Understanding Through Developing

Try to breathe in a way that feels refreshing. Breathe in a way that feels easeful. Breathe in a way that gladdens the mind. If you’re going to get the mind to settle down, it has to settle down with something pleasant, and here you’re creating something pleasant inside by the way you breathe.

You have these potentials inside—there’s the potential for refreshing breathing, the potential for easeful breathing, potentials that can gladden the mind. They’re here. It’s simply a matter of discovering them and developing them.

You look at the Buddha’s instructions for breath meditation: They’re not, “I’ll just sit here watching things coming and going,” or, “I’ll put aside thoughts of the past, thoughts of the future, and watch equanimously as I breathe in and breathe out.” The Buddha rejected that way of doing breath meditation. He said it’s one way of doing it, but it doesn’t get the best results.

The steps he does recommend are very proactive. The first two are exercises in gaining some discernment—in other words, discerning what long breathing feels like, what short breathing feels like. But then the remaining steps are trainings. You train yourself, “I will breathe in such a way. I will breathe out in such a way.” You’re going to make a difference, you’re going to explore potentials here, develop skillful ones and abandon unskillful ones. This is why the word for meditation, in Pali, is bhāvanā: “develop.”

You look at the factors for awakening: The Buddha says there are potentials for them already present in body and mind. You can feed them or you can starve them. By feeding them, they grow.

For example, with analysis of qualities: There’s the potential for skillful and unskillful thoughts in the mind, and you want to see the distinction, explore that distinction. See what skillful thoughts lead to, what unskillful thoughts lead to.

There’s a potential for rapture. The Buddha doesn’t say what it is, but it’s there in your body and you can find it. You can start with that question: “What kind of breathing would feel refreshing right now? What would feel really good down into the torso, feel refreshing, bathing your face, bathing your head, bathing your arms and shoulders, your legs and feet, with energy that feels good?” Explore that. We’re here to explore potentials, to develop potentials.

As the Buddha said, that’s one of the ways in which you gain discernment—the best way to gain discernment. He listed three altogether: You come to an understanding from listening to things. You come to an understanding from thinking things through. Those are preliminary forms of understanding.

You want to have a sketch in your mind about how things should work, how the path works, which topics are worth thinking about, which ones are not worth thinking about. Then you think about the things that are worth thinking about. These will be in line with the duties of the four noble truths: You want to comprehend suffering, you want to abandon the cause, you want to realize the cessation of suffering, and you do that by developing the path. Those are things you want to think about, so that you have at least a good sketch in your head about what you’re supposed to be doing.

But then it’s in the actual doing that you gain the discernment. Someone once asked me, “How is it that, in meditation, you get to see the true nature of things?” As I told the person, it’s not that we’re here to see the true nature of things. We’re here to see how things work, how things function, because that’s how things cause suffering, how they can put an end to suffering.—and how things function is something you can actually explore as you meditate.

You can sit and look at a cup, but you can’t get to that cup’s innate nature by looking at it or meditating on it. You can break it into little pieces and you still can’t get to its innate nature. But you can learn: “If I do things with a cup, what is a cup good for?” It’s good for holding liquids. You can use it for holding liquids.

But here we’re going deeper than cups and things outside. We’re going into the mind. How does the mind function? We find out by using it to do different things. That way, we can see the functioning of the mind. The malfunctioning of the mind is what causes suffering. You can learn something about the malfunctioning of the mind and how to solve it by listening, by thinking. But you’re not really going to know the proper functioning of the mind until you actually try to do good things with it.

Like here, we’re trying to get the mind to settle down. That’s going to involve a struggle. You’re trying to stick with one intention, but there will be other intentions coming in. So how do you withstand them? Part of it is by developing that first intention. You develop it by augmenting it with a sense of well-being. When you sit down to meditate, you don’t have to tell yourself, “I’m going to sit here to meditate,” in case it sounds like a chore. Tell yourself, “I’m going to sit here and I’m going to enjoy breathing. I’m going to find how much refreshment I can get out of the breath, how much ease I can get out of the breath.” That strengthens the original intention. You’ll be more likely to stay and to enjoy staying. The more you enjoy it, the better it goes.

As Ajaan Fuang said, meditation needs a sense of rapture and refreshment as a lubricant, just as an engine needs a lubricant. If it runs out of oil, it seizes up. In the same way, the mind begins to seize up if it doesn’t get any refreshment from meditation, if it becomes too much of a chore.

As you get the mind to settle down, you learn a lot about it—you learn that you need to have something to focus on and you’re going to have to talk to yourself to stay.

If you want to give rise to a sense of well-being to reinforce your original intention, you have to talk about what kind of breathing would feel good right now. Try things out. Pass judgment as to what seems best. Stay with it. If after a while it doesn’t feel so good, you can try something else.

Once it does feel good, then how can you maintain it? How can you spread it around? To do this, you’re going to have to use some perceptions, the images you hold in mind about where the breath goes in the body, your perception of what feels good and what doesn’t feel good.

As you engage in these fabrications, you get to know the factor of fabrication in dependent co-arising. Now, you may or may not have read about it, but it’s good to know the words. Use the Buddha’s vocabulary to describe these things to yourself as you’re doing them, to help to distinguish one mental action from another . But you really get to know these activities by engaging in them and trying to do something good with them.

