A Gift of Value

Close your eyes; take a couple of good, long, deep, in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breathing in the body. Focus your attention there. And if long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you can change. Make it shorter, more shallow, heavier, lighter, faster, slower. Try to see what rhythm and texture of breathing feels good for the body right now.

As you do this, you’re developing good qualities in the mind: qualities like mindfulness, the ability to keep something in mind; alertness, the ability to watch what you’re doing while you’re doing it; and ardency, the desire to do this well. This is why meditation is called development, because you’re developing qualities that are useful not only when you’re sitting here with your eyes closed, but also as you go through the day.

We’ve come to make merit, dedicate the merit to those who have passed away. You want to make sure that your merit is complete. You’ve given gifts, you’re observing the precepts, but you’ve got to develop good qualities in the mind. You have to meditate, too, for the merit to be complete. Think of the mind state that you’re developing right now as a gift to the person you’re dedicating merit to. You want it to be of high value.

So. Make it one. Stay with one thing. Stay with that one thing continually. That’s when the value of the mind gets lifted. We often think that someone who has lots of ideas, lots of thoughts, is really smart. But sometimes it’s smarter just to be really still so that you can see what’s actually going on in your mind, to make the mind one.

It’s like going into a market. If there’s only one mango in the market, that mango is going to have a high price. If there are lots of mangoes, sometimes they get thrown away because they can’t be sold in time. But if there’s one mango, it’s going to command a high price. So make your mind one so that it has a high value. And then try to maintain that.

It’s in the maintaining that the value grows. You begin to see things in the mind you didn’t see before. You begin to understand how, say, when greed comes, it comes in little, tiny thoughts. When anger comes, when fear, when jealousy—these things come in little, tiny thoughts to begin with, like little, tiny seeds. And just because a seed is small doesn’t mean it can’t grow large. Think of the redwoods up north. Their seeds are tiny, tiny things, like a grain of rice. Yet they grow into the tallest trees on earth. And it’s the same with the defilements of the mind. When greed comes in, when anger comes in, it comes in as a little, tiny seed. But then it can grow, and it can grow very quickly.

So you want to make the mind quiet so that you can see these things when they come. Then you can deal with them. It’s a lot easier to pick off a seed and not let it grow than it is to uproot a tree that’s grown very large already.

So. This is the value of making your mind one. When it’s still like this, you can see things you didn’t see before. You can learn things you wouldn’t have learned otherwise. Then you take this mind state, and you dedicate it as a gift to those who have passed away.

When they get a gift of high value like this, they’re going to really appreciate it. The other advantage of making the mind one, is that when you dedicate thoughts to those who’ve passed away, the thoughts go much more easily. They go further because of the power of your concentration.

So to make your merit complete, to make a merit that has high value that you can send far, make sure you develop qualities like this in the mind—mindfulness, alertness, ardency—bringing the mind to oneness and learning how to keep it there.

That’s when it’s really valuable.