Freedom & Independence

Close your eyes. Take a couple of good, long, deep, in-and-out breaths. And wherever you feel the breathing in the body, focus your attention there. Then ask yourself if it’s comfortable. If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you can change. Make it shorter, more shallow. Heavier, lighter. Faster, slower. See what rhythm of breathing feels best for the body right now.

Then train the mind to stay right here with the breath. If it wanders off, just bring it back. Wanders off again? Bring it back again. Ask yourself where the breath could be even more comfortable so that the mind will be more and more willing to stay.

It’s important that we train the mind. We can’t just let it wander around as it likes.

The paradox, of course, is that we’re training it to be free and independent. But the Buddha’s sense of freedom and independence is not like the typical person’s sense of those terms. For most people, freedom means free to do what you want. Independent means you can be looking after yourself and don’t have to worry about other people. You can take care of yourself.

But from the Buddha’s point of view, those ideas don’t work. After all, what you want may be pretty tyrannical. If what you want ends up causing yourself suffering, is it really freedom when you follow those wants?

What you want to do is be able to be free to do what is skillful, what will lead to long-term happiness. Some of the obstacles to that freedom are outside, as when people make it really difficult for you to observe the precepts. But most of these obstacles are inside, as our own greed, aversion, and delusion make us want to do things that are not in our own best interest. So we have to train the mind; subdue those qualities; get them under control, if we want to be free, in a genuine sense of the word.

The same with independence: The idea that you’re totally independent from other people—some people say is the source of all evil. But it’s actually pretty stupid. It’s not evil. It’s dumb. If your happiness depends on other people’s suffering, they’re not going to stand for it. They’re going to do what they can to put an end to it. You realize that you do have to depend on other people, so you want to take their best interests to heart.

But at the same time, you do want your goodness to be independent. In other words, what other people do, no matter how poorly they behave, you don’t take that as an excuse for your own poor behavior. You make sure that whatever you do, whatever comes out of the mind in terms of your thoughts, your words, or your deeds, really is skillful—and it doesn’t depend on other people being good to you. You’re good to them regardless. After all, that is your karma.

That sense of being independent is absolutely necessary for goodness to survive in the world because there are so many people misbehaving. If we take other people’s misbehavior as an excuse for our own misbehavior, we’re just pulling one another down. So whether they try to pull you down, they spit horrible words at you, just let them fall at the ground at your feet. You don’t have to take them in. They do horrible things to you? Again, you don’t have to take it in. Just say to yourself: “That effect goes only as far as the body, but my mind can be independent.” It can keep on producing good things because the good things you produce are your wealth.

The good things that other people do for you, that’s your old wealth that wears away, wears away. That means you have to keep on creating new wealth.

So make sure that you’re independent inside in terms of generating goodness all the time. In that way, you’re free and independent in a way that really means a lot; it really is valuable.