Learning by Doing (outdoors)

When we think in terms of the four noble truths, what we’re doing right now is developing the fourth truth—developing the path.

And as the Buddha said, the heart of the path is right concentration. So, focus on staying with your breath. Take a couple of good, long, in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breathing in your body, because when we talk about the breath, it’s not so much the air coming in and out of the nose—it’s the flow of energy in the body. It’s the flow of energy that keeps us alive, that allows you to feel the different parts of the body.

We tend to think of our sensation of the body as being a solid and then we have to pump the air in. But from the Buddha’s point of view, our first, most immediate sensation of the body is the energy. So, as you breathe in, and there’s a flow of energy that allows the air to come in and go out, where do you feel it? Focus your attention there. Try to breathe in a way that feels good.

You can experiment with different kinds of breathing—long, short, or in-long, out-short; in-short, out-long; heavy, light; fast, slow; deep or shallow. Hold in mind the picture of how the breath can flow through the body and try to find a mental picture that allows for the breath to flow everywhere. Then evaluate how well it’s going.

You can try different perceptions; you can try different ways of breathing. This element of experimentation is important because we’re not here just to force ourselves to see things the way the Buddha saw them. We’re here to develop our own sensitivity, because it’s through our sensitivity that we develop discernment. We see things as they are actually happening and then can do something about it.

When you settle the mind down like this, first let it get some rest. We tend to be frazzled by the way we live in the world, and it’s good to have a time and a place for yourself to just drop all your responsibilities outside and create a good home for the mind right here.

As I was saying earlier in the week, most of us are like the carpenters who build beautiful buildings in Bangkok but live in tiny little shacks. They throw a little bit of corrugated iron, a little bit of plywood together, and that’s where they live. Yet they’re building beautiful buildings for everybody else to stay in.

The mind tends to be like that. It’s building a good place for the body to live, and for your family—through your work both outside and inside the house—to make the house a good place to live. But the mind itself gets neglected. It’s living in a little shanty.

So, now, you’re using the breath, using your perceptions of the breath and your thoughts about the breath, to create a good feeling in here—one that can be a home for your mind. Give yourself a good home to stay in.

As you get well settled here, there comes a point where you start taking a interest in what you’re doing, after enjoying the sense of well-being you’ve fostered. This is necessary to develop your insight, because the factors that go into creating the good sense of concentration—the form of the body, which is the breath; the feeling of ease that you get from the breath; the perceptions you hold in mind about the breath; your thoughts that think about the breath, that evaluate it, and your awareness of all these things: Those are the topics of insight, They’re all right here.

They’re called the five aggregates. In Pali, the word is khandha. It means, “group.” As the Buddha said, when we cling to these groups in the wrong way, they cause suffering. But when we create them in the right way, they form part of the path. In getting to know them as part of the path, you get to really get to know them for what they are. Otherwise, they’re just names in a book. You hear about the names and you say, “Well, yeah, there are these things happening in my mind. So what?”

The best way to know these things happening in your mind and to sense their importance is to play with them, to create something good out of them. It’s a basic principle that the things you know best are the things you do, the things you make.

It’s like eating food. The people who really know the food are the ones who cook it because they know how it has to be done. You can eat the food and you may be able to taste what’s in it if your taste buds are really good. But you’d be more perceptive if you’d actually had practice in making that kind of food yourself. That’s when you really come to appreciate it.

Years back, when we made a Buddha image at Wat Dhammasathit, Ajaan Fuang wanted some amulets to go inside—84,000 in all. We made them out of paste—a paste of different materials. I was given the job of mixing the paste, and I had lots of different recipes to follow. The paste, here, was not a glue. It was a paste made out of lime and tree sap and all kinds of auspicious ingredients. After mixing it—many, many, many batches—I came to appreciate, when I saw someone else’s amulets, who had done a good job and who hadn’t done a good job of mixing the ingredients together. That’s because I had experience making them.

That’s the same way with aggregates. When you make something good out of them, you know them really well. Then you start seeing them in other parts of your life. And you start seeing that the Buddha was right: When you hold on to these things unskillfully, they’re going to cause suffering. When you hold on to them in the right way so as to make the path, there’s still some stress there, but it’s the stress that’s needed in order to get the mind to settle down, so that it can understand itself.

Then there comes a point where you abandon this state of concentration, too—but don’t let it go until it’s done its work.

In the meantime, try to get to know this process of getting the mind into concentration, keeping it in concentration—because that’s how you come to understand the mind.

Some people think that you get the mind quiet first and then you do vispassana, which requires that you switch to another topic entirely. But that’s not how the Buddha taught, and that’s not how it’s taught in the forest tradition.

In the forest tradition, you learn how to get the mind still and, in the process of getting it still, you begin to understand it a lot more—both in getting it still and in fighting off the things that are coming in to destroy the stillness. You start becoming more perceptive of your mind, appreciating a good state of concentration. When the mind is not willing to settle down, you get a sense of the steps you have to follow to make it want to settle down.

It’s in this way that your insight develops. It’s your sensitivity to what you’re doing, seeing it in terms of the four noble truths: The way you cling to the aggregates has to be comprehended. The way you take those aggregates and make them into concentration has to be developed. It’s a skill that you work on. So it all comes together right here.

That’s why the Buddha said that right concentration is the heart of the path, whereas all the other factors in the path are it’s requisites—the things that help it along, keep it right. But the concentration is where you’re going to see things.

After all, when the Buddha gained awakening, he was in right concentration, watching his breath. What’s the difference between his breath and your breath? Well, nothing. The difference was in his sensitivity, in the qualities of the mind he brought to the breath.

Those are the things that you’re working on right now: your determination to stay here, your strong sense that this is a good thing to be doing right now—good for you, good for the people around you—and the persistence that sticks with it, no matter what. Many of the interesting things that are going to happen in the mind tend to happen when we switch our frame of reference. There’s a slight moment of blanking out and then we come back into a new frame of reference or a new world of thought. What happens in the meantime is something we tend to miss.

But when you’re really consistent with your alertness, your mindfulness, and your ardency, you begin to see the steps of how the mind drops one frame of reference and moves to another. You begin to understand how the mind creates its own little worlds to live in.

Here again, you see the process clearly because you’re fighting it. If you just allowed the mind to wander around and then just follow it around wherever it went, you wouldn’t learn all that much. It’s when you fight against your mind’s unskillful tendencies and encourage its skillful ones—that’s when you learn.

So everything you need to know is all right here—just make sure that you stay right here and stay alert. And keep the right questions in mind: “What am I doing right now?” “What is my duty right now?”

The Buddha once made a comparison between two types of horses. There’s the thoroughbred horse who, while feeding on its barley in the morning, is thinking about, “What kind of work do I have to do today? What will my master want out of me? And how will I respond?” The ordinary horse just thinks, “Barley! Barley! Barley! Barley!”

In the same way, when the mind gets still, it’s easy to just think, “Still! Still! Still!” and to lose your alertness, lose your mindfulness. Things can get very quiet but you don’t know what’s really going on.

But if you keep those duties in mind—“I’m here to develop concentration so that I can comprehend what I’m doing that’s causing suffering. It’s all right here. I just have to learn how to ask the right questions”—with that attitude, you become a thoroughbred meditator.

And it’s the thoroughbreds who get the rewards.