Choices Make a Difference

When you make up your mind to stay with the breath, it makes a difference. Last night, I was listening to a Dhamma talk, and the person giving the talk was saying that your choices don’t really make a difference because they’ve already been determined. This morning I was reading somebody else saying that your choices don’t make any difference, that they really don’t matter. How and why this is sold as Dhamma, I have no idea.

As the Buddha said, if everything were predetermined from the past, our choices wouldn’t make any difference. We’d be bad because of things that had been determined in the past; we wouldn’t be responsible for anything. In a case like that, he said, you’re left feeling bewildered and unprotected. You really don’t know what to do. There’s no basis for deciding what should or shouldn’t be done. You feel an urge comes up and you’ve got to follow it. You’re not protected from your unskillful urges.

You have to realize that you can make a difference. If our actions didn’t make a difference, there’d be no end to suffering. So if you believe the Buddha was right in dedicating his life to teaching people how to put an end to suffering, then you have to believe that our choices really are choices and they really do make a difference.

So right now, choose to put your mind in a good state: calm, collected, at one with the breath. Choose to try to keep it there. As you keep it there, you’re going to be developing some good qualities: mindfulness, the ability to keep this in mind; alertness, the ability to watch what you’re doing; and ardency: If you see that you’re slipping off, you come right back. Slip off again, come right back again. You don’t stop to sniff the flowers or gaze at the sky. You’ve got work to be done here, training the mind in its good habits. Its good habits will then make it easier to make skillful decisions into the future.

So, given that what you choose to do does make a difference, put the mind in a position where it can make good choices. When it’s still and content—with a sense of ease and well-being with the breath, ease and well-being here in the present moment—then when unskillful things come up, you’re not so attracted to them. That’s our problem. Sometimes unskillful mind states promise some quick pleasures that don’t require much effort. But then that’s it. The pleasures change into something else. And then you’re stuck with the karma of having done something unskillful.

You want to be in a position where you can resist the allure of things like that. You know that your main purpose in life is to find long-term happiness—a happiness that doesn’t harm anybody else, that doesn’t harm you—so have a clear sense of your mind being rightly directed. Then do everything you can to make choices that follow in line with that direction. That way, you make a difference both to yourself and to the people around you. You can’t straighten out their minds, but you can set a good example: that happiness can be found by being skillful, by taking responsibility for your actions.

So try to make the best choices you can.