A Real Education
September 02, 2023

As soon as we’re born, three big things are facing us: aging, illness, and death. We don’t talk about them to little babies. They wouldn’t understand. But these things are facing them, and face all of us at any point in life. If our society gave a decent education, those would be the big issues they’d teach us how to prepare for. But the values of society go elsewhere. So if we want to face these problems, we have to take matters into our own hands. We come out to a place like this, where you can sit under the trees in the middle of the day and you’re face to face with your own mind, because it’s the mind that’s going to determine—when aging, illness, and death come—whether you’re going to suffer or not. You need to get it under control.

This is what we’re doing as we meditate: exerting some control over the mind. We don’t just let it follow wherever it wants to go. We give it something good to focus on, like the breath, because the breath can be comfortable. Not only that, it’s your guarantee that you’re staying in the present moment so that you can watch the mind in action. You’re not concerned with memories of what you did in the past or with anticipations of what you’re going to do in the future. Those things are there in the background, of course. Things you did in the past will be sending influences into the present moment, the random thoughts that pop up in the mind. And, of course, as we’re meditating, we’re developing skills that we’ll need into the future.

But first, you have to learn how to observe your mind right here and now, and keep it directed where you want it to go. This can be one of the most dismaying parts of the meditation. You make up your mind to stay with the breath, and then other things come in. One of the first skills you have to learn is that not everything coming into the mind is worthy of attention. And things are not going to be perfectly quiet right from the start. So no matter what the mind is thinking about in the background, keep it in the background.

As the texts say, you bring mindfulness to the fore. “Mindfulness” here means remembering what you’re here for: trying to develop powers of concentration. And how do you do that? Well, mindfulness is part of it. There’s also alertness, as you watch what you’re doing. You watch continually enough so that you can see the connection between what you’re doing and the results you’re getting. That involves another quality, which is ardency. Mindfulness on its own can be mindful of anything. You can keep anything in mind and it still counts as mindfulness. Alertness can be alert to anything in the present moment. It’s the ardency that makes them skillful.

In Ajaan Lee’s analysis, ardency is the discernment factor among those three. That’s because, if you’re really wise, you realize that your actions are going to make the difference between happiness and pain. So you want to do everything you can to get the mind skillful, to develop skillful qualities in the mind, so that they’ll generate good thoughts, good words, good deeds. So you don’t just let things drift around.

And you’re not here to be non-judging or choiceless in your awareness. There are stages in the meditation where you do try to be choiceless, but not at the beginning. In the beginning there are lots of choices. Either you’re going to stay with the breath or you’re going to wander off. So tell yourself to stay with the breath. If you have trouble staying with the breath, you might want to think first about good reasons to stay with the breath. Learn to talk to yourself. Give yourself pep-talks—encouraging yourself to see the importance of getting the mind trained, and at the same time, thinking of the drawbacks of getting involved in the world. So much of our culture is designed to make you feel bad about yourself so that you’ll buy something to make yourself feel better, which has nothing to do with your genuine well-being at all. Your genuine well-being comes from the mind.

As the Buddha said, wisdom and discernment begin with the questions, “What when I do it will lead to my long term welfare and happiness? What when I do it will lead to my long-term harm and suffering?” The emphasis is on your actions because they make the difference. That’s what’s wise about these questions—that, together with the realization that long-term happiness is possible, long-term suffering is possible, long-term happiness is better than short-term, and you want the long-term. That should be obvious, but most people act as if it’s not.

The answer to those questions, of course, is to develop skillful qualities of mind if you want to be happy because they will then make it easier for you to do and say and think the right thing, the things that will be for your long-term well-being. This is the wisdom of the Buddha’s education: that what you do is important, and it doesn’t depend on other people’s opinion of what you’re doing, because aging, illness, and death don’t care about other people’s opinion. They don’t care about your self-esteem or your lack of self-esteem, or how many toys you’ve got. They present you with real pains. They present you with real difficulties.

As a lot of practitioners say, that’s when the practice turns into performance, when it’s tested. You don’t know exactly how hard your test is going to be, so do your best to get your mind well trained. When it slips off the breath, you can bring it back. Try to talk to yourself in ways that give you encouragement. This is an important part of persistence and patience in the path, because sometimes the results take time. You have to learn how to talk to yourself to keep your spirits up.

