Three Intoxications

Gather all your thoughts into the present moment. Gather your awareness right here, because this is the beginning point of everything. Your life is shaped by your intentions, and where do your intentions show themselves? They show themselves right here, right now. Your past intentions are things you can’t watch. You may remember them, you may not. As for your future intentions, they’re more likely to be good if you train the ones in the present moment to be good.

So set the right intention: You want to stay right here. Be aware of your breath coming in, the breath going out. Stay grounded right here. Ask yourself what kind of breathing is comfortable. If you’re going to stay here, try to make it a good place. It’s like moving into a house. If you think you’re just going to spend one night, you’re not going to spend any time to fix it up. But if you tell yourself, “I’m going to be here for a long time,” you try to make it more comfortable, more entertaining. So entertain yourself with the breath.

Ask yourself, “If I breathe long for a while, what’s going to happen? What if I breathe short? Or in long, out short? In short, out long? If I try heavy breathing for a while, light breathing, fast or slow: Which do I prefer? What combination do I prefer?” Then, when the sensation of breathing feels good, how far can you spread it through the body?

Give yourself challenges like this. Ask yourself questions like this to make the present moment more interesting, so that the mind will be happier to be here. After all, there will be long periods when it doesn’t seem like much is happening. It’s like casing a joint. You know there are criminals in an apartment someplace in the city, so you post somebody in a building across the street who can watch the comings and goings from the apartment. For a long time, there won’t be many comings, there won’t be many goings. But every now and then something important will happen, but you won’t know ahead of time. Which means you have to be alert all the time. So you find ways of keeping yourself happy to be here so that you can watch what’s going on. You realize that your mind is the main agent shaping your life, so you want to catch it if it’s doing something unskillful. And you have to remind yourself how important it is that you do this.

As the Buddha said, all skillful qualities in the mind, all skillful qualities in the heart, are rooted in heedfulness: the realization that there are dangers in the world, and if you’re careless, you open yourself to those dangers, but if you’re careful, if you’re skillful, you can avoid those dangers.

Of course, the big dangers we all face are aging, illness, death, and then rebirth. Very few people see birth as a problem. They say, “Well, that’s already happened.” But it’s going to happen again if we’re not careful. And who knows where it’s going to happen? At the moment of death, who knows what the mind is going to suddenly get interested in. Some old memory comes up. Some dream comes up. And if you’re not mindful, if you’re not alert, you go places where you really shouldn’t go. So you have to prepare for this.

The big danger, of course, is when you tell yourself, “I don’t have to prepare.” This the Buddha calls “intoxication.” There are three types of intoxication: intoxication with youth, intoxication with health, intoxication with life. Intoxication is when you tell yourself, “I don’t have to be all that careful. I’m young. It’s going to be a* long* time before I get old. I don’t see any signs of aging in my body. Other people’s bodies get old, but mine is not going to get old as fast as theirs.” That’s what you tell yourself. As for health, “Everything seems fine, healthy, in good running order.” And as for death, “The odds are that death could come a long time from now.” Of course, when you’re thinking about odds, you’re gambling.

When you tell yourself you don’t have to worry about these things, that’s the big danger. After all, aging, illness, and death can come at any time. In fact, aging is already happening. As soon as we come out of the mother’s womb, we begin to age. It’s just that the body’s repair system is really good. You wear it down for a bit, but then you rest a bit, and everything gets fine. Just like new. It’s when the repair system begins to wear down: That’s when you suddenly realize how much you’ve been abusing your body, because it doesn’t recover quite as fast.

It’s like the color in leaves. We see the red and orange leaves in the fall and we wonder, “Where did the red come from? Where did the orange come from?” Well, it turns out they were there all along but they were covered up by the chlorophyll. The green pigment was so much stronger that you couldn’t see the red, you couldn’t see the orange. But when the chlorophyll goes, that’s when you see, “Oh, these colors have been there all along.” In the same way, aging has been here all along. The body keeps getting worn down, worn down, but as long as it can repair itself, you don’t see the wearing down. Yet there will come a point where the wearing down gets more insistent, and the recovery time takes longer and longer. And then the recovery system begins to break down. So you have to prepare for that.

When you come right down to it, the big regret—with aging as well as with illness and with death—is that you didn’t use your youth, you didn’t use your health, you didn’t use your life in the best way possible. At the moment of death, it’s too late. You just have to pack up and go. When you age, you still have a chance to do something good with your life, but it just gets harder and harder. The same when you’re sick: It gets harder to get around, it gets harder to get up, to get down. But there are still good things you can do.

There’s a story in the forest tradition. There was a woman who was dying of cancer. She went to see Ajaan Maha Bua and asked if she could come to his monastery and stay for a couple months and practice meditation to prepare for her upcoming death. He said, “I can look after your mind, but you need somebody else to look after your body.” Well, she had an old friend, a woman over 80 years old who was a retired doctor. She asked the old friend to come along with her. So the two of them went. They stayed at the monastery for three months, and almost every night Ajaan Maha Bua gave them a Dhamma talk, which they recorded on cassette tapes. Then they went back to Bangkok.

A few months later, the woman with cancer died. But then the old doctor suddenly found herself a big pile of 80-plus cassettes. She had the idea that it would be good to transcribe all the cassettes and make them into a book. But as she told Ajahn Maha Bua, she wasn’t sure that she’d be able to finish the task. He told her, “Well, see how much goodness you can squeeze out of this body before you have to throw it away.” She found that she actually did have enough strength to finish the job. She ended up with two big volumes of Dhamma books on the problems of how to deal with pain, how to deal with illness, how to deal with approaching death. So even though she was 80-plus years old, she could still squeeze some goodness out of her body.

