After the Fire
October 26, 2007

Events in the past few days—the fires, the smoke, the winds—serve as a blatant reminder in case you’ve forgotten what an alien place we live in. And I’m not just talking about Southern California. This physical world, this human world we live in, is a very treacherous place. It seems designed to destroy human happiness, human hopes. We work to build up a little something we can depend on, but it seems that everything the world creates, the world also destroys. This constant cycle of creation and destruction leaves very little standing for any length of time. And here we, wanting happiness, a happiness that stands, a happiness that doesn’t change.

Some people say that the world was created by a benevolent creator, but looking at the events of the past few days, it’s hard to see any evidence for that. The world just goes its own way, regardless of what we want, and no matter how much we plead with it, we can’t change its basic nature.

What this means is that if we’re looking for happiness, we’re going to have to change our basic habits. Instead of looking outside, we have to look inside. And as the Buddha said, this is a path that involves two sorts of things: development and abandoning.

The abandoning is obvious. Take the day we left here. We could have come back to nothing. I must admit as I bowed down to the Buddha the last time on Tuesday morning before we left, I looked around and wondered, “Will I ever see any of this ever again?” This place has been built out of generosity. You look at each item in the sala, look all around the property: It’s the work of people who’ve given their time, given the energy, given their money. Every object, when you look at it, has that kind of goodness radiating from it, the goodness that comes from generosity.

Yet even that kind of goodness in the objects: We like to think that it has some sort of protective power, which is one of the reasons why we’re here, but it could have happened another way. The wind could have kept coming in our direction and that would have been it.

So material things are things you’ve got to let go of. But in order to let go, you need something more solid to hang on to. That’s where the development comes in. When the Buddha talks about the factors for awakening, they’re all things that we develop, that we try to bring into being. Some of them emphasize the developing more, and others emphasize the letting go more. But the ability to let go is something you have to develop as well. These are things we work on.

Out of the seven, the Buddha says, one is always appropriate: mindfulness, keeping these issues of the skillfulness in mind—What’s the most skillful approach? What is needed right now? Keep those questions in mind. And from there the factors for awakening fork out into two sides. There’s the more active side, starting with the analysis of qualities in mind, when you look at to see what is most skillful, what is unskillful in your mind. Then there’s persistence, which essentially is right effort, working at abandoning unskillful qualities and developing the more skillful ones, which can lead to an energized sense of rapture, fullness in body and mind.

Those are the qualities that involve working, developing. Then there’s the side of the mind that you have to hold on to when everything else needs to be let go, when you learn how to keep the mind at peace and calm in the midst of the storms—the firestorms and mind storms—that can come swirling around you. There’s calm, concentration, and equanimity. These are the states you have to hold on to when there’s nothing else to hold on to. Learn to be still, quiet. That stillness and quietude is an important refuge. But you need to get it balanced, because stillness without mindfulness can just become dull, sleepy, deluded, drifting off. There has to be an element of interest in the stillness to keep it awake, to keep it alive.

This is why, as things begin to settle down in the mind, you can’t just allow the mind to drift off anyway it wants, or to latch on to a feeling of pleasure and just take the pleasure as your object, because it begins to get fuzzy after a while, and the mind begins to get dull. So once the mind is still, you need to work to keep it interested.

That’s why Ajaan Lee has you investigate the different ways in which breath energy can benefit the body, benefit the mind, what levels of breath energy there are in the body. There are also other ways of keeping the mind interested. You can go through the 32 parts of the body. You can analyze the body into its elements: its properties of earth, water, fire, wind, space, consciousness.

This way, you achieve a sense of balance in the stillness. There’s mindfulness there, and you’re trying to get all the factors of awakening working together so that they’re all in balance. Analysis of qualities: What kind of breathing is skillful? What kind of breathing is unskillful? Work at developing the skillful kind of breathing, and that way you get concentration and the more active elements working together. It’s only when you find the mind is really lopsided in one direction that you really have to focus your attention on either the more active side or the more passive side. But once things have been brought more into balance, you want to have all seven of the factors of awakening present.

Sometimes you see them presented in such a way that everything is working toward equanimity. But as the Buddha said, equanimity has its time and its place. There are times when simply being equanimous about things gets you sunk in problems. You miss the point that there are things that you can change; there are things that you can’t. If it’s something you can’t change, okay, foster equanimity. If it’s something you can change and needs to be changed, go ahead and do it. Work on the qualities of mind you need. Don’t simply come here hoping that you get the mind still, still, still, still, still and then just freeze into a stillness. We’re working on a whole range of skills. Stillness is one of them, but it requires the more active factors for awakening as well. The rapture comes from taking a sense of joy in doing things well.

I was reading the other night someone presenting a picture of the path in which it was very stern and moralistic, where you have to really whip yourself into shape and come down hard on any weakness. It all sounds very uninviting. Only great heroes could do that kind of practice. And I must admit that many times in our practice, we don’t feel very heroic. But the Buddha himself often presents the practice not in such stern moralistic terms. After all, he’s not a position to force anything on us, to say we have to do this, we have to do that. What he is saying is, “Look, you can do this skillfully.” And many of his analogies are from different skills that people work on and develop. The whole point of a skill is that you learn how to do it well and like doing it well, enjoy doing it well. You find it an interesting challenge, a challenge that you’re ready to rise for. That’s a skillful approach to the practice.

We live in this an alien world, but it is possible to find happiness. In the beginning, the path has to make use of the things of the world. Eventually, though, it leads beyond the world. But meanwhile, we’re able to take advantage of what the world has to offer. We’ve got this body; we’ve got this life. We can use these things to find a happiness, a well-being that goes way beyond the influence of the world.

The Buddha presents that as a challenge—not as a stern moral obligation, but simply as a realistic look at what our situation is, and what the potentials there are in our situation. If you learn how to take joy in the skill of the practice, that joy gives the practice a lot of energy. As Ajaan Fuang used to say, rapture is what acts as lubricant to the practice. Without it, he said, the practice gets dry like an engine whose lubricant has dried up. It begins to seize up after a while.

So learn how to do this with a sense of serenity, and a sense of rapture, even in the midst of this alien landscape, where not only chaparrals are burning, but your eyes are burning, your ears, your nose, your tongue, your body, your mind are burning. But where it’s not burning, that’s where the coolness can be found. If you look with skill and ingenuity, you can find it.