Quality Meditation

When you have a short meditation like this, you have to make up for the fact that there’s not much quantity. So. Bring some more quality. Where does the quality come from? It comes from your effort and your alertness. You want to be really alert to what you’re doing, which means you have to be able to step back a little bit from your thought worlds.

Most of us inhabit a thought world and then we drop it. Then we inhabit another one. And there’s a moment of unconsciousness between those worlds. As we go from one, we suddenly wake up and find ourselves in another. We’ve forgotten the fact that we’ve actually left the first one. We’re just reborn suddenly. That’s the way most people are reborn in samsara anyhow: There’s a blanking out.

So you’ve got to learn how to see through that. Otherwise, you just wander, wander, wander all the time, and then you have trouble remembering where you were. But if you can step back a little bit and say, “This is how my mind gets into that world, and this is how it pulls out,” then you’ll learn something really important. You realize you have the choice of going into those thought worlds or not.

So when you’re with the breath, you also have to have a part of your mind surveying both the mind and the breath to make sure they stay together. If the mind shows any signs of wanting to wander off, you’ve got to give a warning. Say: “We’re here to meditate; we’re not here to wander around.” In this way, you begin to develop some continuity.

Where does deep concentration come from? It comes from little moments of concentration strung together. As they get strung together, they get bigger and bigger, more and more solid. If they’re just little scattered beads without a string to tie them together, they don’t grow. This is where the analogy begins to break down, but you get the idea.

So try to string things together—which means watching yourself as you focus in on the breath, watching yourself as you see that the mind is beginning to move and look for something else. Learn how to say, “No. You’re going to stay right here.”

So it’s a combination of alertness and ardency that allows you to see what’s going on.

And when you can see what’s going on more clearly, then you’re more in control. Otherwise it’s pretty random. You think the thoughts you want to think, and you don’t have to think the thoughts you don’t want to think. That’s one of the goals of the practice. And you also want to improve your standards for what’s worth thinking and what’s not. It all starts with little things like this—being able to watch your mind in action and learn how to say, “Yes” and “No” in an effective way. That’s how the training develops. That’s how you get some quality into your meditation.

As Ajaan Lee once said, having a little piece of paper with a government seal—in other words, some paper money—even though it’s a much smaller piece of paper, id much better than having a whole bushel of newsprint. That little piece of money, that little slip of money, can buy you a lot of things. The newsprint can’t buy you much at all.

So make sure you make up for the lack of quantity with quality. Then, when you get used to having quality meditation for short periods, and going to want quality meditation for long periods. Then you have a whole bushel full of money, which is better than just one piece.