Skills to Make You Free

As you’re sitting here with your eyes closed, there are many things you could be thinking about. You could be thinking about the breath. You could be thinking about events today, events tomorrow. You have lots of choices. There are lots of potentials here in the present moment. So try to choose the best potential and stick with it

Like getting the mind to settle down with the breath: Explore the way the breathing feels in the body and take an interest in this energy flow that keeps you alive, that allows you to be aware of the body, allows you to move the body. Try to make it a good place to stay. You have that choice. You just have to work at your skills to do this well.

The issue of free will in Buddhism is never one of absolute free will. The more skills you have, the more freedom you have. So we’re working on developing the skills that we can bring to the present moment. This is an essential part of the teaching. The Buddha wasn’t the sort of person to go out and pick fights with other people, to get into arguments. Usually, it was other people who brought arguments to him. But there was one teaching that he would always take exception to, and that was that we don’t have any power in the present moment. There were people who taught that everything you experience right now is the result of some past action, or the result of the will of a creator god, or was totally random. You weren’t at all responsible for your present experience right now.

The Buddha would actually go and seek those people out and argue with them. He took the issue that seriously. He told them that if you believe that, then there’s no path of practice. People kill, steal, have illicit sex, lie because of things that are totally beyond their control. And if you believe that, he said, it makes the path impossible. If you teach that, you’re leaving people bewildered as they have urges coming up in the mind and they have no basis for even believing that they can choose which train of thought to follow, which ideas to follow, which ones to say yes to, which ones to say no to. When you have no basis for making those kinds of decisions, you’re left defenseless, you’re left suffering.

It’s because of this that I’m always amazed at people who say the Buddha doesn’t teach free will—that he teaches that everything is determined—because he was so opposed to that view.

The other thing that I find amazing is that some people say it’s such great news to know that they have no free will. You wonder what kind of mind would think that, a mind that doesn’t want to be responsible. It’s a very depressive thought. If you lack a sense a lack of agency, lack a sense of being able to decide what to do and actually carry through with it and have an impact on your surroundings, you’re pretty miserable. It’s one of the definitions of depression.

There’s a famous case in American history, concerning William James, the American philosopher. When he was young, he wanted to be an artist. His father put every obstacle in his way, and he finally gave up. And as he gave up, he started thinking about the issue: “Does anybody have any free will at all?” He went into severe depression. What got him out of the depression was a book by a French philosopher whose name I can’t remember, a follower of Kant, who said the fact that we can choose our thoughts is a sign that we do have free will. So James decided that his first act of free will would be to believe in free will. Eventually, based on that, he was able to get himself out of his depression.

As the Buddha pointed out, our past actions do have an influence on what we’re going to experience right now, but they’re not the whole story. If you can bring certain skills to the present moment, you can take the results of past bad actions that are sprouting right now and learn how not to suffer from them. This is an important ability. This is why we’re able to practice. And this is one of the reasons why we want to practice, so that we can learn those skills. The more skills we have, the more freedom we have.

He listed five skills altogether.

One is to make the mind unlimited. By that, he meant developing the attitudes of the brahmaviharas: limitless goodwill for all beings, limitless compassion for those who are suffering, limitless empathetic joy for those who are happy, and limitless equanimity in cases where you can’t make any difference. These attitudes enlarge the mind.

The next two skills are that you train yourself in virtue and train yourself in discernment: your ability to see what’s going on in the mind, what choices you’re making, which ones are skillful, which ones are not.

The final two skills are the ability not to let the mind be overcome by pain and not to let the mind be overcome by pleasure. These two skills we learn as we practice concentration. When you sit down to meditate, one of the issues that immediately comes up is that there’s a pain in your knee, a pain in your back, or a pain in your hip, and you need the skills not to be overcome by those pains in order to get the mind to settle down. The first order of business is to find a part of the body that you can make comfortable by the way you breathe, and learn how to maximize that comfort. If the pain is going to have your hip, let it have your hip. You’ve got other parts of the body that you can focus on.

It’s like that old book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, where the instructor recommends that, when drawing a face, you don’t draw eyes or nose or mouth. Draw the spaces between the eyes and the nose, between the nose and the mouth, between the mouth and the lower part of the chin. In other words, look at the areas you don’t ordinarily look at. See them afresh. You find you can draw a much more realistic-looking face. In the same way, here you’re focusing on the parts of the body that are not immediately calling for your attention, but you can make them comfortable.

Then you can think of that sense of comfort spreading through the area that has pain. Say there’s a pain in your knee. You let the comfortable breath energy go down the leg, through the knee, down through the ankle, out through the toes, out into the air. In other words, don’t let the flow of breath energy get blocked by the pain. There is that tendency that we try sometimes to breathe only in areas that are not pained, and so the pains restrict what we can do, restrict where we can breathe. So think of the breath penetrating them. Remind yourself that the breath is energy, and energy can penetrate every atom there is. Remind yourself also that the breath comes prior to the pain. It was there first, so the pain doesn’t have to restrict it.

