The Battle Within

One of the bases of success in meditation is desire—the desire to do it well, the desire to get results. But you can’t focus on the results. You have to focus your desire on the causes. Right now the cause is keeping the mind with the breath, keeping your awareness with the breath, paying attention to how the breath is doing right now. When it’s coming in, does it feel good? Is it too long, too short? Too heavy, too light? Too fast, too slow? You can adjust things as you like. By getting interested in this, you find yourself wanting to stay more and more, because you begin to see that the way you breathe will have an impact on how you feel your body, and how you feel your body will have an impact on the mind. So there’s a lot to explore here.

But the problem is you have other desires as well. There’s going to be a battle. The beginning of discernment is seeing that you’ve got some desires that will lead you to long-term welfare and other desires that will just lead you around by the nose without any promise about where they’ll take you. So you’ve got to figure out which is which and then figure out how you can want to stay with the ones that lead to long-term happiness. Then you can say No to the ones that lead someplace else.

This is going to require some training, because the mind has been wandering around—usually based on what it feels like doing. There are times, of course, when you have work you have to do, so you force yourself. But then when you don’t have to force yourself, you say, “Let the mind wander as it likes.” Yet when it wanders as it likes, sometimes it gets itself into trouble.

You’ve got to learn how to curb your desires by using one desire, the desire for true happiness, to overcome other desires that want the quick fix. So there’ll be a battle. This is why we train, just like soldiers need to train for a battle. The Buddha himself would use this image a lot: the soldiers who know how to fight, the soldiers who know how to be brave in the battle.

Back in those days, the archers were a big part of the army. The archers had to practice again and again and again. And theirs weren’t little bows and arrows like we play with when we’re children. They were huge bows, taller than human beings. You had to be really strong, you had to be really quick, and you had to be really accurate. That required a lot of skill. It required a lot of training. That’s an image to hold in mind.

As you’re here, doing battle with your defilements and doing battle with your unskillful desires, and finding that you’re losing, don’t get discouraged. It’s a part of the training. The fact that you’re putting up a fight means you can learn. If you don’t put up a fight at all, you don’t learn anything. When you put up a fight, you begin to see that “These are their tricks. What can I do to get past their tricks?” And you start thinking about things, start looking at your mind from a different angle—an angle that’s a lot more useful than its usual angle.

So accept the fact that there is going to be a battle inside. But it’s a battle with the prospect of winning. When you win, it’s not like ordinary battles in the world where you just simply create more karma. This is winning and finding a goal that really is worthwhile, a goal that’s not going to change on you, a goal that’s not going to create bad karma.

Accept defeat every now and then, but learn from your defeat. If you just give up, give in, you can’t even say that you lost. Losing is better than not fighting at all, because when you lose, if you’re observant, you can learn. You come back the next time, and then you can win.