There’s a novel by Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers—his retelling of the Joseph story from the Bible. In one part of the story, Joseph has been thrown in jail, and he could have made himself miserable. But he decided to do something good. He decided to do something to keep himself entertained. So he started interpreting his dreams and the dreams of his fellow prisoners. He got really good at it. He started interpreting the dreams of the warden.

Then, word came out from the pharaoh. He’d had a strange dream that nobody could interpret. The warden sent Joseph to see if he could use his skills with the pharaoh. So instead of just being miserable with the hardships he was undergoing, he found some ways to keep himself occupied, entertained, building on his strengths. The skills he developed enabled him to interpret the pharaoh’s dream, helped Egypt survive a long famine, and eventually got him reunited with his family.

So as you come to the meditation, realize that you do have some strengths. Ask yourself what you’ve been good at in the past, what skills you’ve developed, what lessons you’ve learned about things like desire and laziness—how to you talk to yourself so that your laziness doesn’t get in the way, how to adjust your desire so that it’s not too weak, not too strong. “Too weak” means you just don’t put much effort in, don’t care. “Too strong” is when you’re focused solely on the results you want and you’re impatient. You have to learn to focus on the causes and be meticulous in what you’re doing, because training the mind is a matter of training something very delicate, very intricate.

There’s a passage in the Canon where an elephant trainer comes to talk to the Buddha and says, “With elephants, it’s easy. You take an elephant, you drive it from this city to the next city and then back, and in the course of that time—which is not long—you’ve learned all the tricks that that elephant is capable of. Whereas human beings are a tangle. You can live together with someone else for years and still not know all the deceptions that that person is capable of.”

Here you’re faced with your own mind. It can be deceptive with you, too. So this is going to take a lot of your powers of observation. Of all the skills we can develop, this is the most challenging. But it’s also the most rewarding. And it deals with the biggest issues you’re faced with. When the body ages, it doesn’t ask your permission. It doesn’t ask you which parts of the body you’re willing to have age first or stop functioning first. The illnesses: You don’t get to choose your illnesses. You don’t get to choose your time of death, or the way in which you’re going to die. These things are thrust on you, and you have to be prepared, because if the mind isn’t trained, it can suffer a lot, and make a lot of foolish decisions in the course of dealing with these problems that will have results that’ll last not only in this lifetime, but also into future ones.

So there are skills you need to develop. The primary ones are: How to be with pain and not suffer from it? How to be with difficulties and not suffer from them? I’ve heard someone say that the cause of suffering is wanting things to be different from what they are. But that’s not the case. There are certain things you have to accept, but you do want your mind to be different from what it is right now. You do want it to develop skill. You do want it to be more self-reliant. So you work on that.

The mind has the ability to take the raw materials coming in from the past and make all kinds of things out of them. In fact, hhis is what we’re doing all the time. This is what our experience of the present moment is. There are the results of past actions coming in, and then there are our current actions. We’re presented with raw materials, and we get to choose which things that are appearing in the present moment that we’re going to work with and which ones we’re not, which ones we’re going to emphasize and which ones we’re going to de-emphasize.

We tend to do it pretty willy-nilly. But as you meditate, you’re learning to do it more systematically, more thoughtfully, with more insight as to which potentials right now are really worth developing, and which ones are worth letting go. The potential to be able to think about all kinds of things right now: That’s there. The potential to develop concentration, mindfulness, other skillful qualities: That’s there as well. So, you do have to choose. There’s work to be done, important work. Not the make-work of society. Genuine work. Solving a genuine problem.

The Buddha sets up standards so that we’ll be up to the task. He wasn’t the kind of teacher who’d say, “Well, just do whatever you want, and the fact that you participated will get you a star.” He said, in effect, “These are difficult problems, but it is possible to solve them. You have to work at developing the necessary skills, and this is how you do it.” He’s a demanding teacher, but then again we’re facing demanding problems. He teaches us how to be equal to them.

That kind of education is the most necessary, and the most valuable. So try to encourage yourself to stick with it, because it’ll see you through when aging comes, when illness comes, when death comes. You’ll have the skills you need not to suffer, not to harm yourself, not to harm anybody else in those difficult times. Those are the most valuable skills you can develop.