Not Just a Witness

I’m reading a book on the psychology of Now, how the mind creates its sense of what’s going on in the present moment. The author points out, as she goes from one revelation to the next, that we don’t just pick up stimuli from outside and then put them together to see what we’ve got. We anticipate; we generate perceptions. Otherwise, our response to the outside world would be too slow if it were based solely on what we’ve seen. Of course, our anticipation depends on our experiences in the past.

And our memory of the past is not just a series of mental constructions. The way our body felt at those times is also an important part of our sense of that time, as are our emotions. The emotions interact with the body. The states of the body affect your emotions; your emotions affect the state of your body.

On top of that, we regulate our perceptions by acting, doing something, to check our perceptions to see how helpful they actually are. Perceptions that don’t work, we throw away. Perceptions that do work, we keep.

As I’ve been reading the book, I keep thinking, “The Buddha saw all this 2,600 years ago. This is all nothing new.” What may be mind-bending for someone who has a very intellectual idea of how we interact with the present moment was, for the Buddha, what he had seen looking inside his body and mind. And he was amazing in that he was able to pinpoint exactly where the big issues are.

As when he talks about the three kinds of fabrication: The way you breathe is the connection between your mind and your body, so he has you focus on the breath. He has you focus on how you talk to yourself about the breath, because how you talk to yourself is how you construct your reality—as in all situations. Of course, those constructions are going to be built out of perceptions. Sometimes the sentences form the larger context, and we stick our perceptions in that context. Sometimes the perceptions will change in a way that very insistently doesn’t fit into our larger picture, so we have to change the larger frame. It’s all happening right here as we focus on the breath.

Then our sense of cause and effect: Where does that come from? It comes from the fact that the mind acts as a cause. You have an intention. Now, the intention may have been sparked by something coming in from outside, but then you act on that intention. As the Buddha taught Rahula, be very careful about which intentions you act on. Then look very carefully at the results of your actions while you’re doing them and when they’re done. Learn from that. Commit, as the Buddha would say, and then reflect.

If we didn’t act on the world, we wouldn’t know what’s connected with what, which is a cause, which is an effect. There would just be a show, a parade passing by. But as we get a sense through our actions, pushing against the world, we can see where it pushes back and where it allows us to push.

This is why it’s so important as you meditate that you realize you are doing something. This is a type of karma. We’re not here just to be witnessing. There will be a stage in the practice where you practice just witnessing for a certain purpose, but in the beginning, the meditation is very much a doing. You want to get more and more sensitive to how you shape things and what you learn from how you shape things.

It’s like learning a language. They say one of the best ways of learning a language is not simply to think of what you want to say and then look up the translation in a book or online. First think of what you want to say and then ask yourself, “Well, how would I say that based on the knowledge I already have in the language?” You try to learn how to think in the language and then you test it against what the proper way of saying it would be. You see where you were wrong, but it’s important that you don’t get upset because you were wrong. You just realize that your structure, how you put that language together, is not quite right yet. So you learn and you adjust. And you’re happy to learn.

What this means in meditation is that you try things out.

Think of the Buddha and his quest for awakening. He tried things out. And he didn’t just dabble. If there was a course of action he thought was worthwhile, if it seemed likely to bear fruit, he would follow it with all his conviction and persistence and mindfulness and concentration and discernment—in other words, putting all his strength into the practice. When he got results—when he was convinced that these were the best results you could get from that practice—then he would judge it. A couple of times he judged a practice to be inadequate, as when he was studying with the two teachers who taught no further than the formless* *jhānas.

Then he went off on his own. He tried extreme austerities. In that case, after six years, he realized he’d reached the point where if he continued with the austerities he would die. That was obviously not the path. But he tried things out. He acted on his assumptions. When the results were not what he wanted, then he went back and examined his assumptions.

In the case of the austerities, the assumption was that you had to deny yourself as much pleasure as possible to purify the mind. He realized that doing that was going to kill him. The question was: Was there an innocent pleasure? And he realized, Yes. He remembered the time when he got into the first jhāna as a child when he was sitting under a tree and his mind spontaneously settled down. Could that be the path? Something inside said, “Yes.” So he gave it a try.

