More than Mindfulness

There’s a passage where the Buddha compares your emotions to flowing streams. He says that mindfulness is what holds the streams in check. Discernment is what cuts them off at the source.

Mindfulness is simply keeping in mind the fact that you don’t want to get involved with them. You step back from them, remind yourself to watch them come, watch them go. And that’s it.

But they’re going to come and go and come again.

This is why, when the Buddha was teaching the establishing of mindfulness, he didn’t recommend just mindfulness and alertness. He also recommended ardency. If you want to get to the point where your afflictive emotions don’t come back again, you’ve got to do more work. That’s what the discernment is for. This is why there’s such an intimate connection between ardency and discernment.

Mindfulness anesthetizes you to the impulse to follow a thought world. It’s like when you have an itch or the impulse to cough or the impulse to swallow. If you watch it carefully, you’ll see there’s a point where the physical trigger moves over to the point where it’s going to actually make you act on it. If you catch it at that point and disperse it, you can hold the impulse in check.

The dispersing is like those hunters who go through the forest with what’s called scatter vision. Instead of being focused on one point, they try to give equal weight to their entire visual field. Even though there may be one point of their vision that’s more prominent than the others, their attention is diffused, it’s not focused in. It doesn’t point in, it spreads out.

So whatever they see, they see and they let go because they want to be fresh to see the next moment and the next step. Whether they’re trying to track an animal or looking for mushrooms, they want a broad range of awareness. They want the whole range of awareness to be equally strong throughout.

This, by the way, is one of the reasons why we translate samādhi as concentration. It’s not just a lucid calm. It may not be one-pointed, but it’s more intense than just calm. Calm is passaddhi. Samādhi is concentration.

In samādhi, there’s an intensity to the whole range of your awareness. Wherever you’re focused, there’s an intensity that spreads things out rather than pointing them in.

So, say there’s an impulse to cough: You focus on the point where the physical sensation turns into an impulse to do something about it, and you disperse it, disperse it.

You find that as you disperse it, the little patterns of tension that were in the body, down the arms, into the hands, down the legs, into the feet, get relaxed as well. You begin to realize you’d been building up this impulse to respond throughout the body. When you disconnect it, it all relaxes.

The same principle applies to your thoughts. There’s a little stirring, right on the border between the breath and your awareness. It could turn into just anything. It could turn into just a physical stirring or it could turn into a thought.

As soon as you sense it, zap it, disperse it. Don’t just watch it come and go. Make it go. That’s where the ardency comes in, and this is what allows you to develop some discernment—if you want discernment.

As you zap it, you begin to realize that it was actually forming before you zapped it. What were the steps? How did you miss them? Why didn’t you see them? You want to get curious about that.

If you’re going to put an end to these things—rather than just noting their coming and going, noting their coming and going—you have to get to them earlier.

This is why, when Ajaan Lee spoke of the various qualities of mindfulness practice—mindfulness, alertness, and ardency—he identified ardency, the desire to do this well, as the quality connected with discernment.

You have to want to be discerning for the discernment to come, because when you’re looking for the arising, you’re not just looking for the arising, you’re looking for the origination. The cause. Where did it start in the mind?

To see that, you have to get to it faster and faster. Which means that you have to strengthen the intensity of your concentration on the one hand, and to refine your sensitivity on the other, so that even the slightest amassing of tension, building up of tension, is something you can detect and disperse, detect and disperse—because you want to get to the point where the mind objects to the dispersing.

That’s the culprit. Why would you want to build up that tension? What were you looking for? That’s when you see the origination. This is when your knowledge of arising and passing away is not just simple mindful watching arising and passing away, it’s penetrative. It sees into things—because only when you see the origination can you really deal with it.

You see there’s an impulse in the mind. It wants something, has a passion for something. It hasn’t articulated it to itself, but it’s there. You want to force it to articulate. The way you do that is to obstruct it, to get in the way—and get in the way quicker and quicker, get closer and closer to it.

When you see what originates it, that’s when you also see the allure: why you wanted to go with it. When you see the allure and can compare it with the drawbacks, that’s when you see how stupid it is. If you don’t see your own stupidity, you’re not going to gain any insight.

