Intent

Close your eyes. Take a couple of good, long, deep, in-and-out breaths. Ask yourself: Where do you feel the breath in the body? It may not be where you expect. But wherever it’s clearest now that the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out—focus your attention there. Then give it your full attention. You want to see if the breath is comfortable. The more comfortable you can make it, the more likely the mind will want to stay in the present moment.

This quality of intent is really important. We have so many intentions in life, and so many of them are working at cross purposes. It’s good to sit quietly for a while to figure out what you really want in life. What’s really worth wanting? There are a lot of things you might want, but they’re not going to give you any real satisfaction. They come and they go. Sometimes, in order to get them, you do things that are not all that honorable, which means then you have the bad karma that comes from doing those things. It’s really worthwhile to do something that in the doing is good, and in the receiving—in the attaining—is good as well.

To find anything really good like that, you have to look inside the mind because the things outside in the world keep changing on us. The people we love are going to be parted from us someday. The things we like about life, the things we want, are going to wear down. The only thing of really lasting quality is the quality of your mind.

And even that, if you haven’t trained it, is not going to be all that lasting. Sometimes it goes in this direction; sometimes it switches around and goes in the opposite direction. You want to train the mind so it’s intent on one thing that’s really worthwhile. So while you’re thinking about what that might be, you also have to think about what qualities of mind you have to develop to get to something like that.

You have to be mindful. In other words, once you’ve chosen a goal, you keep it in mind. And you have to be alert, to see if you’re actually following the steps that lead to that goal. And you have to be ardent. You have to really want to do this and want to do it well, because the quality of your life is going to depend on the quality of your intentions, the quality of your actions.

You develop these qualities with this exercise of staying with the breath. You have to keep the breath in mind—that’s mindfulness. You have to be alert to what it’s doing, whether it’s comfortable or not. And you have to be ardent in doing it well in order to get the results you need. So you’re developing the qualities of character that you need in order to find whatever you’ve chosen as your goal.

So take this exercise and use it as a day-to-day activity. And be really intent on it while you’re doing it. If you just go through the motions, you get half-baked results. If you want fully baked results, you have to develop the skills so that they really are mastered. So it’s something you do every day. Give full attention to it every day.

This quality of intentness is one of the bases of success, as the Buddha said. There are four bases in all. You have to want something. You have to focus the desire on the causes. That’s the first base. The second base is persistence. You really stick with it. The third base is intent: You pay careful attention to what you’re doing. Give it your full attention. The fourth is circumspection. In other words, you think about what you’re doing and figure out how to do it best—how to choose a goal that’s good, and also how to choose the means that are good. You give it a try and then you look at the results. And if you don’t like the results, then you can change.

But you have to use your powers of analysis in order to see these things. So it requires your full commitment.

After all, what are you looking for? You’re looking for something that constitutes true happiness. You’d think that everybody would take their happiness seriously. But most people treat happiness in such a casual way. They think that it just comes and goes; there’s no predicting it. Or maybe happiness depends on being wealthy. But if you look carefully at people who are wealthy, they’re not happy. Some of them are, but not all of them. So their wealth isn’t the factor that makes a difference.

People with a lot of power, people with a lot of beauty—all these things—they don’t really make you happy. The things that make you happy are having a well-trained mind, a mind that can find happiness within, something that’s really solid and lasting. And it depends on qualities of a good character as well. So you can be proud of the fact that you’ve attained these things.

So think carefully about what you want out of life. The rains retreat is going to start in a week, and it’s good to think about what you want to accomplish. Every year, as we go through the rains, we make our determination that we want to do something special for the rains. What do you really want to develop for that period of time?

Life passes away, passes away, slips by us. We don’t know how many more rains retreats we’re going to have left, so make the most out of this one. Be really intent on choosing a good goal and be really intent on doing all the steps that lead to that good goal. That way, you have something to show for the fact that time is passing away. The body is passing away, but you’ve found something that’s really solid and doesn’t pass away. That’s when you’ve chosen a good goal, and you’ve worked properly in order to attain it.