Free Will
November 24, 2023

Close your eyes and watch your breath. Try to stay with the breath all the way in, all the way out. Try to make the breath comfortable, so that it’s a good place to stay, so that you want to stay here. Because the mind does have a habit of wandering off. It’s used to focusing on something and then getting uncomfortable, so it’s always ready to jump, jump, jump to the next thought. But here you try and give it a good place to stay and train it how to stay. If you find that it is wandering off, you just drop that thought, whatever it is.

Remember that you do have the choice. You can either follow it or come back. It’s not the case that you have accept everything that comes up in the mind. There are many things the Buddha says you have to accept. You have to accept the fact that there’s going to be physical pain in life. When someone has died, you have to accept the fact that they’re dead. When people have spoken harsh words to you, unkind words, untrue words to you, you have to accept that as part of the human condition. But as for unskillful thoughts that come up in your mind—greed, aversion, and delusion: Those the Buddha says you don’t accept at all.

And you have the choice. One of the worst wrong views in the world is that you have no free will, that you have no choice. The Buddha wasn’t the sort of person to go out to look for arguments, but if he found that people were teaching that what you’re experiencing right now is totally determined by the past, he would go and argue with them. He’d say: How can you have a path to practice if you think everything is determined by the past? How can anybody escape from suffering? It’s the fact that we do have free will, at least to some extent, that we can take advantage of that, make the choice that we want to find a way out.

You do exert some control over your mind, so learn how to do it skillfully. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of remembering that you initially wanted to be here with the breath, and now you’re someplace else. Well, remember to be back and you’ll be right back. Other times, you have think about the drawbacks of the thinking that pulled you away. You realize it’s not really anything you want to stay involved in. Or you can simply ignore it and just not get involved. Or you can relax around the thought. Every thought requires some tension, so if you relax around it, the thought has no place to stay. Or there are times the Buddha said we have to beat the mind down. You might want to use a meditation word really fast, like machine gun fire—“Buddho, Buddho, Buddho,” really fast—to keep your mind from thinking about anything else.

There are lots of different ways of dealing with distraction. And trying to control the mind is not being a control freak. You’re trying to control it skillfully, because you have the potential that you can do that, and you can benefit from it.

So accept the fact that, yes, the mind has wandered off, but don’t accept the fact that it’s going to keep on wandering. Just keep bringing it back. Keep bringing it back. Make the breath a good place to stay. Remind yourself that you’re developing some important skills here as you get concentrated—that the mind will be more and more inclined to come back and stay when it comes.

And be more on the lookout for any other thoughts that would pull you away. Jump out of them as quickly as you can. It’s in this way you exert skillful control over the mind. And you learn what to accept, what not to accept. In that way, you benefit from the fact that you do have freedom of choice. So make the most of it.