Lessons from Stilling the Mind

When you’ve done something generous, the Buddha has you reflect on it, to give rise to the sense of gladness, glad that you did it.

There’s a story in the Canon of a miser who was very wealthy, but he couldn’t enjoy his wealth. He tried to eat good food, but he got sick. He tried to live in a comfortable house, but pests would get into the house and disturb him. When he finally died, all of his fortune went to the kingdom.

The Buddha commented that, in a previous lifetime, the miser had given a gift to a private Buddha, but then regretted it. As a result, he received all his wealth in this lifetime, but he couldn’t use his wealth.

So, when you give a gift, reflect on how happy you are that you gave it. That sense of gladness, the Buddha said, is good for getting the mind into concentration. When you get the mind into concentration, he changes the word from gladness to sukha. Pamojja is gladness; sukha is the pleasure of concentration.

He talks about spreading that sukha—that sense of ease, well-being, pleasure— throughout the body. This means that we’re going to transform a mental pleasure into a physical pleasure, so that the mind can settle down.

You do that by reminding yourself that it’s good to be here with the breath, it’s good to have a chance to settle down and be still and not disturbed.

In one of the Buddha’s images, he talks of a cowherd. When there are unskillful thoughts in the mind, you have to beat them back in the same way that a cowherd has to beat back the cows when they try to get into the rice during the rice-growing season.

But when you’ve gained some control over your unskillful thoughts and you’re thinking only skillful thoughts, you’re like a cowherd who doesn’t have to worry about the cows getting into the rice, because the rice has been harvested. They can wander as they like, and nobody’s going to get upset. The cowherd can just be mindful of “those cows.” That’s all he has to do.

But still, the Buddha says, you reflect on the fact that if you think skillful thoughts for a day and a night, it wouldn’t cause any harm, aside from the fact that it would tire the mind. When the mind is tired, the body gets tired too. So, to ease both body and mind, he said, you gather your mind into concentration, bring it into a state of composure, which he defines as the four levels of jhana.

So, be glad to be here with the breath. Be with the breath in such a way that you feel good being with the breath, not only mentally, but also physically. That means adjusting the breath, making it long, making it short, figuring out what kind of breathing feels good for the body right now, what kind of breathing is good for the mind right now.

That’s called vitakka-vicara, directed thought and evaluation, part of getting the mind to settle down snugly with the breath so that the mind fits the breath, the breath fits the mind. Both sides are happy to be here, you might say. Then when you’ve settled in like that to the point where the body feels really good, the breath feels really good, coming in, going out, you don’t have to do any more adjusting.

From that level, the Buddha says, you stay focused on the breath in and of itself. There’s a formula: “ardent, alert, mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world.” You’re with the breath, he says, but you don’t think thoughts associated with the breath. In other words, you drop your thinking and evaluation of the breath—your discursive thinking about it, thinking in terms of sentences—and you’re just left with a perception of breath: “breath, breath, breath.” And you want to stay right there.

In doing that, you’ll learn something interesting about the mind. Even though you’re not doing any directed thought and evaluation, there still is some mental signaling going on inside the mind, which you may not have seen if you had allowed the mind to wander around like the cows.

This is an important lesson. If you really want to see the mind, if you really want to understand the mind, you’ve got to get it as quiet as possible, as single as possible, so that you can see the subtle things that are still going on as you go down through the different levels of concentration.

So, try to be quietly here. Allow yourself to be fully absorbed in the breath. As the Buddha says, once there’s that sense of ease and well-being, or ease and rapture, you let it spread throughout the whole body to the point where there’s no part of the body that doesn’t feel saturated with pleasure, saturated with ease. We’re not talking about a little bit of ease. It’s really intense.

There’s never any place where the Buddha says that the pleasure of concentration can be too intense. After all, you’re going to use this pleasure to pry yourself away from the pleasures of sensuality: the mind’s fascination with thinking about thoughts of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations that it would like. You need something strong to counteract that fascination.

So instead, you employ this pleasure of form—in other words, the body as you feel it from within, and you let it become strong. It’s not a tactile sensation. It’s related to the elements in the body or the properties of the body: warmth, coolness, heaviness, energy. When they come together, they feel really good.

That kind of pleasure doesn’t have the drawbacks of the pleasures of sensuality. You don’t need to take it from anybody else.

Think of all those images the Buddha gives of the drawbacks of sensuality.

