Heedfulness

We live in this very fragile world, a very tenuous place to be alive. You go up a couple miles, it’s too cold. The air pressure would make your head explode because there’s so little of it. You go down a couple miles, it’s too hot. You go down into the sea, you’d be crushed by the pressure. There’s a very thin skin here in which we can survive. And even in that skin, things have to be properly balanced. Earth, water, wind, fire: These are things we depend on for the survival of the body, but they can be too much or too little—and they kill us.

But you have to realize the life of the body is not nearly as important as the life of the mind. That, too, is precarious, but it can be trained so that it become less and less precarious. As the Buddha said, if you’re heedless, it’s the path to death. If you’re heedful, it’s the path to the deathless. Those who are heedful do not die. Those who are heedless are as if they’re already dead. In other words, your life, really, is in the goodness you do. You realize that if you create a sense of well-being in the present, at the same time, you provide for your future by doing good.

So do your best to make your mind more firm, more solid, more heedful—thinking about the consequences of your actions. As the Buddha said, that’s the beginning of wisdom. It’s hard to draw a clear line between wisdom and heedfulness. Discernment, as the Buddha teaches it, takes the principle of heedfulness and makes it more and more precise, more and more subtle, more and more effective. But it’s the same principle all the way through: Your actions shape your life now and on into the future. So you want to shape them well.

Heedfulness, compunction, wisdom—these three qualities all come together. That’s the life of the mind. That’s your life. That’s how you keep yourself alive. The elements may be way out of whack and destroy property, destroy lives, but as long as your goodness is still alive, that’s what matters. You’ll be able to maintain your humanity with other people and to keep clear watch over yourself, realizing that if you really do have concern for yourself—if you really do love yourself—you’ll do the best to train the mind, because that’s where your happiness becomes more and more secure. Your heedfulness becomes more and more established, more and more wise. And that’s the life that’s really worth preserving.