Losses

Close your eyes. Put some energy into staying with the breath, staying with the object of your concentration, because if you put energy in, more energy comes out. Concentration, after all, is a strength. But as with the body, you have to give some strength already to get some more. In Thai they call it auk kamlang, putting out energy. You have to put out the energy in the body for you to get more energy in the body. And it’s the same with the concentration. Put some energy into staying with the breath so that you really are solidly here, because you’re going to need this strength coming from within.

We live in a world where there’s loss all around. Some kinds of loss, the Buddha said, are serious. Some are not so serious. But either way, you’re going to need some strength to deal with them.

The ones that, in his eyes, are not serious are things that the world takes very seriously: loss of wealth, loss of health, loss of your relatives. He says you can lose those things, and you get them back. And you’re going to lose them anyhow. It’s not the case that when you go from this world you can take these things with you. Above all, losing these things doesn’t mean that you’re going to go to a bad destination.

However, if you lose your virtue and lose your right view, then you can go to a bad destination very easily. Right view here meaning belief in the power of your actions, that you really are responsible for your actions, and your actions do have an impact on you and on the world around you. That’s the basis of right view. You don’t want to ever lose that understanding of the importance of action.

At the same time, based on that right view, you realize you don’t want to lose your virtue. If you do harmful things to others, the harm is going to come back to you. So you want to make sure that you act in ways that are harmless—no killing, no stealing, no illicit sex, no lying, no intoxicants. You don’t want to lose those principles.

The important thing to note is that you can lose them only if you throw them away. The world doesn’t take them from you. So you want to make sure your mind is strong enough so you don’t feel tempted to throw them away.

This is why we work on the concentration so that the mind has a strong sense of center inside, a place where it feels at home and cannot be touched by things outside. You want to work on that center as best you can so that when good things come to you in the course of life, you don’t get complacent. When good things go away, you don’t get upset. You realize this is the nature of the world. Things come and they go. But you want to have something solid inside that you can hold on to, so that your goodness doesn’t start going with the things as they go.

So work on developing this strength inside. Put some energy into your concentration, and you’re going to get a lot of energy out. Then try to use that energy to make sure your mind is solid and reliable, steady.

As the Buddha said, you want to make your mind like earth. People can pour disgusting things on earth, but the earth doesn’t shrink away. They pour perfume on the earth, the earth doesn’t rise up to meet the perfume. This doesn’t mean that you’re totally unfeeling. It means simply that you don’t react in ways that blind you to what’s going on. If you’re all wound up in the reaction, then you can’t see things clearly. There has to be a part of the mind that’s independent, solid, sure. Then you can see things for what they are and have the strength to do what needs to be done.