An Exercise in Sensitivity
June 18, 2024

One of the teachings of the Forest Tradition is that when insight or discernment comes, it doesn’t necessarily have to express itself in terms of the three characteristics or the three perceptions of inconsistency, stress, and not-self. Anything that allows you to see that you’re holding on to something that’s making you suffer, and you don’t have to hold on—that counts as insight.

It’s a development of your sensitivity—one, to see that there is stress, suffering, someplace in the mind, someplace in the body; two, realizing that it comes from your clinging, it’s accompanied by the clinging, in fact, the Buddha says it is the clinging; and then three, realizing you have the choice not to cling in that way.

So whatever sensitivity you can develop so you can sense these things going on in your mind, it’s all to the good. That’s one of the reasons why we practice concentration: You get more and more sensitive to what you’re doing and to levels of stress and ease in the mind. When you look at the different descriptions of the levels of jhāna, you’ll notice that they all center around a feeling tone—pleasure or equanimity—and the pleasure gets more and more refined as you go through the different levels.

Even equanimity is said to be a very subtle form of pleasure. Of course, subtlety comes from doing something again and again, and getting more and more sensitive about what you’re doing. So as you get more sensitive to subtle levels of pleasure, you also get more sensitive to subtle levels of stress.

In fact, when you see the stress that comes in the lower levels of concentration and can let it go, that teaches you an important lesson: What you’re holding on to is stressful. But there are still things you have to hold on to as you go from one level of concentration to the next. Otherwise, you just go back to the mind’s old ways of wandering around.

Although it’s true that you can learn some things by watching the mind wandering around, you can learn a lot more by watching it as you try to get it to settle down and under control. That’s because there are parts of the mind that resist getting under control. As long as you let them wander, you’re not going to know them. They’re going to hide out.

There’s a Thai expression, suam roi, which literally means you walk in the footsteps of someone else. That’s one way that a thief can get in and out of your house without leaving tracks that you would recognize: He steps in your footsteps. He steps into the tracks that you leave.

So defilements can suam roi—they can step into your mind, step out, and you hardly know that they’re there because you’re not fighting them. It’s when you put up a fight, put up some resistance: That’s when you understand their power.

And to ease the fact that there is a fight going on, we’re fighting to develop a sense of well-being. This, the Buddha said, is essential for the path. It’s your nourishment.

You have to learn about feelings, and what better way of learning about feelings than to create feelings that are skillful and pleasant?

There’s the phrase says, Vivicc’eva kāmehi vivicca akusalehi dhammehi, secluding yourself from sensual thoughts, secluding yourself from unskillful mental qualities, you settle down. You try to find a sense of well-being with the breath.

This is why Ajaan Lee recommends that you play with the breath—long, short; fast, slow; or in long, out short; in short, out long; heavy, light; deep, shallow. You can play with these things to figure out what feels best for you right now.

And who’s going to tell you that you’re breathing right? You have to use your own powers of judgment. This is one of the ways Ajaan Lee interprets the phrase “directed thought and evaluation.” He also notes that this conversation you have about adjusting the breath leads to discernment, because discernment is a value judgment: What kinds of actions are worth the effort that goes into them? What kinds of actions are not? You have to decide for yourself.

This is one of the reasons why Ajaan Fuang—when he would teach concentration—would hand out Ajaan Lee’s directions on how to get into jhāna, but he himself would never mention the term. He certainly wouldn’t certify you as having attained this or that jhāna. It was up to you to notice how the mind was settling down.

Listening to him teach other people, I began to notice that some people had many different layers in settling down, and some had more than others. You look in the Canon, and you see it’s the same. There are some places where there are said to be five stages in settling down, others four, and others three.

So rather than trying to fit your mind into a mold, you just explore: Where, as you settle down, is there a sense of well-being? Where is there still some stress in that sense of well-being? And what can you let go of that would alleviate that stress?

We can get some pointers, we get some ideas, from the texts, but we have to look at our own experience—be sensitive to our own experience—to get a sense of what the mind is doing and what relative levels of ease and well-being you experience as you settle down.