So we’re here doing: making assumptions, acting on our assumptions, seeing if they work, and doing our sincere best to test them. That’s our guarantee.

When someone says, “Don’t believe anything until you test it yourself,” remember that you also have to test yourself in the course of testing things like this. Are you really sincere? Are you really giving your best? That’s when you can say you’ve arrived at a fair judgment. Otherwise, you’re like that columnist writing in The New York Times who said he’d tried mindfulness for a couple months, but it didn’t work. Been there, done that. Well, he hadn’t even been there, hadn’t really done that. He was in no position to pass judgment.

It’s through trial and error, and then reflecting on where your error might be, then trying again, that you finally reach trial and success. So we’re very much engaged in the doing. Without the doing, we’d have no way of testing our perceptions. Things would just be a parade. We’d be the idle witness, watching this parade of things going by, going by. If we didn’t ask any questions, if we didn’t have any assumptions, if we didn’t have any way of testing assumptions, interfering with the parade, we wouldn’t learn anything.

So watch out for the type of meditation that says you just want to observe, to practice bare awareness. From the Buddha’s point of view, bare awareness or bare attention doesn’t really exist. For him, there are only two kinds of attention: appropriate and inappropriate. Appropriate attention frames things in terms of the four noble truths. Inappropriate attention frames things in other ways—or maybe it doesn’t even have a frame. That’s what bare attention would be. But look at where attention is in the lineup of dependent co-arising. There are factors before it that shape it, give it a frame. By the time you get to attention, it’s not bare. It’s already been shaped by fabrications, acts of consciousness, perceptions, intentions.

And the consciousness of a witness is not totally pure. As the Buddha pointed out, you can peel away your attachment to the different elements or properties—earth, water, wind, fire, and space—and arrive at pure consciousness. Pure consciousness can observe feelings from the outside, seeing what’s causing a particular feeling, how that feeling comes, how it goes away. But that’s still a constructed process, a constructed pure consciousness. You have to realize that it’s something you do as well. At some point, you have to take that apart, too.

As the Buddha says, when you get that consciousness really equanimous, then you can apply the equanimity to higher and higher formless states. It would last a long time, but it would still be constructed. You have to ask yourself, “Is it worth it if it all falls apart? Is there something that doesn’t fall apart?”

Now, these are questions you ask when the mind gets into good, solid concentration, and everything seems really quiet, very still, very pure. “Is it really unconditioned?” This is where your sincerity and your honesty have to come in.

At that point, the mind is sometimes disinclined to do anything further. This is why the Buddha said the secret to his awakening was that he was heedful, ardent, and resolute. He looked at things from all sides to see if there was any danger, any weakness in what he had found. He sincerely wanted to do his best, and if more work was required, well, he was resolute in doing it.

So this practice we have—trying things out, trying to figure things out, and then taking what we’ve figured out and putting it to the test: That’s how the Buddha gained his awakening. That’s how awakening is found. Other lazier ways of approaching it just don’t work.

So take advantage of the faculties you have, your ability to construct perceptions, make assumptions, and then test them. It may seem pretty hit or miss to begin with, but if you’re really observant, you begin to hit, hit, hit on target. The important thing is that you not get discouraged in the meantime.

Ajaan Fuang used to say his students fell into two types: those who thought too much and those who didn’t think enough. The ones he was concerned about were those who thought too much, because they would find it difficult to get the mind to settle down. In cases like that, you have to keep encouraging them, he said.

If the teacher is not around to encourage you, well, learn how to encourage yourself. You’ve got these tangled vines in your awareness, these tangled vines in your mind. If you get discouraged by them now, they’re just going to stay there. When the time comes to die, you’ll find yourself entangled. Clear these things out now while you can. And how do you do it? Arriving at perceptions, arriving at assumptions, putting them to the test—and clearing things out.

This is why meditation is an active process and not a passive one. You’re the doer and the witness, not just the witness. You commit and you reflect, and then you commit again and reflect again. That, the Buddha said, is how the Dhamma is nourished.