talks, he talks about the breath energy starting at the navel and going up the torso. So, there are ways you can play with the breath and make it interesting to see what you need right now.

Now, if you find that you have headaches, or there’s pressure in the head, stay away from the head. Instead, focus on the body. Think of all the possible channels in your neck where that excess energy can flow down. What’s happening is that most of us carry a lot of thinking around in our heads, thinking that restricts the blood flow. The little muscles and the blood vessels get tightened up as we think.

And we have lots of thoughts to store away. You’ve got to remember this, you’ve got to remember that as you go through your work or whatever it is that’s concerning you. Then when you meditate, all of a sudden you try to let that go. The muscles relax and the blood, which has been forced into the blood vessels because they’re so constricted, suddenly really gets forced as the blood vessels expand. That increases the pressure in the head.

So you’ve got to give the pressure some exit points, either down the front of the throat down into the chest or down the back, down the spine, down into the ground.

So, there’s a lot to explore here.

When the Buddha explains the causes of suffering in dependent co-arising, the most interesting ones are those that come prior to sensory contact—in the factors of fabrication, and the factors of name and form. There’s perception, there are feelings, there’s directed thought and evaluation, there are intentions, there are acts of attention, where you frame questions, look into things. Where you’re going to see all those factors most clearly is as you’re getting the mind to settle down.

When the Buddha talks about dependent co-arising, it’s not something he just thought up on the night of his awakening. He was watching his mind in concentration. It’s something you see over and over again: If you want to understand the aggregates, you’ve got to watch the mind in concentration. If you want to understand intention, well, what is concentration? It’s a mind that’s firmly intent. And it’s got to deal with other intentions that are going to come in and try to pull you away someplace else.

So you’re dealing with these factors that can lead to suffering if you do them in ignorance, but now you’re doing them with knowledge. And this is where you’re going to see them most clearly. Which is why when Ajaan Fuang was teaching people like me, who tend to think a lot, he stressed over and over again, “Get the mind in concentration, work on your concentration, and take an interest in concentration.”

The mind in concentration, where is it? What’s it doing? What are the various factors? You begin to see them clearly. They’re not just abstract terms. They’re actual events in your mind, and you’re seeing them at the level of events. You’re manipulating them at the level of events. Which is where you have to do it.

After all, you’ve got this problem in the four noble truths. Suffering is caused by the craving that leads to becoming, and one of the forms of craving that leads to becoming is craving for non-becoming—in other words, craving to destroy whatever types of becoming you’ve already got. So how do you free yourself from becoming without craving non-becoming? How are you going to get past that impasse?

The Buddha’s strategic solution is to look at the factors in the mind that lead to becoming, and to deal with them on the level prior to their creating a state of becoming, before you develop the passion and desire that turns them into a sense of you in a world someplace. And where is that? Where you’re dealing with these factors as events happening in the mind as the mind settles down. That’s where you’re going to see these things.

So, there’s plenty to see. Even though your ears may be ringing from the events of the day, it is possible to calm them down. Get the ringing out of your ears so that you can hear the sound of those mice in the wall. Try to adjust things just right.

When the Buddha talks about the factors for awakening, there are those, he says, that help to calm the mind down. They correspond to the water and the dust that you put in the fire when it’s flaring up too much. Those are the factors of calm, concentration, and equanimity.

But if the fire is getting too weak, then you work on analysis of qualities. In other words, try to figure out what’s going on. When you see what’s skillful, you try to do your best to encourage it. When you see what’s unskillful, you try to discourage it.

You get a sense of refreshment as the skillful qualities get stronger. That’s what helps strengthen the fire.

Then there’s mindfulness, which is trying to keep all this in mind and is always appropriate however strong or weak the flame of your concentration.

So you’re working on the factors for awakening right here. They’re laid out in a line in the Buddha’s description for what Ajahn MahaBua calls “concentration fostered by discernment”—starting with mindfulness, developing analysis of qualities, and then calming the mind into equanimity. That’s when they all strengthen one another sequentially. But when you divide the factors into those two sorts—for strengthening and weakening the flame—then you can see them more as things to be brought into balance, things you use when they’re appropriate. When they all get balanced, then they all work together.

So if drowsiness is a problem, as we talked about today, try to get really sensitive to what’s going on right here, right now. Give your mind work to do right here. That’s what the analysis of qualities is all about. Your mind’s got to work. You came at the end of the day and you thought, “Well, now, I can get to rest.” But no, there’s work to be done. Still, it’s good work. It’s work inside, working directly with your mind.

That’s how you’re going to understand it. It’s not the case that the mind gets still and then you miraculously gain discernment without trying to figure anything out. You gain discernment by trying to master this problem of how to get the mind to settle down, alert and still at the same time. The Buddha gives you pointers on what might be the issue, but you’ve got to figure out your mind right here, right now.

After all, that’s where the reality is. Those words all came from the Buddha, from what he observed from working with his mind, right here. For him it was right here, right now. And here we have our right here, right now. So, use those pointers to figure out what’s going on and get that flame just right.