Good & Independent

There’s so much talk about how the world is interconnected and that we should celebrate that fact. The Buddha, though, was not one of the celebrants. He saw that interconnectedness is basically the process by which we suffer.

When you look around you in the world, you can see a lot that you wouldn’t want to be connected to. And you realize how interdependent we are on things we can’t really rely on in the world. This is why we have to learn how to become independent. Our goodness has to become independent.

Again, you hear a lot of talk about how the idea of an independent self is the source of all evil. But we’re not talking about an independent self, we’re talking about independence—it’s a state that ultimately doesn’t require self. But to get there, you have to develop an independent self, to be independent in your goodness—like we’re doing right now.

The conditions of the world could be pushing us to do all kinds of things, but we’ve decided that we want to train our minds in good qualities. Start out with mindfulness, keeping in mind the fact that you want to stay with the breath. Then be alert to the breath—how’s it going? Is your mind staying with the breath?

If you find that it’s wandering off, bring it back. That’s the quality of ardency: You’re trying to do this well. You’re trying to create a good quality, a good state in the mind—a state where there’s a sense of ease, refreshment, singleness, where the mind can stay with one thing—ardent, alert, mindful—putting aside all its concerns with the world.

As we live in the world, we have to have our independent source of goodness inside: goodwill for all beings. We start with goodwill for ourselves. We realize that we’re suffering. There’s stress, there’s suffering in life and we have the wisdom to see that it’s coming from our own actions. We’re borrowing the Buddha’s wisdom. That’s what conviction is—seeing that there have been good people in the world and they’ve left behind a path on how to develop our own goodness.

Then we spread goodwill to others as part of that goodness, because if you have ill will for anyone, it’s going to be very easy to do unskillful things around those people. Then, of course, that legacy of that unskillful action is going to be a burden for you in the future. And it’s a burden right now—it just doesn’t feel right.

There are a lot of people out there in the world who can do a lot of evil. AI is now helping them, so they can do lots and lots of evil. So you need your own genuine intelligence to find something inside that’s independently good. That means having goodwill in your thoughts, goodwill in your words, goodwill in your deeds. This doesn’t mean that you do what other people want, necessarily—after all, their desires may not be all that skillful.

Basically, goodwill for others is realizing that their happiness will have to come from their actions. So you wish that they will see the error of their ways—if they’ve been acting in cruel and heartless ways—to see the error of their ways and be willing to change. Anything you can do to help them in that direction, you’re happy to do it. Of course, you have to look at your own actions—what do you have to change?

Here again, we’re guided by conviction. As the Buddha said, conviction is the proper response to suffering. Our ordinary response is bewilderment and a search. We’re confused by why we suffer; we search for someone who might know a way or two to put an end to that suffering. So we’re trying to convert that bewilderment into conviction. We listen to what the Buddha has to say about why we suffer. He says it’s not because of things outside, it’s because of things inside the mind: craving, ignorance. What he says makes sense.

So we try to work on these things. This means that from conviction we go to persistence, energy. We do our best to try to figure out what in the mind is unskillful and what in the mind is skillful. We encourage the things that are skillful, like heedfulness, mindfulness, goodwill, concentration. Things that are unskillful, we try to put them aside. Any hindrances that come into the mind, anything that gets in the way of your mind settling down right now—even if it’s a thought about doing good some other time—there’s a time and place for that. Right now you’re trying to work on your concentration. That means developing mindfulness, keeping in mind this quest for what is skillful and realizing that, for the mind to maintain its strength to be skillful, it’s going to have to find a source of nourishment inside. That’s what the concentration is for.

Try to be with the breath in a way that feels really good, remembering that the breath is not just the air making contact at the nose. It’s the energy that flows through the body that allows the air to come in, the air to go out. Ask yourself: Where do you feel that energy? How does it feel? Does it feel good? Do you want an energy that’s nourishing? Calming if you’ve been upset? Energizing if you’ve been tired? Relaxing if you’ve been tense?

