Intense Stillness

Ajaan Lee says that the breath is like a mirror for the mind. If the mirror is distorted, you’re going to get distorted images of the mind. If the mirror is concave, your image will be shorter than you really are. If it’s convex, it’ll be longer. What you want is a mirror that’s nice and flat.

The problem is that when the mirror gets flat, sometimes when the breath gets flat, and the mind gets flat as well. In other words, it gets dull. Nothing much is happening, and your interest drifts off. It’s interesting in the beginning as you’re adjusting the mirror. There’s something to do: Survey around the body. Go here, go there. Explore nooks and crannies that you ordinarily don’t look at. Focus down in between your toes. Focus down between your fingers, into your ears. There’s a lot to adjust. But then, after a while, you don’t have to adjust the breath anymore. The breath feels good throughout the body. It feels even throughout the body. It’s as if there’s nothing to do.

But actually, there’s now a different task.

Remember Ajaan Fuang’s comment that there are three stages to the meditation. One is doing it. Second is maintaining it. And the third is putting it to use. The doing it is the more active side as you adjust things. Then when things get still, you’ve got a different set of skills to master: the maintaining. You have to keep coming back, expanding the range of your awareness. Make sure it doesn’t shrink at all. At the same time, you want to detect any slight disturbances before they turn into thought worlds that carry you away.

So there’s work to do. It’s just that nothing much seems to be happening. And when you’ve reached that stage, the mind gets dull, your energy level goes down, and you drift off. So sometimes you have to go back and do some more adjusting. Breathe in ways that give you energy. Actually, there are lots of things you can do.

When I first came back here and was teaching, a lot of the people had been through different vipassana schools where they had a particular method and you just did their method—and nothing but their method—again and again and again. One woman in particular commented that when she asked instructions on what to do, I would say, “Well, try this, and if that doesn’t work, try this.” She’d never heard instructions like that before. She’d always been told, “Do this, do this, do this. Don’t even think of anything else.” But I was coming from the forest tradition, where there’s no single method of meditation, and the monks didn’t sit in one large room and listen to one talk. They were off in the forest by themselves. They got the basic instructions and then they had to apply those basic instructions to their individual circumstances. Their progress depended on their ingenuity, and they came up with lots of different options.

So it’s good to realize that you do have options.

As Ajaan Fuang would say, if you’re working with the breath, take the breath as your first option. What can you do to change the breath to make it more interesting? What can you do to breathe in a way that gives you more energy? I’ve personally found that breathing in long and out short, or breathing in in a way that expands the abdomen in all directions, can help wake you up.

Or you can try moving your point of focus around: three breaths at the nose, three breaths at the base of the throat, three breaths at the center of the chest, three breaths down at the abdomen, and so on.

Or you can change the topic for a while. You can think about the bones in your body. Start with the bones at the tips of the fingers. Work up to the second joint, the third joint, the palms of the hands, the wrists, forearms, the elbows, the upper arms, the shoulders. Then start with the toes and work up through the body: through the legs, the pelvis, the vertebrae, the skull.

Give your mind work to do. There are lots of different things you can try. If you learn any lessons from dependent co-arising, an important one is that certain factors are at different points in the sequence. So they have different company.

Like the problem with feeling: Sometimes feeling is in fabrications together with directed thought and evaluation. Sometimes it’s in name and form. Sometimes it’s right after contact. Sometimes it’s there as a result of birth, aging, and death. That means that your particular feeling, your particular pleasure or pain, may be influenced by different things, so you have a range of options to investigate.

But at the same time, you don’t want to just give in to the need to have variety all the time, because the demand for variety can be a defilement. Or it can be a disguise. The mind is hiding something from itself. So there are times you have to tell yourself, “I’m just going to stick it out right here. Stay with the breath.”

Just try to get more sensitive. That’s what the maintaining is all about: being more sensitive to disturbances in the breath energy, more sensitive disturbances in the stillness of the mind—which are usually connected.

When a thought begins to appear, what subterranean conversation went before it? And where was there a stirring of energy in the body? This is where I like to think of the image of the spider on a web. The spider is in one spot on the web but it’s sensitive to the entire web. Any disturbance on any spot on the web, it goes right there, deals with it, goes back to its spot. Have that sense that you’re focused on one spot in the body, but you’re connected to everything in the body. And the slightest disturbance is something that you want to investigate.

Sometimes you’ll find that it’s just a disturbance in the breath. Other times, you’ll find that the mind is beginning to latch on to it and take advantage of it as an opportunity to go traveling. Well, disperse it, disperse it, disperse it, and come right back to your spot. Try to develop a sense of intensity in the connections of the breath energy in the body.

Ajaan Lee’s image is of extending electricity into a forest. You string up the electric wires, run the current along the wires, and all the lights light up, light up, light up. You want to maintain them all lit throughout the forest. In other words, you’re generating your energy, but you’re also getting light. More energy comes back. It takes some energy to generate the energy, but you’re getting more in return. The stillness is not just a dull stillness. It’s a well-lit stillness, a well-connected stillness throughout the body.

And have the attitude of a hunter. You do the proactive work to get ready, and then you have to go sit. You see documentaries of hunters: They have a lot of work they have to do with their tools, with their weapons. Sometimes they make them very elaborate, not just functional. They carve designs in them. A lot of preparation, and then they go sit. They have to maintain an intense awareness, a broad-ranged awareness, at the same time that they’re very still. It’s that combination you want to develop. You’re working on it, but you’re working on stillness. You’re intensifying the stillness. That gives you the energy you need to keep it up.

Then, as you’re protecting it, you’re also beginning to put it to use. That’s Ajaan Fuang’s third step. As I said, when a thought comes, you’re going to see a stirring. You’re going to see the thought go through various steps before the stirring turns into a coherent thought, and you run with it. The more quickly you can disperse it, the more you’re going to see those steps.

Say there are three or four steps. Sometimes you miss it entirely, not until you realize you’ve run off. Other times you get it at step number four. Then you get quicker, and you get it at step number three, two, one. As your sensitivity improves, the sensitivity is improved by the intensity of the stillness. You’re all here, all alert, all around. It’s as if you can see in 360 degrees.

Think of that image of the Buddha: They called him the all-around eye. Back in ancient India, the eye was considered to be the spiritual organ of the body. To be gazed on by a deva was a blessing. And the devas were said to be all-around eyes. In other words, any spot of their body was like an eye, sensitive to the people around them and giving blessings to the people all around who gazed on any part of their body.

So think of yourself as an all-around eye. All the nerves in your body are like eyes. Try to maintain that perception, maintain that sense of intense stillness. That’s the kind of concentration you can live with. That’s the kind of concentration you can put to use. It’s not just resting. It’s part of a quest. You’re here looking for defilements in the mind, and you’re going to see them best when your eyes are bright all around.