Read Your Actions

Close your eyes. Watch your breath. And watch your mind watching the breath. Ajaan Lee gives the analogy of a pulley with a rope going over the pulley, and you can pull the rope in one direction, you can pull it in another direction. Sometimes you watch the breath. Sometimes you watch the mind watching the breath to see whether you can get them together.

To make another analogy: It’s like trying to fit two pieces of wood together. At first, they don’t fit quite right. What do you do? You have to figure out where to make the new cuts. Sometimes you make the cuts in the wrong places. You have to throw those pieces of wood away and then you try again. With wood that’s wasteful. With the breath, though, you can just do it as many times as you like to find a way of breathing that feels good, find a way of bringing the mind to the breath that feels right, focused on the right spot in the body—“right” in the sense that it feels good for you. Focus with the right amount of pressure. If there’s no pressure at all, the mind slips off. If there’s too much pressure, you feel confined. So learn how to do things, then evaluate them.

When the Buddha was introducing the Dhamma to his son, Rahula, one of the images he used was of a mirror. You look at your actions—your thoughts, words, and deeds—as you’d look at your face in a mirror. When there’s anything wrong, you remove the blemishes or the dirt on your face. The same way with your actions: You learn how to read your actions as to what kind of results they get. In this way you learn. This is how your discernment develops.

Discernment is not a matter of just imposing the Buddha’s concepts on your experience. It’s a matter of gaining a sensitivity to what you’re doing, the amount of stress that you’re creating through your actions, and figuring out which stress is necessary for right now and which stress is not—and then abandoning what’s not. In seeing that, then you get more and more skilled in observing yourself. That’s what discernment is all about.

When the Buddha talks about discernment, it’s not about discerning the solar system or discerning the stars outside. It’s discerning what’s going on in your mind in terms of sense of form, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness. Where are you going to see those things? Inside. In your mind. That’s one of the definitions of discernment: all-around knowing in terms of fabrication, of saṅkhāras. You get to know the saṅkhāras not just by watching them passively, but engaging in them and then evaluating them.

After all, you need perceptions, you need thought constructs, you need a feeling of pleasure in order to stay on the path. These are all aggregates. These are all fabrications. So you learn about them by doing them and then evaluating what you’ve done. As the Buddha said, this is how you nourish the Dhamma. You commit yourself to the practice and then you reflect on what you’ve done.

And it doesn’t stop there. You take what you’ve learned through reflection and you apply it the next time you act. Keep up this process, and discernment that really is your discernment will develop.

So learn how to read your mind, read your body, read your breath, so that you can get them all in harmony.