This leads you into the next step: You can ask yourself about the perceptions you have around the pain. Focus on the actual sensation itself and ask yourself, “Is it the same thing as the body part that it’s in? Is it a solid block of pain, or is it moments of pain?” If you can see it’s moments of pain, then you can ask yourself, “Are these moments coming at you, or are they going away?”

This is an exercise both in concentration and in discernment. And the fact that you’re taking a more proactive approach to the pain means you’re not running away from it, you’re not being victimized by it. It’s going to hurt you less, and you’re going to come to understand the relationship of sensations of the body to the sensations of pain, and see that they really are separate. Sometimes this analysis will actually make the pain go away; other times it won’t, but because there’s a sense that things are separate, you don’t have to feel oppressed by the pain.

This is one of the skills with which you can deal with the results of past bad actions and not feel overcome by them because you’re not overcome by pain.

But it’s also important that you learn how not to be overcome by pleasure, because if you start wallowing in pleasure, you’re opening yourself up to wallowing in the pains that come following on pleasure. Here, too, concentration helps. You work with the breath, you make the breath comfortable, but you have to make sure that you not get distracted by the comfort. The comfort is there, but you maintain your focus on the breath. Work with the breath energies throughout the body. Try to develop a full-body awareness from the top of the head down to the tips of the toes, the tips of the fingers— everything, all at once.

And learn how to stay right there. Try to forget about the books you’ve read saying that you shouldn’t get stuck on concentration, or that concentration is a dead end. It’s not a dead end. It’s part of the path. And forget the books that tell you, “You have to move on fast to insight.” The Buddha basically says, “Learn how to settle in. Be at home here.” After all, he calls this vihara dhamma, a dwelling place for the mind.

When you get a home, you don’t just run into the house and then run out. You go into the house, you decorate it, you make it a home, and then you can stay there. You can rest. As you stay there, you start learning things about the mind in which you’re dwelling that you didn’t see before, which is why concentration is the basis for discernment.

So hold on to the breath and allow the comfort to do its work in the body. Then it will grow more and more calm, more and more calm.

As you do this, you’re also working on the skill of not letting your mind get overcome by pleasure, which is one of the skills that help to protect you from the results of past bad actions, that help to minimize them. These are also the skills that work to release you totally from this whole mass of samsara, this whole mass of karma. After all, the Buddha said the path we’re following is the path of actions that leads to the end of action, a path of karma that leads to the end of karma.

So these skills we’re developing here help us in a lot of ways. What they basically come down to is: Whatever your past, you can be here in the present moment and not suffer over whatever comes up—thoughts that appear in the mind, pains that appear in the body, things that happen outside. You’ve got the skills that allow you to be more and more free in the present moment.

Think of the Buddha’s teachings on dependent co-arising. When he talks about the results of past actions that come at sensory contact, that’s about halfway through the process of dependent co-arising. The factors that come before contact are the ones we work on as we meditate. The perceptions, the skills that allow us to be with pain but not suffer from the pain, be with pleasure and not be overwhelmed by the pleasure, perfect our virtue, perfect our discernment, develop expansive attitudes in the mind: These are the things we can bring to the present moment. These are the skills that we can carry with us. So don’t be afraid of being attached to them.

This is another problem of reading too much: We’re afraid of being attached to concentration. But, as Ajaan Fuang said, if you’re not crazy about your concentration, you’re not going to get good at it. We’re working on a skill here, so you really want to be attached to mastering the skill—attached properly in the sense that you take a mature attitude toward it. But don’t be afraid of being attached. You can work on removing your attachment to concentration later, after you’ve used the concentration to pry away your attachments to other things.

Think of Ajaan Chah’s example of the banana. You’re coming back from the market, carrying a banana. Someone comes up and asks you, “What are you going to do with the banana?” You say, “I’m going to eat it.” “How about the peel, are you going to eat that too?” Then Ajaan Chah asks, “With what are you going to answer them?” His answer is twofold. First, he says, you answer them with desire. In other words, the discernment that allows you to come up with a good answer is based on desire. You want to give a good answer. And the answer, of course, is that the time hasn’t come to throw the peel away. If you throw the peel away now, the banana turns into mush in your hands, and you never get to eat it.

So there are some things that you have to hold on to. When they’ve done their duty, then you can throw them away.

So these skills that we’re working on—the skills of the brahmaviharas, virtue, discernment, mastering the arts of concentration so that pain doesn’t overcome us, and pleasure doesn’t overcome us: Hold on to these skills. Work at them again and again and again. Learn how to master them. In this way, you find that you’re more and more free in the present moment to do what’s skillful, to be a free agent, and to actually make a difference right here, right now.