Getting Your Head Around the Goal
I know a lot of people who complain that they can’t get their heads around what it would be like to be awakened, what nibbana is like. But we have to remember that that’s not the duty with regard to nibbana. We’re not here to get our heads around it. We’re here to realize it. The word for realizing, in Pali, saccikaroti, basically means to verify, to witness. In other words, our goal here is to have a direct experience. We do that by following the path.
Now, the right view that begins the path is informed by reading and listening. There’d be no point in having Dhamma talks like this if that weren’t the case. Then there’s the discernment that comes from thinking things through, and then the discernment that comes from developing. A lot of times, our problem is we want to think things through beforehand in the hope that the more we analyze the issue, the more we read and think about things, then the more we’ll have a good idea of what it’s like to be awakened. Sometimes we even hope that that anticipation will lighten our burden and take us there. We want it to be our shortcut.
Of course, it does help to have a clear grasp of what the Buddha actually taught. But there’s only so much that listening and thinking can do for you. And there are no shortcuts on the path.
Right view has to be made truly right by developing the qualities of the path. The temptation when you anticipate is to think, “Well, maybe I could clone awakening.” There are even people who describe the practice as the practice of being awakened. In other words, you think about what the qualities of an awakened person would be, and you try to find or reproduce them in your mind. But that’s actually the practice of pretending to be awakened because those qualities don’t come about simply through thinking about them, or perceiving ideas about them and trying to impose those perceptions on the mind—or to say, “Well, awakened beings have gone beyond duality, so I’ll just go beyond duality myself.” That’s just playing with the concepts.
You have to put the mind through its exercises because realizing awakening requires that the mind develop strength in its powers of perception, its powers of attention, its powers of reflection. They’re going to be sharp enough and strong enough only if you put them to work in developing the factors of the path.
This is what we’re doing right now. We’re developing mindfulness. We’re developing concentration. Instead of focusing on our ideas of awakening, we’re focusing on the actual sensation of the breath. Instead of trying to figure out the goal, we keep coming back to the breath, exploring and figuring out what we’ve got here.
It’s through these exercises of mindfulness and concentration that the mind’s powers of perception can grow. When the mind is more still, it can see subtler things. It develops a more refined sense of what kind of pleasure can be experienced in the present moment. It also becomes sensitive to more refined levels of stress, dis-ease, or disturbance in the mind. It’s when you can see those things that you’re more likely to be able to see things that are deeper still inside.
So we focus on following the path. We don’t try to turn the path into the goal. That would be like wanting to go to the Grand Canyon when you’ve heard that the Grand Canyon is like a big trench in the earth, and you dig a big trench across your path: your own personal Grand Canyon. That makes it impossible to go any further. You just get stuck in the trench.
You don’t have to anticipate what awakening is going to be like in order to find it. Right anticipation is not one of the factors of the path. Instead, the Buddha says, “Try to focus on comprehending your suffering.” Again, it may seem like a diversion or a distraction. But if you exercise your mind through developing powers of concentration and mindfulness, and then turn them on understanding how it is that the mind creates suffering for itself—suffering around physical pain, suffering around mental pain—you can see a lot of the levels of fabrication going on in the mind.
There’s a book someone once did of Ajaan Chah’s Dhamma talks, and the translation was full of distortions. One of them was when Ajaan Chah was talking about how as you sit down here and your mind gets still, it’s like a still forest pool. The translators add that all sorts of wonderful and rare creatures will come to drink in the pool, and you as a meditator get to gaze at them in wonder and amazement. Well, the pool is actually your focus on stress and pain, and those wonderful and rare creatures are actually all your neurotic reactions around pain, all your unskillful attitudes.
You come to see a lot of things in the mind that usually go under the radar. After all, you’ve been dealing with pain since before you were born. When you were in the womb, it was bad enough. When you came out, you were suddenly exposed to air and they spanked you. This is after having gone through that very narrow passageway where you could’ve died.
Anyone who’s been around babies knows they cry a lot. And there’s nothing you can do to explain pain to them to let them know that this particular pain is not going to last forever, or that this particular pain is not going to grow and overwhelm their awareness. Babies have to figure pain out on their own in a pre-verbal way. Then, as they learn language, they can start articulating their attitudes toward pain, but they still maintain a lot of their pre-verbal notions. They—we—have carried those with us on into adulthood. And it’s only by getting the mind really still and asking the right questions around pain, around your perceptions of pain, that you’re going to dig out a lot of these old attitudes and be able to free yourself from them.
The path is something you do. It’s not something you anticipate. The goal is something you will actually experience directly, and the path will take you there, regardless of whether you had your head wrapped around it before or not. It’s always going to surprise you. So don’t worry about getting your head around the goal. Try to get your head in proper shape to actually experience the goal by exercising it: focusing on what you’re doing, focusing on the path.
People look at the factors of the path and wonder, “How could this possibly lead to something transcendent?” But that question comes from looking at the path from the outside. When you put yourself into the path, you see what ways your mind gets stretched, see how it gets exercised, see how it gets strong, how it develops a sensitivity inside, both to the things that come at it through the senses and to its own processes of fabrication.
A lot of the insight is going to be not about things you’re looking at, but about the way you look at things. In fact, once you’ve gotten the mind into right concentration, one of the ways of getting insight is to reflect on the concentration, to see where it could be more subtle, where it could be more solid, and where there are variations in the coming and going of levels of stress. When stress goes up, what did you just do? When it goes down, what did you just do? In asking questions like that, the activity of the path becomes the object that you try to understand.
So the path functions in two ways. One, it makes you more sensitive. And then two, it pares a lot of your activities down so you can watch them as they happen, as you’re doing them—and you can start questioning the doing that you’re doing.
So remember the duty with regard to the goal is to realize it. And you get there by following the duty for the path, which is to develop it. As you develop the path, you find that your mind develops to the point where it’s ready to directly experience the goal. You don’t have to pretend that you’re awakened. When awakening comes, it’s always going to be unexpected. So prepare to be surprised.
