Quiet in the Midst of Turmoil

Ajaan Fuang tells a story of when Ajaan Lee first went to teach in Bangkok. He was teaching at Wat Boromniwaat, which is right next to the railroad tracks. Ajaan Fuang went to visit him one time and—even though he had been in the forest many years, and his concentration was really solid—one night next to the railroad tracks, his concentration crashed. He realized that he wasn’t as skilled as he thought he was. So he had to go back and work on the skills of being quiet in the midst of unquiet places.

The Canon talks about this a lot. It uses a lot of images.

There’s the image of a man with a bowl of oil on his head. The bowl is filled to the brim with oil. He has to walk between two groups of people. On the one side, there’s a beauty queen singing and dancing. On the other side, there’s a crowd of people excited about the beauty queen singing and dancing. As he walks between the two groups, there’s a man behind him with a raised sword. If the first man spills even a drop of oil, the second man is going to chop off his head.

As the Buddha says, in a case like that, would the man let himself get distracted by the beauty queen or by the crowd? No. He stays focused on the bowl of oil, which is a symbol for mindfulness of the body.

In this case, the problem is that you’re letting your attention run out. This is in line with the Buddha’s teachings on dependent co-arising. It’s not the case that problems start when there’s sensory contact, when things come in from outside. All too often, our minds are primed to go out looking for trouble. So you have to ask yourself—when you’re in an unquiet place, and your mind is getting unquiet as a result—to what extent are you sending your attention out? What are you looking for?

All too often, we’re looking for food to feed on: the food of sensory contact, the food of consciousness at the senses, the food of our intentions with regard to what’s going on outside.

So you’ve got to give the mind something better to feed on. This is why we practice mindfulness immersed in the body, totally immersed in the whole body. Be aware of the whole-body breath coming in and the whole-body breath going out. Try to make it as full as possible, as pleasurable as possible, so that it’s absorbing. It’s a good place to stay. You have a strong sense of the dangers of going out.

It’s not that you’re not aware of things. You are aware, but you don’t make them your food source. You don’t look for food out there.

This is the message of a second image: the six animals on leashes. They stand for the six senses. You’ve got a monkey, a crocodile, a bird, a snake, a dog, a hyena—all on leashes. If you just tie the ends of the leashes together, then the animals will pull to go where they want to look for food. The bird will go up the air. The monkey into a tree. The dog into a village. The hyena into a charnel ground. The snake into a hole in the ground. The crocodile down into the river, all where they usually look for food. Whichever one is strongest will pull the other ones its way. Probably the crocodile: It goes down into the river, drags everybody else down into the river, and they all drown.

The Buddha recommends that you have mindfulness of the body as a post. You tie the ends of the leashes to the post, and the animals may pull, pull, and pull, but as long as the post is strong, they can’t pull away. They just have to lie down right next to the post.

In the same way, you want to keep your awareness focused inside. Be very careful about what you go looking for outside, what you’re feeding on, because it’s not the case that these things just come into your eyes and ears and disturb you. You’re dragging them in. You go out looking for them and you drag them in.

So ask yourself, “Why are you looking for trouble?” Sights can come in and they just go past. Things people say come and hit you at the ear, and you can let them stop right there. That’s Ven. Sāriputta’s recommendation. Words come and hit your ear, there’s the contact of the sound at the ear, and when the contact ends, the sound ends. The problem is that we’re sucking things inside, pulling things inside, whatever people are saying.

He says this with reference to really unpleasant speech, but you can apply it to any speech. If something’s not really relevant to you, none of your business, just let it make contact with the ear and stop right there. That can stop a lot of trouble and a lot of conflicts.

If something really is relevant to you, you have to learn how to listen to it and not suck it in. In other words, it’s there, you register it, you decide whether it’s something worth listening to or not, and then you let the issue stop there. All too often, we embroider things and that’s what makes them really difficult.

The image I like to think of is: To what extent is your mind like a vacuum cleaner, just sucking everything in the environment? Of course, you suck in a lot of dirt. When you suck in dirt, you’re going to get sick. So turn off the vacuum cleaner. Things that are outside, let them stay outside. Things that are inside, let them stay inside so that they don’t interfere with one another.

In other words, you’ve got your inner work to do, staying centered with the breath and being at ease with the breath. This is what makes this tolerable. Otherwise, it’s like a battle between you and the outside environment.

If you feel full inside, there’s no need to feed. When you’re not feeding on things outside, you can’t take in germs, all those parasites they have that are going through the food system right now. As long as we’re feeding on the kind of food that’s infected, we’re going to get infected. When we don’t feed on it, it’s not going to touch us.

It’s the same with other people’s actions, other people’s words. If you can just leave these things out there and not feed on them, then you’re not going to get sick. You’re not going to take on the turmoil.

So have the right attitude: If your mind is getting disturbed by things outside, the problem is not things outside, it’s the mind.

Ajaan Lee talks about this a lot, about the people who want to run away and stay in the forest forever, having no contact with human beings at all: Wherever they go, they’ve still got themselves. Their mind has a tendency to feed on things. If it doesn’t have any present moment disturbances to feed on, it’ll take past disturbances, things from years ago, and get disturbed about that.

So you want to learn the habit of not feeding on disturbance. If you don’t feed on disturbance, you don’t get infected by disturbance. You have this post of mindfulness immersed in the body: your breath energy filling the body, your awareness filling the body.

And if it does feel like the world is pushing in on you, well, you can push back with your good energy. All too often, we feel that if we live with other people and want to sympathize with them, we have to take in their energy. Then we get infected by their bad energy. But we’re not really helping them at all because their energy is still theirs.

We don’t owe it to other people to take in their energy. We can fill our body with our energy, to repulse any negative energy that may be coming in. Think of it as an electromagnetic field that resists the push of other fields coming in from outside.

So instead of feeding on the world, you’re sending good energy out into the world. Think of it radiating out from you.

That’s a lot of what the practice is all about. After all, what is clinging? It’s feeding: taking in, taking in, taking in, and then getting sick from taking things in that we shouldn’t take in. If you learn to generate some good energy and push it out, then you don’t get infected by the world. And to whatever extent your good energy really is good, combined with some goodwill for everybody, it’s your gift to the world.

As you’re going through the world with beauty queens and crowds, people with raised swords and animals, and other people’s vacuum cleaners, you can turn your vacuum cleaner off, spread goodwill around, fill your body with good energy. That way, you keep yourself safe and you’re providing something good for the world as well. One less person in turmoil. One less person creating disturbances. One more person giving some peace to this world, which needs it so much.