If you pay a lot of attention, you realize that that energy responds very quickly to thoughts in the mind. You can say to yourself, “Breathe in long,” and it’ll go long. “Breathe in short” and it’ll be short—you don’t have to force it. “Heavy, light, shallow, deep, fast, slow.”

This is the power of thought. The breath will change, and then you can think of whatever breath feels good running through the nerves of the body. It may run up against some pains or patterns of tension, but you can think of it permeating these things, going right through them.

After all, the breath was there first. All too often, we think of the body as a solid lump and you have to pump the air in. But actually your first immediate experience of the body, is through the energy, the breath. So let the breath have priority right now. It can go anywhere in the body. Expand your awareness to fill the body. Expand the breath to flow throughout the body so that you’ve got the breath filling the body. You’ve got a sense of ease filling the body. You’ve got your awareness filling the body. They’re all right here. That’s what nourishes you. That’s what gives you strength.

Remember the Buddha’s image of the soldiers of right effort: They need the weapons of teachings in the Dhamma, but they also need nourishment. And the nourishment comes from the concentration.

At the same time, when the mind settles down like this, it’s a lot easier for it to discern what’s actually going on—to see why it’s causing suffering. When blatant suffering comes up, you can see it really clearly. But there are subtle sufferings as well, and the subtle sufferings have subtle causes, which is why you have to get the mind really quiet.

One, simply so you can see them—you’re not running around making a lot of noise.

It’s like realizing that there are mice in the wall of your house. You can’t try searching for them by turning on the vacuum cleaner. The vacuum cleaner will make so much noise that you can’t hear the mice. You won’t know where they are. So you’ve got to turn the vacuum cleaner off. Turn off the TV. Turn off the refrigerator. Turn off everything so that it’s really quiet in the house—and then you can detect where the mice are. That’s one reason why we get the mind quiet—for the sake of discernment.

Another reason is that when the mind is really at ease like this, it gets more discerning as to which states of mind are easeful and which ones are a burden. What are you doing that’s burdensome right now? Anything that pulls you away from this sense of ease—why would you want to go with it? You may have a habit of going with thoughts like that, but when you’ve got something much better, you can compare them and see that those thoughts have their drawbacks. You can let them go much more easily this way.

Ultimately, you begin to see that even the concentration itself has stress, a subtle disturbance inside, in all of its different levels. That’s how the Buddha went through the levels of concentration, noticing where there was a disturbance and what was causing the disturbance. It was usually a perception, an activity of the mind. When he dropped that activity, the disturbance would go away and he’d get deeper into concentration.

He didn’t have any guides to tell him that he had to do this or that jhana or whatever. He was feeling his way instinctively through this question of: “Where is the stress? What’s causing it? How can you let it go? How can you let go of the cause?” That’s what discernment is all about.

So when you develop these qualities of mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, you can unburden the mind. When the mind is unburdened, it has a lot more strength to do the things that really are worthwhile.

This is how you maintain your goodness independently: You strengthen the mind inside. Then, when you’re dealing with the world, you realize you have much less need to feed off the goodness of the world.

We do try to see the goodness of the world, but as Ajaan Lee once said, “The goodness of the world isn’t true. The truth of the world isn’t really good.”

There are a lot of limitations to the goodness outside, but if you can’t see any goodness at all, it’s going to be hard to motivate yourself to want to be good to the world. So you have to look for it.

Use it to nourish your path as you go along it, until you reach the point where you really can be totally independent. Your goodness then, as the Buddha said, becomes a natural ornament of the mind. That’s when it can be reliable—when you don’t need to feed on it. You can rely on yourself, and the world can rely on you. You reach a point where you don’t have to rely on the world because there’s a goodness that doesn’t have to do with worlds, doesn’t have to do with selves, any of the parameters of becoming. It’s totally beyond.

It’s not affected by anything. It’s not dependent on anything. That’s why it’s genuinely good.