The same goes for discernment: You’re trying to understand your clinging. Well, you’re going to see clinging in your distractions—things that pull you away from concentration. Why do you slip away? What are the steps? The more you try to cut off a distraction at the pass, and the quicker you get at it, then the more you see the various steps you go through as a thought-world develops and you go into it. You can begin to dig down to parts that are fairly subconscious and bring them up into the light.

You learn about your clingings, your attachments, by resisting them—because we’re here to learn about activities, to learn about cause and effect. We learn about ourselves as cause and effect. The more you get to know how the mind works, the closer you get to seeing what the Buddha had to say about how you define yourself by your attachments.

A monk came to see him one time and asked, “A being, a being: To what extent is there a being?” Some people might say, “Well, there’s no being there. It’s just causes and conditions rolling through.” But the Buddha said, “No, there is such a thing as a being. Wherever there’s attachment, there’s a being.”

What are people attached to? They’re attached to form, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness. Your sense of what you are is something you define. You define yourself through your clingings, through your attachments.

You should find that thought liberating, because if how you’re defining yourself is unsatisfactory, you can define yourself in new ways. This is what the Buddha has you do as you practice meditation. You get better things to cling to—better types of form, better feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness.

Take advantage of the fact that your identity is fluid—but also realize that you want to go beyond any sense of identity at some point. At first, that idea may scare you—“If I’m defined by my clingings, then when there are no clingings, what’s going to happen to me?”

The short answer is that you won’t need a “me.” You’ll have the ultimate happiness. Your whole sense of self is in service of your desire for happiness. This is why you cling to these things to begin with. When your happiness doesn’t need a sense of self, you can let it go—and the Buddha is telling you that there’s something better when you let go.

At first, you don’t fully trust him, but you really need to give him a try. Make the best “me” that you can out of the desire for pleasure by getting the mind into concentration. You keep in the back of your mind, though, the fact that there’s something even better that will come from letting go when the concentration has done its work—the Buddha promises that. You finally get to the point where you realize that even though this state of concentration is really good, it still has its drawbacks. It still has to be maintained. There’s still an effort that has to go into it. Wouldn’t it be better if there were something that didn’t require constant maintenance? That thought is what really inclines the mind to the idea that there could be something deathless and you’re willing to sacrifice all your attachments to get there.

Now, on getting there, the Buddha says, the mind goes through a stage where the question of existence or non-existence doesn’t mean anything to you. You see things arising, arising, arising—and the idea of non-existence doesn’t occur to you. You see things passing away, passing away—and the idea of existence doesn’t occur to you. When non-existence and existence don’t have any meaning, then you’re not afraid of your not existing. You just see suffering, suffering, suffering, and there’s only one thing to do—and that’s to let go.

That’s when, the Buddha says, you have the arising of the realization of “all phenomena are not self.” It’s a value judgment: All things are not worth clinging to anymore. You clung to them because you thought they would give happiness: They did but they don’t. In other words, they used to seem satisfactory but now they no longer do. You want something better. You’re willing to let go. And then you let go of that statement too—because that, too, is a phenomenon; that, too, is a Dhamma. You don’t cling even to that. That’s when the mind is freed.

The question came up a while back: “If all phenomena are not self, then what gets reborn?” To begin with, the Buddha never talks about what gets reborn. He talks instead about the processes by which rebirth happens.

Here again, he brings in the idea of a being and gives an analogy: There’s a house on fire. A flame spreads from the house and sets other things on fire. What does the flame cling to as it goes from one house to another? It clings to the wind. It’s sustained by the wind.

In the same way, when a being leaves this body and goes to another one, there’s a bundle of attachments: What is it sustained by? It’s sustained by craving. That’s the process. You want to put an end to that process because all you’re doing is just continuing your suffering.

When you see all phenomena as not self, the purpose of that statement is not to explain what gets reborn. Its purpose is to stop the process of rebirth. When you see that there’s nothing really worth clinging to, the process has nothing to sustain it. You don’t continue your suffering.

You learn all this by developing. We can talk about it, we can think about it, but you really know it only when you’ve done the work of developing. Remember those duties of the four noble truths? The duty with regard to the cessation of suffering is not to figure it out beforehand. It’s to realize it. And how do you realize it? By developing the path. It’s part of the discernment that comes from developing.

This is why we work with potentials right here, right now. There is the potential in the mind to find this level of true release. And you work on it by developing, step by step, the things that get you there. All too many people want that one realization that will suddenly open things up and give them sudden awakening—as if a change in your conceptions would bring awakening.

Actually, a lot more work has to be done. There has to be the work of developing, learning about cause and effect by manipulating cause and effect. We start doing it right here, getting the mind into concentration. Whatever is needed to get the mind to settle down with a sense of well-being, you do it: Get the mind in a good mood so that it’s willing to settle down. Give it something good to settle down on.

In the course of that, you’re going to learn a lot through developing. So pay attention to what you’re doing right here. Because in the act of paying attention to your actions—that’s where the real discernment lies. And not just any actions—the actions of following the path, developing the path, taking it as far as it can go.