One of them is that it’s like having borrowed goods. You go around showing off your borrowed goods, but if the owners see you, they can take the borrowed goods back. In other words, if your pleasure depends on other people, they can take those pleasures away at any time. But this pleasure of doesn’t depend on anybody. It’s purely inward. It’s in the part of the body that you can sense and nobody else can sense.

That means it’s yours. So, make the most of it. Let it get intense, to be strong enough to counteract your desire for sensual pleasure.

You’re going to get the mind to a point where it has to get even more still than this, but first, give it a sense of real pleasure, really strong sense of fullness, so that when the mind settles down and starts getting more equanimous, it’s coming not from a state of hunger, but from a sense that your immediate needs for pleasure have been met. You have a sense of enough. The mind can get even more still.

It’s through getting the mind still in stages like this that you can see what’s going on in the mind. You can understand how the mind puts its thoughts together on many levels.

It’s like doing an investigation in a corporation. Something’s wrong in the corporation. There’s something going on that’s not quite fair, not quite aboveboard. You question all the obvious people, but it turns out that the obvious people are not the source of the problem. So, you have to dig a little bit deeper.

The people on the next level, they’re not the problem. You dig deeper, they’re not the problem. Finally, you get down to some unexpected people in the lower levels of the corporation. Those are the ones that’re causing the trouble.

But you won’t see that unless you get the really blatant possibilities out of the way. It’s the same with the mind. You’re not really going to know the mind unless you’ve got it really still, really quiet, totally absorbed in the sense of the body. Both the body and the mind get more and more quiet.

As the Buddha said, you get to the point finally where bodily fabrication is still. What that means is that the sense of the in-and-out breath just stops. It’s not because you’ve lost touch with the body. You’re fully aware of the body.

Think of the Buddha’s image of the man wrapped with a white cloth. Just as there’s no part of the body to which that white cloth doesn’t extend, in the same way, your body is filled with a sense of clear, bright awareness: bright not in the sense of a light necessarily, although some people do experience light, but bright in the sense of being very, very clear. You’re aware of the whole body, and the body is very, very still. The mind is very, very still.

If the mind is moving around a lot, you’re going to need oxygen, you’re going to need to breathe. But if your brain is doing very little work—it’s very still, very quiet, very alert right here—the need to breathe gets less and less. You feel that your body is full of breath energy.

That’s where the breath originates. It originates from within. It’s the energy that allows the air to come in and out through the nose and the lungs.

Now, when the body is saturated with this energy, when it’s full, you can be very still. This is the state the Buddha said is ideal for gaining insight because the issues of the body have grown still. Many layers of the mind have fallen away. Different layers of fabrication fall away, fall away, fall away as you get more concentrated.

Now, to get here, some people find it very easy just to settle down, not think about issues of the world, and plunk, they’re down.

Other people tend to think a lot. They like their thoughts a lot. All too many of these people decide, “Well, since I like my thinking, I can just think my way to awakening.”

But it doesn’t work that way. As Ajaan Fuang noted, the people who tend to think too much are the ones who have to really work on getting the mind quiet. As they do, their inquisitive nature will incline them to try to understand what’s happening as they get the mind quiet.

Now, we in the West tend to think an awful lot. We’re enamored with our thoughts. So, you need to learn another skill if you really want to understand your mind. You have to learn how to stop thinking.

That happens in layers. It happens in stages. That way, you can see the layers of conversation going on in the mind, the layers of communication. Ultimately you want to get down to a pre-verbal level.

We suffer not just because of the words we think.

Think of little children who don’t know any language at all. They suffer a lot and they’re operating on a pre-verbal level. We have our pre-verbal levels, too. You have to get your mind down to a pre-verbal level if you really want to understand it, to see exactly where the suffering is, what’s causing it.

And you want to make yourself happy to be here, to do this kind of work.

This is one of the reasons why we practice generosity, practice virtue. As I said earlier today, if you’re going to watch your mind, the best mind to watch is a good mind—in other words, a mind that’s been doing good things, being generous, being virtuous, extending thoughts of goodwill to everybody. That kind of mind is easy to watch. You’re happy to watch it.

Then you start taking it apart, so that you don’t just watch, you begin to understand. And it’s through understanding that you begin to see, “Oh, here’s where the mind inclines itself in the direction of suffering. And here’s where it can incline itself in the other direction,” as it peels things away.

So, the more quiet you get the mind, and the more alert you can be as you do that, then the more you’re going to see, the more you’re going to understand—and the more you’ll be able to find some freedom inside.