Staying True
October 18, 2007

Focus the mind on the breath. Notice where you feel the breath in the body. Any spot where the sensation is very clear that now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out: Focus on that spot. It doesn’t have to be at the nose. It might be in the chest. You can feel the rising of the chest as you breathe in, you can feel it fall as it breathe out. The same with the abdomen—anyplace in the body where there’s a sensation that lets you know that now the breath is coming in, now it’s going out. You can focus right there. And be careful as you focus to allow that spot to feel open and relaxed.

All too often when you focus, everything gets tensed up, everything gets tightened around the spot where you’re trying to maintain your focus. But that makes it unpleasant, makes it easy for the mind to slip away because it doesn’t like being there. So think of all the blood vessels in that spot being relaxed, that the blood flows freely, the breath energy flows freely, all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out-, and in the spaces in between. The more consistently you can keep that spot relaxed, the more pleasant this will feel. There will be a sense of fullness, so think of that sense of fullness spreading out throughout the whole body, down to the toes, out to the fingers. Then just stay right there.

This is not all that difficult to do, but it’s difficult to stay here. That’s the important part. This is the element of viriya, or persistence in the practice. It also depends on truthfulness, or sacca. You make up your mind you’re going to stay here, and you’re not going to listen to any voices that tell you to go someplace else or that there are other more important things to do. Only if you stay here can things can develop. Otherwise, it’s just like a little kid running into the house, grabbing a sandwich, and then just running out. No relationship develops in the family because there’s no time to eat together. Or like planting a tree in one spot today and digging up and moving it around, planting it someplace else tomorrow. You’re lucky if the tree doesn’t die. And it certainly has no chance to grow.

So once you’ve made up your mind to stay here, you’ve got to talk with the whole committee in the mind, because every member of the committee will want to come and say, “You’ve got to think about this; you’ve got to worry about that. Now you’ve got a whole hour. You can dig up some old bones that you like to chew on.” The different members of the committee can have lots of different agendas and some of them are pretty entrenched. Some of these members go way back. Then they have lots of old tricks. They can blind you for moment to what they’re doing, and you suddenly find yourself off someplace else.

A small moment of passing out is a very common way. You blank out for a moment, and that’s when some of the more emotional members of your committee can hijack the mind.

This is why mindfulness is important. In other words, you want to keep the breath in mind, and you’ve got to be alert to see how it’s going, not only to alert to the breath, but also to the movements of the mind, because the mind is used to operating on many different levels. There’s the part that seems to be open to the light of day, and then there are other parts that are down in the cellar. They don’t like to be seen. They’re the ones that tend to hijack things, though.

So you’ve got to sit down with the whole mind, and keep reminding every committee member who comes up that “I want to see you clearly, and I want you to understand that we’re doing this for the sake of happiness, for the sake of true well-being.” All the different members of the committee have that basic motivation in mind, they just have different ideas of what happiness might be, different ideas of what well-being and security might be. The ones that like to worry about the future have a reason for worry. There have been times in the past when you didn’t prepare for the future and you suffered. So they might be sneaking around in the back, not very content that you’re just sitting here focusing on the present when you should be worrying about the future, as they would say.

You have to remind them that whatever comes up in the future, your best preparation for the future is to be mindful and alert, so that you can remember the right thing to do, and be alert to the situation, whatever the situation may be. And you don’t want to have your mind hijacked by greed, anger, or delusion at that time, so you want to work on training the mind, developing the good qualities you’re going to need to withstand these defilements.

What this means is that in order to maintain the truthfulness of your original decision to stay here, you’ll need some discernment. You have to understand the different voices, where they’re coming from, and remember that they’re all coming from one basic impulsive, the desire for happiness.

So that’s where you can connect with them, whatever they say. If they say that it’s time to go back and look at some old movies about your family, about your work, you can remind them there might be a little bit of pleasure there, but again, it’s like the dog chewing on a bone. It’s chewed on the same bone for weeks at a time, so there’s nothing really new there. The pleasure there is simply the pleasure of what’s familiar. And there’s certainly no nourishment.

Or there may be the pleasure of thinking about sometime when you were wronged, and part of the mind gets a certain amount of satisfaction out of thinking about how you’ve been unjustly victimized. There’s a very strong sense of self in there. You have to remind that voice in the committee that there’s not much real satisfaction that comes out of it. There’s a much more wholesome satisfaction that comes in learning how to be comfortably with the breath.

So whatever voice comes up, try to use your discernment to reason with it. At the same time, you’ve got the methods of meditation to show that it is possible to have a sense of well-being right now, simply breathing in a comfortable way. And you can clear the air.

That’s called calming. You calm the mind. You soothe it by giving it something good to stay with, good visceral pleasure. So when you’ve got the discernment and you’ve got the calming here, it helps the mind to give up all the things that are going to get in the way of its original intention, which is to stay with the breath, to develop these qualities of mindfulness and alertness.

This set of qualities—discernment, truthfulness, relinquishment, and calming—are called the four determinations. You set them up in your mind as ways of sticking with your most important intentions. When you use them in the meditation, you find that you can stick with it longer and longer, and it has a chance to develop.

You can stick with it in other situations as well. You can stay focused on the breath as you do walking meditation, you can stay focused on the breath as you do your work throughout the day. Wherever you are—in the monastery, at home, or on the highway—it is possible to stay in touch with that sense of the breath being comfortable and full as you breathe in, comfortable and full as you breathe out, all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out-. Try to maintain that center with a sense of fullness and well-being, so that you can use it when these obstreperous voices come up, the ones that want to make you abandon your intention. You say, “Here, we’ve got a really nice sense of pleasure here, a pleasure with no drawbacks, nothing blameworthy about it at all, simply breathing.” If you get a sense of well-being that can infect the mind, then it’s a lot easier to reason with the different contrary voices as they come up.

This is how you maintain your truthfulness: You’re true to your intentions, you’re true to your true well-being, your true best interest, a well-being that doesn’t harm anyone else at all, and is actually conducive to their well-being. This is one of the reasons why the Buddha taught this path. He didn’t teach a selfish practice to some people and a compassionate path to others. He said that if you look after your own well-being in a true way, you’re actually helping other people. There’s no conflict between the two. There’s no reason why you should abandon your center here. Whatever issues come up that would pull you away, that’s your opportunity to develop your discernment even further.

So stay true to your meditation; stay true to your intention. That’s how you arrive at true well-being. Truth is not a quality of a statement so much as is a quality of the heart and mind, and this is particularly true with the truth of the Dhamma. We talk about the Dhamma as being words, the things the Buddha taught, but the real truth of the Dhamma comes when you’re being true.