The Mind You Bring

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

As the Buddha said, you want to be able to breathe in and out sensitive to a sense of fullness, sensitive to a sense of pleasure. That depends both on the mind you bring to the meditation and also to the topic you’re focusing on, like the breath. So. Work on the breath to make sure it’s comfortable. And look at the mind state you’re bringing.

We live together as human beings, and one of the best ways of creating a good mind state to bring to the breath is to live together in peace and harmony. The Buddha gives recommendations for how to do that.

There are six points all together, and the first three of them are goodwill: goodwill in your actions, goodwill in your words, goodwill in your thoughts. He could have said just goodwill once and left it at that. But he wanted to make sure that you think of all the implications of goodwill.

After all, you can sit here thinking goodwill for all beings and then get behind your car and get cut off by somebody in traffic, and you’re thinking black thoughts about the person who cut you off. Yet that’s precisely when you need goodwill: realizing that the people we’re living with have their problems, they have their suffering.

If you see people who are worse off than you are, realize that you’ve been there in the past too. People are better off than you are? You’ve been there in the past as well. So you shouldn’t look down on people who are worse off and you shouldn’t be jealous of people who are better off right now. Realize that we’re all human beings. We’re going up and down. We’re going up and down at different times, in different places.

So thoughts of jealousy, thoughts of contempt, have no place in human society, if we want our society to be human. As the Buddha said, if you see somebody who’s very, very wealthy—has all the power, beauty, good things in the world—remember that you’ve been there before. You see poor people on the side of the street—who have nothing at all—well, you’ve been there too. So have some fellow feeling for them, because we’re all in this together.

The other points that the Buddha pointed out are, one, if you have material gain, you share it. Especially if you get something especially nice, you share it. That creates a sense of harmony in the group, a sense that we’re concerned for one another, happy to share our good fortune with one another.

As for our virtue, the Buddha says you want your virtue to be equal, but not just equal on any level: equal on the level that the noble ones would approve of. In other words, they see that you hold by the precepts all the time, without exception, and you handle the precepts in a way that’s conducive to concentration.

In other words, you don’t get obsessed by past mistakes you’ve made. You learn from your mistakes. You realize, “Okay, I did something or said something I shouldn’t have done.” You have to realize why that’s not a good thing to do and then remind yourself not to do that. Make up your mind you’re not going to do that again. This is how we grow as human beings.

Then spread goodwill to everyone, including yourself, so that you don’t beat yourself up over your past mistakes. If you beat yourself up over your past mistakes, you tend to want to forget them. When you forget your past mistakes, then you can’t learn from them.

It’s when we have a virtue in common that we can live with one another. We see this all around; virtuous people have trouble living with people who don’t have the precepts. You just don’t feel right living with them. And it’s a source of friction in the community. So everybody should try to raise the level of his virtue so that’s something that the noble ones would praise, the noble ones would approve of.

And finally, make sure that your views are right. You realize that we live because of our actions. We experience happiness and pain because of our actions. So for the bad things that are happening in life, you don’t go around blaming other people. Just tell yourself, “Okay, I must have made mistakes in the past. I want to make sure I don’t make those mistakes again.” When you realize that the important things in life are your own actions, you stay focused in the right place.

So you see that all of these come together. You have goodwill for yourself, goodwill for others. You realize when you have made a mistake that’s actually been harmful to yourself or to others, and you make up your mind you’re not going to do that ever again. And then you have more goodwill to strengthen that resolve. In this way you can live with yourself, you can live with others, and we can live in harmony.

All the conflict we see in the world these days is because people don’t follow these principles. So keep them in mind: goodwill in your thoughts, your words, your deeds; generosity with the good things you’ve gained; virtue on the level of the noble ones; and then right view on the level of the noble ones. If we live in this way, there’ll be peace in the world. If we can’t get peace in the whole world, at least we have peace in our world.

So start where you’re responsible. However far out those influences go, it’s all to the good.