In the Act

Close your eyes. Be aware of your breath. Know when it’s coming in, know when it’s going out, while it’s happening. Also be aware of your own mind—make sure it’s there with the breath. This is the quality of alertness.

Ajaan Lee says that it’s like a rope over a pulley. You pull the rope in one direction, focused on the breath. Then, you pull the rope in the other direction, focused on the mind. Make sure they’re there together. You want to be there, in case the mind starts to wander off, because you want to catch it in the act.

It’s only when you catch the mind in the act that you’ll really do something about it—when you really understand it. You can know in theory that the mind has greed, aversion, delusion, or that it has any of the five hindrances—sensual desire, ill-will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and anxiety or doubt: You can know about these things, you can know their names, but as the ajaans say in Thailand, it’s like knowing the names of criminals. Just knowing their names is not enough to catch them, not enough to stop them. You’ve got to catch them in the act. Then you have definite proof that these are the criminals. Then, you can take them away.

It’s like dealing with dogs. We used to have a lot of dogs in Wat Dhammasthit and to train them as to where they should and should not go to the bathroom, you had to catch them in the act—throw a stone at them, while they were doing their business, and then they’d never do it there again, at least at that one spot. If you threw a stone at them later, they wouldn’t make the connection.

It’s the same with your mind. When you catch yourself wandering off, you see how stupid it is, you see that you’re going after things that are not for your best interests or you can see the reason for why you’re wandering off is pretty bad, then you’re not going to do it again. Otherwise, you can know the names of all the hindrances, you can call them out all day long, but that doesn’t scare them away.

You’ve got to catch the mind in the act, which means that you’ve to be alert all the time. Make this a practice as you go through the day: “Where is your mind, right now?” There’s an old advertisement they had—“It’s 10 o’clock p.m. Do you know where your child is?” Here, right now, it’s around 9 o’clock a.m. Do you know where your mind is? Make sure you do.

Then, if you make sure you know as you go through the day, you’ll learn a lot of good things. Following the instructions in the texts is like following a guide to a trail—they’ll tell where the trailhead is, they’ll tell where to turn left, where to turn right. But what you’re going to see on the trail is not just the trail—you see the landscape all around. They may talk about the highlights of the landscape, but sometimes you’ll notice things that are not listed in the highlights.

As we were just saying about a famous trail in South America: They’d assigned people to create a new trail because the old trail is turning into a big rut and it goes right up the hill-side. So they wandered off to the left, wandered off to the right and they found some water-falls that nobody knew about. If you just stayed on the old trail and focused on the old trail, you wouldn’t see much. But if you wander off a bit, you’ll notice what’s all around you.

Ideally, of course, you want to stay on the Buddha’s trail. But still, you can look around—particularly, you’ll want to look at your own mind, so that you can catch it in the act when it’s doing something that it shouldn’t be doing. And you can say, No, and you can say effectively because you’ve seen it while it’s doing it, you’ve seen why it’s doing it. Otherwise, you only know about things in the abstract. You won’t know why the mind has gone off. When you don’t know why, then it’s going to do it again.

So try to be on top of things. Be alert to what you’re doing right now, and that way, you’ll see a lot of things that are in line with the books, but not necessarily listed in the books—in particular, you’ll see the ins and outs of your own defilements. Those are the things that are actually causing you to suffer. It’s not the names in the books that’s causing you to suffer—it’s movements of the mind.

So you want to be there when they’re doing something that’s unskillful so that you can stop it. You can encourage it in the right direction, and that’s how the wisdom and the discernment become your own. And you use them to point the mind to where it’s the most effective.