Ajaan Mahā Bua talks about this in his practice of contemplation of the body. He practiced and practiced so that as soon as he saw an attractive body, immediately he’d focus on the unattractive spots, actually physically see the body as unattractive. All the unattractive things inside would actually come to his vision—to the point where he thought he had no more lust. But then he asked himself: What was the point at which lust ended?

There has to be a point. As we hack away at these defilements—lust, aversion, delusion—it’s not the fact that we’re going to end them ourselves. We weaken them through our efforts, but we end them by following the path. The path leads to the deathless—and it’s that experience of the deathless that will cut them.

But there was no experience of the deathless that corresponded to the end of lust in Ajaan Mahā Bua’s case, so he was suspicious of it.

So he decided to test it. He visualized beautiful bodies clinging to his. This went on for three or four days, and there was no reaction at all. On the fourth day, though, there was a slight liking of the bodies. He realized, okay, there’s still something there, there’s still something that likes this.

So he went back and forth between unattractive bodies—all taken apart, bleeding all over the place—and then attractive ones. What was the difference? He saw that there was a perception of the attractive and a desire for the perception of the attractive. It was that desire that was the problem, so he focused on that. That was when he had the experience that actually cut through things.

There has to be an intensity to your quest. There has to be some ardency in this. You’re not just smoothly watching things coming and going, not getting in their way. You’ve got to get in the way. That’s the role of mindfulness. You have to put up that dam across the stream—and then work upstream to find the source, putting the dam closer and closer and closer to the source.

This, of course, is where the analogy breaks down, but you get to the point where the mind begins to really object to this “cutting off.” Look for that. That’s where the problem lies.

So we’re practicing more than mindfulness here. And mindfulness itself has to be more than mindfulness: It has to be mindful and alert and ardent. The ardency is what opens the way for the discernment. You want to get quicker and quicker at stopping these things, and see more and more clearly what in the mind objects to your stopping these things. Otherwise, everything is allowed to flow, flow, flow. The defilements that get a little bit of pleasure about seeing these things coming and going are not going to be challenged.

It’s only when you challenge your mind that it’s going to show its stripes. And only when it shows its stripes will you know what kind of tiger it is. When you know what kind of animal it is, then you can deal with it effectively. Most people don’t want to challenge the tigers. Their attitude is, as with dogs, let sleeping dogs lie. But when they wake up, the dogs can be ferocious, and the tigers can be even more so. The question is, do you want to have that happen?

Think of Ajaan Chah’s question about taking a banana from the market. Someone comes along and sees you carrying the banana. They ask you, “Why are you holding the banana?” “I’m going to eat it.” “Why are you holding the peel? Are you going to eat the peel, too?” And Ajaan Chah asks you, “With what will you answer the question?”

Here’s where he’s really perceptive. He says you answer with desire. It’s through desire, the desire to give a good answer, that discernment will come. Of course, the good answer is, “The time hasn’t come to let go of the peel. If I threw the peel away right now, the banana would be mush in my hands.”

In the same way, you have to want discernment. It involves stirring up the tigers a little bit, challenging them so that you can see the extent to which they are paper tigers. A lot of our emotions are like that. There was a meditation guide I saw one time, with pictures drawn by one of the authors, and one of the pictures was extremely realistic face of a tiger. But the body of the tiger was made out of folded paper: origami.

We’re afraid of our emotions, which is why we just let them come and go, come and go. They get a little bit of food, and we don’t feel too overwhelmed by them, but you’ll never know when they’re going to suddenly get really hungry and eat you up.

So if you have any discernment, if you have any heedfulness, you’re going to want to develop your discernment even further to the point where the tiger’s dead. It’s not going to come back anymore. The stream has been cut off at the source. It’s not going to flow anymore.

That’s the kind of peace, that’s the kind of assurance, that the Buddha offers. There’s a question in the Canon: “What assurance does this path offer?” It offers you the ability to see through things so that they don’t come back and haunt you, they don’t come back and attack you. What things? The things that are arising in your own mind. Only when you’ve reached the point where an experience of the deathless cuts through them are you fully safe.

You’re not going to reach that point simply by watching things coming and going. You’ve got to get in the way. You have to want to get in the way. That’s when you get results that are really special.