Innately Changeable

Close your eyes and pay attention to your breath. Notice when it’s coming in; notice when it’s going out. Keep with it each time you breathe in, each time you breathe out. You’re trying to give the mind a place to stay solidly in the present moment. Otherwise, it wanders around.

You know what happens to people who wander around without a home, without a good, solid place to stay. They’re exposed to all kinds of dangers. When you have a good place to stay, though, you can look at the weather outside—the weather’s good, then you go out. If it’s not good, you come back in. You also get a good sense of who you should let into the house and who you should not let into the house.

First you’ve got to give the mind a good place to stay. So stay right here and make the breath comfortable. You can try making it longer or shorter. Faster, slower. Heavier, lighter. Deeper, more shallow. See what way of breathing feels good for the body right now. Sometimes it needs a way of breathing that’s relaxing because it’s tense. Other times it needs breathing that’s energizing because you’re tired. So read what the body needs and provide that.

At the same time, read what the mind needs. We like to think that the mind is innately good, that all of our thoughts are basically well-meaning. But if you actually look at what’s coming out of the mind, all kinds of things can come. If the mind is innately anything, it’s innately changeable. It can be heading in one direction, and in a split second, it’s heading off in another direction. You have to gain some control over it, and having a good, solid place to stay is an important part of gaining some control.

Otherwise, when you’re standing at the side of the road with no protection, you just go with anything. But if you have some protection, then who can come into the house—who doesn’t come into the house—you get to choose. And also what goes out of the house: You get to be very careful about that as well.

This is one of the reasons why we’ve got the precepts: to make you stop and think about what you’re letting out into the world. “When I’m going to say something, or do something, will it break the precepts at all?” The Buddha didn’t put down the precepts arbitrarily. He saw that when you break the precepts at any time, it’s going to be harmful—harmful for yourself, harmful for other people. So it’s good to have a few, clear guidelines like that, against which you can check your impulses.

Otherwise, all your impulses say they’re good or right or justified. The Buddha says well, sometimes, you may think they’re justified, but there are certain things you could say that would not be true or would be actually harmful, things you could do that would be harmful. No matter how much you try to justify them to yourself, they’re not going to be good in the long term. So it’s good to have some objective outside standards for measuring things.

Of the precepts, the one that’s most important is the one against lying. Unfortunately, it’s the easiest one to break. We fudge the truth, sometimes out of good intentions, sometimes out of bad intentions. But even if we think we have good intentions, the long-term consequences are not going to be good. So you have to be especially careful about that one.

As Ajaan Lee used to say, “You went to all the trouble to become a human being with a human mouth, so bow down to your mouth every day.” You’ve got a mouth that can say wonderful things, convey important truths, and how many times are you actually using it for those purposes, though? Sometimes it’s just shooting the breeze. As you shoot the breeze, you begin to say things that you didn’t really mean to say. You get less and less mindful about what you’re saying. That makes it difficult to train the mind.

The first step in training the mind is training your mouth, because you’re going to be talking to yourself as you meditate. So learn how to talk well outside, and it gets easier to talk well inside—so that this quality of the mind that’s so changeable doesn’t change in the wrong direction. Learn how to give it a good, solid basis right here, right now, with a sense of well-being, a sense of ease, a sense of belonging here. Then as you go out into the world, you can take this sense of stability with you. In that way, you’re much more likely to do and say and think the right things, because you have more control over what’s coming out. And you’re very careful about what you let in.

So think of this is as a house with windows and doors you can open and close. Or as a road that has a green light and a red light. Obey the green lights and the red lights. There are good things you can do? Well go ahead. There are unskillful things? You can stop. When you have this kind of control over the mind, you find that your life goes a lot more easily. You benefit and the people around you benefit as well.