Timeless Practice

It’s good to have times like this when you can devote all your attention to the practice—all your attention to getting the mind to settle down, to find some calm—remembering how the Buddha said that there is no happiness other than peace. You want to look for as much peace inside as you can.

But you can’t spend all your time sitting here with your eyes closed. You’ve got to go through the day. You have all kinds of needs, in terms of your body, in terms of the family, the group you’re in. At times like that, the meditation turns into restraint of the senses. You look at how you look at things, you listen to how you listen to things, and then you’re very careful about how you comment about what you’re seeing, what you’re hearing, what you’re smelling, tasting, touching.

That’s a lot of the problem right there: in your comments on things. The contact itself lasts for a little bit and then goes. It can be pleasant or unpleasant. But the mind tends to magnify things, turn them into big stories. It’s what you tell yourself about the things you see and hear, etc.—that’s the problem. So you have to focus on that. You look at something and see all kinds of reasons for wanting it. But you can look at it another way, look at the same thing, and find all kinds of reasons for not wanting it.

So as Ajaan Lee said, “Be a person with two eyes.” When you see something attractive or hear something attractive, look for its unattractive side as well. Talk to yourself about that. And the same with all the other senses.

This may be one of the reasons why the Buddha said to practice mindfulness of the body as you go through the day as your foundation for sense restraint. When you’re mindful of the body, it’s a way of trying to keep your concentration going as you go through the day. When you’re more concentrated, then you hear more clearly what the mind has to say. It’ll have many layers, many different hallways, little echoes inside. A little statement gets said here, and it echoes through your mind—sometimes subterraneanly, sometimes out in the open. The more you can get the mind quiet, the more you can hear these things, see what you’re actually saying. That way, you can get some more control over the mind.

This, as Ajaan Fuang would say, is how the practice becomes timeless. Whether your eyes are closed while you’re sitting here, whether your eyes are open as you go through the day, it’s all the same practice: keeping the mind right where it should be, not letting it go wandering out of its ancestral territory. That way, you stay safe.