Safety
October 25, 2023

The Buddha once noted that a teacher’s duty is to provide protection to his students. Now, by this he didn’t mean physical protection. He meant more protection from your own mind. We have all kinds of urges coming up in the mind. There’s greed, aversion, delusion, with all of their various permutations, and they can get us to do some very unskillful things. Yet they’re very appealing. We think we gain our happiness through being greedy. We get what we want done, sometimes, through anger. We even like our delusion. We don’t recognize it as delusion, but we like it. So he has to alert us that these are dangers, and that they can be overcome.

There’s that line of thought that whatever is going to come up in your mind is going to come up, so you shouldn’t try to resist it. Causes and conditions, you know. When the Buddha explained how we experience things, though, part of it comes from past actions, your past karma, but an important part comes from what you’re doing right now. That’s where the Buddha focused. You can’t go back and undo what you did in the past, but you can develop skills right here, right now, that you can depend on, skills that provide you with safety.

It starts, he said, with having a sense of shame and compunction: shame in the healthy sense, the shame of not wanting to do anything that’s really beneath you. And compunction, the realization that your actions do have consequences, so you want to be careful not to do anything that would cause any long-term harm or pain. These, he said, are guardians of the world. Then you build on those qualities and try to create a refuge for yourself. You do that by practicing the establishing of mindfulness. He compares it to an island in a river. The river is flooding, but you’re on an island that’s relatively safe from the flood.

In another image, he says it’s like your safe territory. He tells a story of monkeys up in the Himalayas. There are areas where only the monkeys go and they’re safe there. There are areas where only human beings go. And then there are areas where both monkeys and human beings go. It’s in that middle area where the monkeys are in danger. Human beings set traps for them. The Buddha’s message is that if don’t leave your safe territory, you’re not going to get trapped. And where’s the area where you can get trapped? In sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, your fascination with these things and the pleasures that can come from them. The pleasures themselves are not all necessarily bad, but the mind has a tendency to elaborate on them, to make them seem to be more than they actually are, and to incite itself to do some pretty unskillful things around them. That’s what you’ve got to watch out for.

When you’re practicing, that kind of thinking is out of bounds. You’re in your safe territory when you stay right here with the body in and of itself—like you’re experiencing the body right now as you breathe in, as you breathe out, without reference to anything else in the world—or, in the Buddha’s terms, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world.

Sometimes you hear mindfulness defined as a wide, open state of mind that accepts everything that’s coming in. Well, that wasn’t the Buddha’s definition. Mindfulness is keeping something in mind, and it has definite boundaries if you want to make it right mindfulness, because you have three qualities that go along with this practice. One is mindfulness itself, the ability to keep things in mind. Then there’s alertness, watching what you’re doing, watching the results of what you’re doing. That’s your main focus in the present moment. You don’t focus on just anything coming up in the present moment: the sound of the crickets, the sound of the helicopters. You want to focus primarily on what you’re doing right here, right now.

There’s a school of thought that says we should be wide open to everything, and not allow even the four noble truths to restrict us. That’s basically saying that wide open experience, accepting experience, is as good as it gets. You might as well accept that. But the Buddha says there’s something better, and it comes from being focused on what’s going to be really important. And what’s really important right now, of course, is what you’re doing. Because, as I said, what you’re experiencing is not just what’s coming in from the past, it also includes what you’re doing right now. You want to see that really clearly, which is why you’re establishing mindfulness right here.

When you stay with the breath, you know you’re in the present moment. There’s no past breath you can watch, no future breath you can watch. You’re right here. You’re mindful, you’re alert, and then you’re ardent. If anything unskillful comes up in the mind, you want to undercut it. Any thoughts about the world—good, bad, whatever—just put them aside. Then you focus on maintaining your sense of the breath coming in and going out, staying with that. The Buddha calls this practice not only right mindfulness, but also a form of concentration.

There’s a passage where one of the nuns of the Buddha’s time identified the themes of right concentration as the four establishings of mindfulness. They’re very closely connected. There’s another passage where the Buddha himself talks about focusing on the body in and of itself, ardent, alert, mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. And then, he says, you develop this concentration with directed thought and evaluation, with a modicum of directed thought, with no directed thought, no evaluation, with pleasure, with ease, with rapture, with equanimity. In other words, he’s talking about jhana, right concentration.

So this is your safe space, your safe territory: getting the mind settled in right here. It’s not totally safe yet. This island is still subject to flooding. And the floods can sometimes get really bad. But for the time being, it’s a safe place.

And this is where you find your safety—in the mind—because, based on this island, you can start gaining discernment into what the mind is doing on a more subtle level that’s leading to stress, leading to harm. And you can stop it.

When you keep digging down and you find something that’s uncaused inside, that’s when you’re safe. Everything that’s subject to causes is subject to a really complicated network. There are some actions coming in from the past, other actions which you’re doing right now, and the interactions can be pretty complex and pretty unstable. But when you find something that’s not caused, then you’ve found security. But for the time being, you know that even though concentration is not totally stable, it’s a lot better than a lot of the other things you could hope to find security in.

That passage that we chanted just now, the four Dhamma summaries, came from a conversation between a monk and a king. The king had known the monk before he ordained. He came from a wealthy family, his health was good, and as far as the king was concerned, people would ordain only if they were sick or had lost their relatives or had lost their wealth. So, what was up? Why had the monk ordained?

