The Larger Picture
October 11, 2023

When you sit down to meditate, it’s good to think about the Buddha on the night of his awakening. Before he focused on the present moment, he had some questions about context. What was the large context in which he was sitting? He could see that he had gone through many, many lifetimes—eons and eons. And not just him—all living beings had gone through many lifetimes: vast stretches of time, vast stretches of space.

In that context, the issues of the daily life, the issues of this person versus that person, begin to seem very, very small. And very, very stupid when it becomes a “versus” kind of relationship. Nothing is accomplished. Whatever you gain by winning out over other people you end up losing. And in the act of gaining you can do an awful lot of harmful karma that you didn’t really have to make for yourself. But now you’ve got it.

It was from that perspective that he then came into the present moment, to see what is it that keeps the cycle going around, and around, and around. He stripped the details of his personal life and looked at the general patterns. It was that way he was able to discover the there is a basic pattern to why people suffer and how they don’t have to.

So it’s good to think in these terms, every time you sit down. It clears out a lot of the issues of the day and allows you to focus on the real issues: what’s going on in your mind right now. After all, this is the instigator. This is the cause. You want to learn how to get some control over the cause, so that it stops instigating suffering and can actually start building the path.

When you depersonalize the issue this way, it gets a lot easier to deal with things directly. It’s not your own personal stupidity. Everybody has been stupid all along. It’s not the fact that you’ve been doing things wrong. Other people have been doing things wrong, too. So it’s a general pattern, and you learn how to master the general pattern. That’s how you can escape from this constant back and forth, back and forth, up and down.

It’s good to think in these terms every day, every day and then have lots of goodwill for all the beings that you think of. And one of the ways of showing goodwill is to get your own mind under control, so that you’re not releasing tigers and lions out into the neighborhood. You find that you can tame them inside the house. Then you’re safe all around.