Use Your Judgment

As you settle down with the breath, you have to direct your thoughts to the breath and then evaluate what you’re doing, both in terms of the breath itself and in terms of the mind’s inner conversation. You look at the breath to see if it’s comfortable. The question is, how do you know if it’s comfortable? Well, you try different kinds of breathing. See which is the best.

Ordinarily, we just let the body do its own breathing without our interfering too much. But now we can try to use the ability to change the breath to see if we can make it better. After all, it is the force of life. And if you allow it to go through the different parts of the body easily, freely, it’s going to be good for them.

That’s one thing you evaluate. The other thing you evaluate is how well you’re doing this. One thing you don’t evaluate is whether you’re a good meditator or not. That never comes into the equation. The Buddha said that his gift, as the gift of any teacher should be, is to give you a sense of what should and shouldn’t be done. That way, you protect yourself from your uncertainty.

Some people take that as passing judgment on actions, and from your actions, you pass judgment on yourself as a good or bad person. That, he said, is unskillful. As soon as you start judging yourself as a person, you place limitations on yourself. Sometimes it can get pretty negative.

When you just look at your actions, you can say, “Okay, that was not wise.” The fact that you can see that it was not wise shows that you have the possibility of doing it better. So keep on focusing on your actions, focusing your powers of judgment there. That’s when they’re used wisely.

Again, sometimes you hear, or you’re told, not to pass judgment on things, just to accept them as they are. Well, if the Buddha had accepted things as they were, he wouldn’t have left the palace. He realized that there had to be a better way to live. So he set out to find it. Once he found it, he taught it to other people.

Now, we don’t know for sure what he said is true until we’ve gained awakening ourselves. This is why we need conviction in the path, conviction in the Buddha, at least to the extent that we believe they’re worth a serious try, because without that conviction, we’re lost. As he said, we’re left unprotected, prey to all kinds of ideas, none of which have any clear foundation.

But here’s someone who seems reliable. Other people who seem reliable have said that they’ve put his teachings into practice, and they’ve found good results as well. So we should give the teachings a try: Focus on what’s skillful and what’s unskillful in your actions, as you get the mind to settle down and as you go through the day. This is one of the reasons why we have the precepts, to give you some standards against which you can measure your actions, measure your intentions.

Then we have the instructions in mindfulness and concentration to give you something to use to measure your actions inside. You find that, as you try to live up to those standards, the mind gets lighter and lighter, your burdens get less and less. And so you realize that the Buddha really does give protection, takes us to a place of safety.

That’s one of the names for nibbana. We think of nibbana as being the name for the goal. It’s actually one of many, and one of them is refuge, saraṇa, a place of true safety. We can find it through our efforts.

As for who we are along the way, that’ll change. Our sense of who we are will change, until we don’t need it anymore. What’s really important is that you focus on what you’re doing, and the question of how you can do it well.

Commit yourself to the practice, reflect on the results, and then commit yourself again. That’s how you make progress.