The monk explained these four Dhamma summaries and then he illustrated them with instances from the king’s own life. The king was old already, he was eighty years old. So that was the monk’s comment about how the world is swept away. As the king admitted, he used to be strong when he was young. He knew no one else who was as strong as he was. But now, as he’s stepping around, he tries to put his foot one place and it goes someplace else. He can’t even control his own body.

The king can also get sick. Just because you’re a king doesn’t mean you can order your body to be healthy or order the disease away. Or, as the monk explains, he can’t order his courtiers who are sitting around waiting for him to die to portion out some of the pains so he can feel less pain. And as for his wealth, he has storerooms. But as the summaries said, you have nothing of your own. Whatever you’ve amassed as a fortune, you have to give up when you die.

So you can’t depend on your own body. You can’t depend on the people you try to get around to be your support. And you can’t depend on your wealth. The problem, though, is that for most of us, that’s the best thing we can think of in searching for security: keeping the body fit and healthy, getting people around who can help us, gaining wealth. But it all falls apart, and yet we keep coming back for more.

That’s what the final summary was: The world is a slave to craving. We see nothing better than this, so we keep wanting to come back. And that’s the danger: that inability to imagine anything better. So we keep on looking for security in things that can’t provide it. No wonder we’re anxious, because no matter how much we may tell ourselves that wealth, groups of people, and a strong body will be our security, there’s a part of the mind that knows it’s not true. We spend our time pretending that we don’t recognize that part of the mind. But it’s there.

What’s good about the Buddha’s teaching is he says, “Look at it. Take it seriously. Don’t be afraid of it.” The dangers are not in the body or in the people you might get to help you or in your wealth. The danger is in the mind itself: the fact that it does unskillful things and has done unskillful things in the past. But that’s not nearly as serious as the unskillful things it’s doing right now—even down to shaping your experience right now.

When you look at dependent co-arising, you notice that sensory contact comes pretty much in the middle of the line-up. Prior to that, you have all kinds of things. There’s bodily fabrication, verbal fabrication, mental fabrication, all the activities of what’s called name—in other words, perceptions, intentions, acts of attention, feelings, contact: This is contact inside the mind, inside the body. All of that comes prior to what you’re experiencing at the senses. That’s what’s shaping things, and that’s what primes you to suffer. We do these activities in ignorance. And because it’s in ignorance, we don’t know what we’re doing. That’s why we suffer.

But if you could learn how to do these things with knowledge, then no matter how bad the contact is at the senses—and that contact, the Buddha says, is your past karma coming at you—you don’t have to suffer from it.

This is why we meditate: to get the mind still so that we can see these things.

Bodily fabrication, the breath: It’s right here. Verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself: That’s what you’re doing with the breath right now. Mental fabrication – perceptions and feelings. You need the perception of the breath filling the body. You need to work on a feeling of ease and well-being. It’s all right here. Then as you get the mind still, watching yourself do these things right here, you’re learning how to do these things with knowledge. Then you can take that knowledge and you begin to realize: This is how you go through your whole life. These are the things that shape your experience. So bring knowledge to them all the time.

And you can do this. We do have the ability to choose. One of the worst misrepresentations of the Buddha’s teachings are the people who say that there’s no free will, that everything is determined by past actions. It turns out that that was a view that the Buddha himself roundly denounced. He would even search out people who taught it to point out to them that they were leaving people unprotected, because if you feel that you can’t do anything about what you’re experiencing right now, then you just have to give in to whatever it is. You can’t protect yourself from your own defilements.

But it’s because we are making choices right now, and we have a free hand, or potentially a free hand in how we shape our experience, that’s why the Buddha taught. That’s where we find our protection. That’s where we find our security. So even though the body gets old, the body gets sick, even when it dies, the mind doesn’t have to suffer, because it’s bringing knowledge to these processes.

So try to be alert to what you’re doing as you focus the mind, staying with the breath. All the things you need to know are right here. You’re doing them right now. Simply that, as we clear away a lot of outside disturbances, we can see these things a lot more clearly. We get a better handle on learning how to protect ourselves so that we do have that island to keep us safe. We make the island stronger and stronger until no flood can overcome it.

If you want to change the image, you may say the island may be your way-station on the way across the river, but you finally get across the river on high ground and you’re safe. This is where total security lies. It’s doesn’t lie in things outside or people outside, because those things can get washed away. And they are washing away all the time. If we could see time pass, we’d be blown away. There’s even one theory that space-time itself travels at the speed of light. So, just a few moments ago is now far, far away.

In this kind of dimension, we’re not going to find real security unless we follow the path, unless we focus our attention right here. This means that we’re not here just to watch the passing show, to appreciate or enjoy the passing show. We have to realize we’re playing a role in shaping it. We want to focus on that, so that we can do it well, turn it into a path that leads beyond this dimension. And the path’s not only a safe path, but it’s also a noble path. We’re doing nothing but good things on the path.

So, it’s a good path to be on, and it takes you to a place where you really would want to go. As the Buddha said, you may not be able to have an adequate conception of the goal, but just be assured that it’s a place of safety, it’s a place of freedom, it’s a place of happiness. It’s true. It’s an all-encompassing awareness, and it’s the best thing there is.