Well, try to have that same attitude with your body when it’s still young: “What goodness can I squeeze out of this body, realizing that it’s going to get more and more difficult as time goes on?” What good can you do with what you’ve got?

The same applies with health. We know that someday disease is going to come, so you have to prepare. This is one of the reasons why we sit and meditate and put up with the pain. It’s not the case that as soon as your legs get sore or there’s a pain in your knees, a pain in your hips, that you change positions. You say, “No, I’m going to sit with it.” Because you realize that the pain of illness and the pain of death could be much worse. If you can’t handle these pains now, how are you going to handle those pains then when the body is weaker? The heedful thing to do is to learn how to put up with pain and to understand how the mind reacts to pain.

A lot of the problem, the Buddha said, is not so much that there’s pain, it’s that we allow the pain to invade our minds and remain there. In other words, we talk to ourselves about how bad the pain is, how much we can’t take it. The perceptions we have of the pain actually make the pain worse and make it a burden on the mind.

If there’s a pain in the knee, we have the perception that the pain and the knee are the same thing. Or our sensation of the knee and our sensation of the pain are the same thing. Actually, they are two different kinds of sensations. The knee, as we sense it, is made up of feelings of solidity, liquidity, warmth, energy. The pain is something else. It’s like the radio waves for two different radio stations in the same place. They have a different frequency. Can you see that they’re different? Can you see further that both of them are different from your awareness? Or do you see the pain as a solid block when it’s actually little moments of pain coming and going, coming and going? Can you hold that perception in mind, of the pain coming and going? And then when the pains are coming, do you have the sense that they’re coming at you? Or can you see them going away, going away, right as they arise? If they’re going away, they’re a lot easier to deal with.

If you learn how to sit with pain and not suffer from pain now, it’s going to be a lot easier as you get sick, as you approach death.

Of course, with death, the big problem is the sense that everything is ending. You look at the future and it’s like a big wall. Well, have some confidence. The Buddha said it’s not a wall. The end of this life is just the end of a chapter in a book that has many, many chapters. Your duty at that point is not so much to try to hang on to what you’ve got, but to anticipate where you’re going to go.

To some extent, where you’re going to go will depend on things you’ve been doing all life long. Which is why, even when you’re young, healthy, and alive, you should be doing good things to create good opportunities, so that when the time comes to go — in the Buddha’s image, your house is on fire and a flame flickers out of the house and goes and catches something else on fire — you want to have some control over where it’s going to go. And prior to that, you also want to create the opportunities for it to go to good places. When you’re generous, when you’re virtuous, when you extend goodwill to all, that’s creating good opportunities. You want to have a good range of choices awaiting you at the end.

I’ve told you about the time I was electrocuted and I was pretty convinced I was going to die. It all happened very quickly. People who watched the event said it was over in just a couple of seconds. But for me, it felt like a couple of minutes, as I suddenly realized I could not stay in the body anymore. All of the sudden, it was as if a series of different doors presented themselves to me—a lineup of about six doors. I realized if I went through any of those doors, I’d be reborn in a different place. My first impulse was, “Hey, wait a minute, you’re a meditator. Wouldn’t it be better not to go through any of the doors?” Then the electric current stopped, and that was the end of it. But it was good to at least to know that I had some choices. Some people don’t have many choices because they’ve been doing unskillful things. If you’ve been heedful, doing skillful things, then you’re more likely to have good choices awaiting you.

But it’s important not only to have a good range choices available, but also to have the mindfulness and alertness needed to choose well, because sometimes some choices look good and yet they may not be so good after all.

Think about Thailand in the 19th century. Suppose you had the choice between being born in the palace or being born out in the farms of Isaan. At first glance, the palace might seem like the better option. But it turns out that back in those days, the monks who were teaching in the palace were teaching wrong view, saying that nibbāna was no longer available, the path to nibbāna no longer worked. Whereas in Isaan, sons of peasants were saying, “No, the path to nibbāna is open and here’s how you follow it.” So you would have been better off to be born in Isan so that you could find the true Dhamma.

Now, the option of having that choice — the choice to be able to hear the true Dhamma and practice the true Dhamma —depends on your interest in the true Dhamma right now, the extent to which you can practice it as best you can.

So this is what it means to be heedful: realizing that we do have the dangers of aging, illness, and death, along with the bigger dangers of being intoxicated with youth, health, life, thinking that we don’t have to prepare for dangers. But there are ways that we can prepare. I mean, heedfulness has meaning because we can prepare. If we couldn’t prepare for dangers, if we couldn’t protect ourselves, then heedfulness and heedlessness would have the same price, the same value. But it’s because we can make a difference that heedfulness is worthwhile.

So remember: There are dangers, but you can prepare. You can squeeze as much goodness as you can out of whatever strength and youth you have. You learn ahead of time how to deal with pain. You provide yourself with good options when you pass away. And you train yourself in mindfulness, alertness, and ardency—in other words, the skills of meditation—so that you’ll be more likely to make a mindful and alert choice when the time comes to go.

So think about the principles of heedfulness every day. As I said, the Buddha said that all skillful qualities are rooted in heedfulness. As you wake up in the morning, say, “I want to live a heedful day.” At the end of the day, you can survey what you did. And if you felt that you had been heedless? Well, tomorrow morning, if you’re lucky, you have another chance. But keep determined that this is what you want to do with your days and nights. You want to be heedful. That way, you don’t regret them when they’re over.