Therapeutic Seclusion

We come to a quiet place like this to get some physical seclusion, to get away from our friends, get away from our enemies, get away from all the voices that are directed at us as we live in the society outside, and have some time for ourselves.

This means that one of the rules here is that you engage in conversation when it’s necessary, but each time you open your mouth, ask yourself, “Is this necessary?” That was Ajaan Fuang’s rule for me when I first met him at Wat Dhammasathit. I had a lot of ideas about the Dhamma— “It’s probably like this,” “It must be like that.” He said, “If you don’t really know, just don’t say anything.”

If you want to find the Dhamma, you have to look inside. So we try to create a quiet atmosphere here, where it’s okay for people to be quiet, so that they can look inside and have the time and the space to allow things to appear clearly inside that otherwise would be stunted.

But physical seclusion is not enough. You also have to have mental seclusion. As the Buddha said, we go everywhere with craving as our companion, and it’s not a good companion. If we were to compare it to friends, it’s the type of friend who gets us to do something wrong, and then, when the police come to catch us, runs away, leaving us holding the bag. So we have to look into our friends’ behavior.

We realize, of course, that our inner friends are things we’re doing to ourselves. It’s a kind of addictive behavior what psychologists would treat as “addictive self-destructive behavior.” That kind of external behavior is just a blatant example of what we do inside all the time, at least from the Buddha’s point of view. When he talks about clinging-aggregates, that’s what he’s talking about: You hold on to things that are making you suffer.

The first noble truth is that you’re doing things that make you suffer. After all, the aggregates are activities. Form keeps changing. Feelings feel. Perceptions perceive. Thought fabrications fabricate. Consciousness cognizes. These are activities we’re doing all the time. We’re addicted to doing them in ways that make us suffer, and we don’t realize it, probably because we haven’t seen anything better.

So, just as psychologists have a scheme for treating addictive self-destructive behavior, so does the Buddha. One point they have in common is the question, “What’s the payoff?” If this is making you suffer, there must be something you like about it. You must be getting something out of it. Otherwise, the suffering would be too obvious and you wouldn’t keep doing it.

But the Buddha goes deeper than that. He says you want to see what the trigger is and, the trigger is not necessarily something outside. He says you look for the origination. A large part of the practice of seeing things arising and passing away is that it’s not just arising. When the Buddha talks about the discernment of arising and passing away, he calls it “penetrative”. That’s what we want to have: penetrative knowledge.

To be penetrative, your knowledge has to see what’s causing the arising and what the varieties are. Some things that arise and pass away are good things that should arise and should not pass away. You can cultivate them so that they stay and grow. With other things, it’s just good that they pass away. But then you want to see: Why do they keep coming back?

So the first step in the Buddha’s program is to look for what he calls the origination: what triggers them inside you. When lust comes, what triggers it? Again, it’s not necessarily an attractive person outside. It’s something in the mind that’s looking for that kind of thing. It wants lust. Why?

See also how it passes away—because it’s not there all the time. You learn a lot by seeing the mind state when, say, there’s no lust or no anger, when things are calm. The lust or anger has gone away, as if it weren’t there at all. But you have to be alert to the fact that something could trigger it again at any time.

When the trigger comes again, and you go for it again, the next step is to look for the allure. This is the payback. What do you get out of this? What do you like about this? Why do you like your lust? Why do you like your anger? Why do you like your jealousy? Why do you like your feeling of victimhood? What’s the appeal? For this, you have to dig down, because many times you can tell yourself, “Oh, I like it because of x.” That’s the mind’s way of excusing itself, hiding things from itself. If you just accept the first answer that comes up, you’re going to continue to be fooled.

So you have to keep going over this point again and again. When you see something that seems to be the appeal, compare it with the drawbacks and look very carefully at the drawbacks. When you get to the point where you see that the drawbacks really far outweigh the appeal, that’s when you develop dispassion. As the Buddha said, dispassion is the escape. It gets you out of that mind-state, out of that state of becoming. There was something in that state of becoming where that behavior seemed to make sense, it had a purpose. But then you begin to realize that the world in that state of becoming, your sense of yourself out of that state of becoming, even the object you desire—is all distorted.

When you see these things, even in therapy, you have to be with a therapist you trust, feeling that you’re in a safe space, that you don’t feel threatened by these things as they come up, because this is not an easy thing to look at: as Ajaan Suwat would say, your own stupidity—why you go for these things.

Now, in a therapist’s office, they create an atmosphere where you feel safe. Here, you create your atmosphere but you also create an arena, basically, inside, where these things are a lot easier to see: both in the sense of being easier to detect and in the sense of being easier to admit.

That’s why we do concentration, trying to get the mind as still as possible, with a sense of well-being inside, a sense of well-being that fills the whole body. This is why we work with the breath energies in different parts of the body, and why it’s worth your while to try to get to know what exactly the breath energy is, say, running down your arms, running down your legs, in your head, in your torso, all the different parts of the body—because once you can sense a smooth energy flow in the body, it feels good being here. When a sense of genuine ease comes with the in-and-out of breath, it can spread unobstructed throughout the body. You feel safe; you feel secure. There’s a strong sense of belonging right here. You’re not constantly being pushed out of your body.

When the mind is quiet like this, then there’s the opportunity to see the origination, when something gets sparked inside, such as lust or anger or greed or jealousy. You’re also in a position where you feel more solid, more secure, and you’re willing to open up more about what the allure of these things is.

So this is the Buddha’s therapy room here: concentration, a sense of well-being filling the whole body.

One of the Buddha’s images is of a lake fed by a spring, and the rains come on a regular basis, so the spring is constantly feeding water into the lake—cool water that permeates the entire lake. That’s the sense of well-being you want to develop inside, because then you can talk to yourself. You can look at yourself a lot more clearly and admit what you see. You’re better at detecting things and better at admitting them. That’s when the cure comes—when you see that a lot of your behavior is driven by a distorted desire. It’s not your only alternative. You’ve got better alternatives.

Most of us go for something because we think that’s the only alternative we have, the best option we have, the quickest, the easiest option for happiness or pleasure. But the Buddha is giving you something better—a state of well-being inside that has very few drawbacks. You can learn how to inhabit your sense of the body from within, your sense of your mind from within. You get on familiar terms. This, too, is a state of becoming, but it’s a good one for therapy.

I heard a monk say once that Buddhism isn’t just therapy, it’s a philosophy. The response that came up in my mind was, “No, it’s not just a philosophy, it’s actually therapeutic. It solves problems. It cures diseases. It’s much more effective. It’s much more useful than just a philosophy.”

So when the Buddha’s talking about clinging-aggregates, he’s talking about addictive behavior. He’s saying that we’re all a bunch of addicts, we’re all engaged in self-destructive behavior, but he’s giving us the way out. And the way out ultimately becomes a lot more radical than you might expect. But in the very beginning, deal with what you’ve got, and it’ll lighten a lot of your loads.

So this is the value of seclusion. You have the physical time, physical space to look inside, and then you can get secluded from your unskillful behavior. Step back from it. You’ll find that in seclusion there’s real peace—not just peace, but a strong sense of well-being that fills the space, fills the time, that you’ve created for yourself inside.