Complete Goodness

Close your eyes. Take a couple of good, long, deep, in-and-out breaths. And notice where you feel the breathing in your body. Focus your attention there. Then ask yourself if long breathing feels good. If it does, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you can change it. Make it shorter, more shallow, heavier, lighter, faster, slower. Experiment for a while to see what kind of breathing feels best for you right now.

We’re training the mind here because that’s an important aspect of developing goodness in your life.

The Buddha talks about three kinds of goodness—generosity, virtue, and training the mind in meditation. The first two help other people, and the meditation helps other people as well. Sometimes we’re accused of looking out after only our own welfare here, but that’s not the case. When you get your mind well-trained, the people around you benefit, too, because your own greed, aversion, and delusion don’t go prowling around disturbing the neighbors. You’re more in control of what’s going on in your mind.

As you stay here with the breath, you’ll notice the thoughts coming into the mind that want to go someplace else. You have to say, “No” because you’re training the mind to get settled down here. So you’ve got to keep that in mind. That’s mindfulness.

Then you have to be alert to what’s happening, particularly alert to what you’re doing so that you can see what’s resulting from your actions, and then make adjustments as you have to.

The adjustments come under what’s called ardency. You’re trying to do this well. That’s a good character quality to develop. Whatever activities you do in life, you want to make sure you do them well.

When you have these three qualities—mindfulness, alertness, ardency—then whatever task you take on is going to go better. So work directly on these qualities of mind. We’ve been generous. We observe the precepts. What we usually miss, though, is getting the mind really well trained.

So if you want your goodness to be complete, this is what you have to work on. Of course, if your generosity is weak or your virtue is weak, you’ve got to work on that as well. You want your goodness to be complete. You want it to be well balanced.

But it’s important that you realize that goodness comes from within. We often think that the good things of life come from outside—the things we attain, the relationships we gain—but real goodness comes from within. If you don’t have any inner goodness, then no matter what you have in terms of material things, it’s not really satisfying. Sometimes you can abuse those forms of wealth, and they end up harming you. The same with relationships: If your mind isn’t under control, relationships can be really bad.

So learn how to gain some control over your own mind. This is the number one task, or number one responsibility for you in this world. So make sure you do it well.