So when you hit something that seems good, put a post-it note on it that says, “Maybe this is something important.” When you hit something that’s deeper, well, put another post-it note on that.

As you settle down, one of the objective measures of concentration is in the fourth jhāna, where the breath stops, but you don’t feel any need to breathe, you don’t feel like you’re being stifled. Everything is wide open in the body, so if you had to breathe, you could very easily.

It’s just that every part of the body seems saturated with a sense of well-being, a sense of breath energy filling the whole body, so much so that you don’t feel the need to breathe in and out. If there’s any lack of breath energy in one part of the body, it will automatically shift from another part of the body.

So you’re learning about feeling, and you’re learning about feeling in terms of the middle way. Remember, the Buddha said the middle way avoids the extremes of sensual indulgence and of self-torture. That doesn’t mean it’s a middling feeling. It means looking for pleasure in another way, not on the continuum: one, pleasure that has nothing to do with sensuality; and two, pleasure that’s not an end in and of itself.

We tend to run toward pleasure as if that’s the reward of life. Here the Buddha’s saying No, you want to learn how to use pleasure for another purpose.

This is why it’s so ironic that people get warned off of strong concentration, saying, “It’s going to be so pleasant that you’ll just get stuck, and won’t be able to gain any insight.”

Although it is true that you can get satisfied with the pleasure of jhāna, the practice of concentration also teaches you how not to get overcome by the pleasure. If you simply focus on the pleasure, you lose track of the breath, and things begin to zone out. You get into what Ajaan Lee calls delusion concentration, where everything is very pleasant, very misty, but you’re not really sure where you are, what you’re focused on.

It’s like someone who takes on a job, gets a paycheck, and then quits the job to enjoy the paycheck. It’s pleasant for a while, but then you’re hungry again, and you’ve got to go back to work. If the boss sees that you’re so unreliable, you’re not really going to get any raise or advancement in your job.

The trick is to learn how to be with the breath and let the pleasure do its work in the body, but you don’t lose your focus on the breath. In this way, you’re actually learning how not to be overcome by pleasure if you really want to master the concentration.

So it’s an exercise in sensitivity, and it’s an exercise in learning how not to get waylaid by pleasure—and also to appreciate equanimity.

For most of us, equanimity is dull, uninteresting. In some cases, it’s defeatist: We realize that there are things that we can’t change, so we just give up, like the dogs in the learned helplessness experiment. But this is a different kind of equanimity. You see that it’s actually more desirable than the strong feelings of rapture and pleasure, but it’s an equanimity that comes after you’ve been satisfied with the rapture and pleasure: the equanimity that comes when you’re well-fed. Someone offers you some food, you say, “Well, no thanks, I’m already well-fed.”

So you’re changing your relationship to feelings. Simply in the practice of concentration, there are subtler tasks that you have to do with your discernment beyond getting the mind into concentration, but getting it into concentration exercises your discernment already. So learn to appreciate concentration.

You know that chant we have that talks about respect. One of the things you respect is the training, and another thing you respect is concentration. The irony there is that concentration is part of the training.

So why did the Buddha single it out again? It may have been because concentration is something that so easily gets overlooked. People are in too great of a hurry to go to the insights.

As Ajaan Lee would say, a lot of people, when they meditate, at the drop of a hat want to go straight to inconstancy, stress, not self. Those teachings have their time and place, but you don’t want to apply them to the concentration until the concentration is strong and has done its work in making you more sensitive.

So this is sensitivity training. It develops your discernment, develops your powers of judgment—so bring some sensitivity to the practice.

Ajaan Fuang noted once that the commentaries say that breath meditation is good for all types. He said, “That’s not true. It requires people with subtle discernment in order to do it well.” But at the same time, it develops your subtlety.

So be sensitive. Be subtle. Try to get on good terms with the breath energy in the body. Develop a friendship that lasts and you’ll find that your discernment will develop in a way that’s not forced by the texts.

It’s simply forced by your own developing sensitivity, which is a large part of its guarantee that you’re not just parroting what you’ve heard or imposing outside ideas on your experience. It’s coming from your own quest to understand feelings, to find the best feelings you can, and to see where that quest can take you.