Commit & Reflect All Around

We nourish the Dhamma within us through commitment and reflection. We commit to doing it, we stick with that commitment for a while, so that it can have time to show results, and then we reflect on the results: Are they doing well or are they not doing well? Then we make adjustments and commit again. That’s how the Dhamma is found—not by anticipating what we’re going to find but by actually working at what needs to be done and then looking at what we’ve accomplished.

Right anticipation is not one of the factors of the path—but right mindfulness is. And mindfulness, remember, is not just being aware of things as they arise and pass away. It’s a faculty of your memory.

Here, it’s your active memory. You’re remembering to stay here, with the breath. As for any other thoughts that come into the mind—and they will come into the mind—you just let them go. You don’t let them pull you away.

One of the forest ajaans has an image: You’re sitting in a house and there’s only one chair in the house. As you’re sitting in the chair, other people will come into the house and they’ll want the chair. So they’ll do outrageous things. You get out of the chair to chase them away and find that they’ve slipped into the chair behind you. So stay in your chair.

In other words, you stay with the breath, wherever you feel it in the body.

When the Buddha is talking about breath, he’s not talking about the air coming in and out through the nose. That’s a tactile sensation. He’s talking about one of the properties of the body itself—the energy you feel as you breathe in and breathe out, that allows the air to come in, allows the air to go out. You want to focus on that energy.

Where do you feel that? Which parts of the body are most sensitive to how the energy flows?

For some people, the most sensitive spot is in the middle of the chest. For others it’s in the throat, in between your eyes—there are lots of different places where you could be sensitive to this kind of energy.

So focus on what seems to be the most obvious spot, the most sensitive spot. Try long breathing for a while and see how long breathing feels. If you’re not sure if it’s good, you can try shorter breathing—faster, slower, heavier, lighter. Have something to compare. As you make comparisons, you’ll begin to see: “This is better than that. That’s better than this.”

It’s through experimentation like this that the mind can settle down.

The Buddha defines discernment as “knowledge of arising and passing away—noble, penetrative, leading to the ending of stress.”

On the surface, it sounds like simply watching things come and go. But notice that it’s actually “noble, penetrative, leading to the ending of stress.” It’s not just watching things come and go.

Noble knowledge is what puts you on the path to a noble attainment—where there is no aging, illness, or death, where there’s no defilement. The mind is totally free. Simply watching things coming and going is not going to get you there.

What you need is what the Buddha calls, “penetrative” knowledge, in which you understand some activity of the mind, good or bad; notice what’s causing it; notice its diversity—as the Buddha calls it—which means seeing what ways it’s good, what ways it’s bad; what’s the range of suffering or happiness that this particular phenomenon—like feelings or perceptions or thought constructs— can provide; how this thing ceases and what is the path to its cessation.

The path to its cessation in every case is going to be the noble eightfold path. It’s by following the path that you get to the end of stress.

So you’re not just watching things coming and going. As you watch them come and go, you try to understand them. And to understand them, especially to notice what causes them and what they result in, you’ve got to manipulate them, you’ve got to play with them, try different things, because you realize that you’re on the shaping side of your experience.

Mano-pubbangama dhamma, mano-settha mano-maya—first verse in the Dhammapada. The mind is the forerunner of all things, they are made by the mind, and they are made excellent by the mind. In other words, what the mind does is the source of these things.

So you want to look inside: What are you doing? You don’t want to think that you’re passively watching something. There’s a lot going on under the surface. You’re doing a lot more than you think you are. That’s called the fact of fabrication.

Then you want to get a sense of its value. When you’re making something—as when you’re putting together a state of concentration—is it worth it? For the time being: Yes. You want the mind to have a place to settle down. In the process of settling down, you’re going to learn about it. And when it’s fully settled down, you’ll be in a position where you can see things really clearly.

What this means is that you have to be sensitive to what you’re doing and have some imagination in trying different things.

You look at the teachings of the forest ajaans, and there’s no single “forest ajaan method,” no single “forest method of meditation.”

Ajaan Lee has his approach to breath meditation. You read the other ajaans and they have their approaches. Why is that? Because their teacher, Ajaan Mun, sent them into the forest. The basic instructions were: Practice as best as you can; observe what you’re doing; see what works and what doesn’t work. And they all came up with their individual ways of explaining things to themselves. Some were more articulate than others, some were more observant than others—but you can learn from their example.

You take their teachings—as when Ajaan Lee recommends that you work with the breath energies in the body—you take his teachings and experiment with them. Try out what he has to say and then make some adjustments.

As he says, think of the breath coming in at the back of the neck, going down the spine, out the legs. Of course, he’s not talking about the air. He’s talking about the energy.

But what happens when you think of the breath as coming up from the soles of the feet, going up the legs and up the spine? Which feels better?

In other words, you’re free to play. That’s what makes it interesting. If meditation were a meat grinder, you’d stick your mind in and it would grind and grind and come out awakened. But not really. That’s not how discernment works. You’re here to engage your whole mind, engage your imagination, engage your interest. The meat grinder wouldn’t be a very comfortable, interesting place to be. And you wouldn’t learn much by letting your mind get ground up that way. But here you’re allowed to play. And then you observe.

The play, of course, is committed play. You’re not just playing around. Think about the athletes at the Olympics right now. They’re playing at their sports but they’re very serious about what they’re doing—that they want to do it well.

And they learned in the same way: trying to do it well and then gauging the results and see what they coould do to change. The really good ones come up with new ways of observing what they’re doing.

So you commit and then you reflect. And then you try to figure out: How can you keep your mind interested here? How can you keep your mind happy to be here? And again, Ajaan Lee recommends working with the breath.

You’ll find that you have some illnesses or pains here and there in the body. Well, how does your perception of the breath affect them? Can you breathe in ways that alleviate the pain? If you have a recurring disease, can you breathe in a way that helps strengthen the body against that disease?

That’s how Ajaan Lee found the breath meditation method to begin with. He had a heart attack when he was out in the forest. No doctors, no medicine. Three-days walk from the nearest road. So he used his breath. As he learned about the breath—of course at that time, he had a very strong motivating factor—the question was: Was he going to survive or not? He also learned, observed a lot of things about the breath that he hadn’t known before.

So try to develop a sense of ease with the breath, so that it’s comfortable to stay here. Then you start using your imagination around the breath, so that it’s interesting to stay here. By trying different ways of breathing, you get a better and better sense of cause and effect in the present moment.

If you just watch things coming and going, you don’t know what’s causing what. Think of scientists. If they want to understand the causes for something, they have to manipulate various things that are potential causes to see what actually gets results. Well, it’s the same thing here.

So commit and reflect. And then commit again. Reflect again.

Psychologists call this ability to step back from your mind, “metacognition,” where the mind can watch itself in action. The better you get at watching yourself like this, the sharper your discernment is going to be, the more all-around it’s going to be.

The goal we’re aiming at eventually requires letting go all around. If you’re used to looking at things from different angles, you’re more likely to spot things that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise—areas where you’re still holding on. So it’s a good habit to develop: learning to watch your mind from all around, because then you’ll learn how to clean it up all around.

Everything you need to know is happening right here. It’s simply a matter of committing yourself to doing the practice well and reflecting as best you can. That’s when these things will reveal themselves and become clear.