Metta Metacognition
December 29, 2024
You want to start the day every day with thoughts of goodwill, metta, wishing for happiness—your happiness and the happiness of everyone else. We do that as a way of clearing our minds before we meditate. But metta, in and of itself, is also something good to contemplate.
An important part of the meditation is the practice of alertness, watching what you’re doing while you’re doing it, and watching the results that you’re getting from what you’re doing, so that you can learn. Psychologists call this “metacognition”: the ability to watch your mind in action, to step back a little bit so that you’re not entirely immersed in your emotions. Looking at your mental states from a little distance, you can contemplate what you’re doing: where it’s skillful, where it’s not skillful, where you’re getting good results, where you’re not getting good results.
You can apply the same principle to the practice of metta itself. You might call this metta metacognition: observing and thinking about what it means to think thoughts of goodwill. What does it mean to be happy? What does it mean for you to be happy, for other people to be happy? And how can you do that in a way that’s not going to be in conflict?
One of the first things you realize is that you’ll have to be happy through your actions. Happiness sometimes seems to just come floating your way without your having done anything, but when you think about that, that’s the result of past actions.
How about your present actions? Are you creating happiness or not? That’s the beginning of wisdom. The question is, when you’re putting forth an effort to be happy, what kinds of efforts are worth it? Which ones are not? You want a happiness that lasts. Otherwise, you can put a lot of effort in, get a brief taste of happiness, and then it turns to something else.
So, what kind of happiness lasts? You want to observe that. Ideally, you want something that’s happy both in the doing and in the long-term results.
Psychologists have studied babie, and they’ve noticed the thing that makes babies happiest is when they do something and they get a result, and when they do it again, they get the same result again. This is why they like making repeated noises all the time, repeated, repeated, repeated noises. It can drive you crazy, but for them it’s pleasurable, because they realize they’ve figured out something about cause and effect. But as you grow up and get into the world of cause and effect, you discover that that world is a lot more complex than just making noises.
But still, there’s a happiness in figuring out cause and effect, so you that can use that knowledge to your advantage. That’s part of what you learn from observing the practice of metta: You start thinking about happiness seriously. We all want to be happy, and you’d think we’d plan for it seriously—not in the sense of being grim, but in being systematic, organized about it. Yet so many people just blunder their way through life, going for what looks happy on the outside and turns into something else on the inside.
That’s one of the lessons you learn: You have to look more deeply, you have to look long-term.
The Buddha gives some examples of activities that’re happy in the doing and also happy in the long-term results.
When you’re generous, when you freely give something to someone else, it feels good to do it, especially if it was a totally voluntary gift. You could have taken what you had and used it yourself, but you decided, “No, give it to someone else, make them happy.” You develop an expansive feeling of wealth, a sense of having more than enough.
The same with virtue: There are times when you’re going to have to make a sacrifice in order to hold to the precepts, but you find that you do that with a sense of honor, that you’re not going to just let money govern your life. You’ve got something of higher value, and that higher value is in you. It’s with you wherever you go. That creates a sense of honor.
As for thoughts of goodwill themselves, they manage to lift you above the ordinary back-and-forth, give-and-take of human life. You decide that you want to lift your level of your mind to that of a brahma, which is a high level of deva, who isn’t concerned about who did what. You give goodwill to everyone. You realize that goodwill is a form of generosity as well. You do it not because people deserve it, but because it feels good to do it, and you’re going to benefit in the long term. After all, if you have ill-will for anybody, you’ll find it easy to do things that are unskillful, and that’s going to come back and get you.
But if you manage to have goodwill for all—and this doesn’t mean you have to like them, just wish that they’d understand the principle that happiness comes from their actions, and they’ll have to act skillfully, and you’d be happy to help them in that regard—then when you have that attitude, it lifts your mind.
This is something you’ve learned: There are a lot of things that are happy in the doing and happy in the long-term results. And to find a long-term happiness, you have to find a happiness that’s harmless.
There’s a story in the Canon: King Pasenadi, who was a follower of the Buddha, is in his upper apartments with Mallika, one of his queens. In a tender moment, he turns to her and says, “Is there anyone you love more than yourself?”
Now, she’s no fool. She doesn’t say, “Yes, your majesty, I love you more than I love myself.” She’s truthful. So she says, “No, there’s nobody I love more than myself. And how about you? Anybody you love more than yourself?” The king has to admit, “No.”
That’s the end of that scene.
So the king descends from the palace, goes to see the Buddha, and tells him about the conversation. The Buddha says, “You know, Mallika was right. You could go the whole world over and not find anyone you love more than yourself, but you have to remember at the same time that everybody else loves themselves just as fiercely.”
The conclusion he draws from that is that you should never harm anyone or get anyone to do any harm. If you harm them, of course, they’re going to immediately dislike you. If your happiness depends on harming them, they’re not going to want to see your happiness last. They’re going to want to destroy it. At the same time, if you get them to do something that’s harmful, and they reap the bad results of that, then they’re going to resent you as well.
We see lots of cases of this in history, as when kings tell their soldiers to shoot at the populace. The soldiers sometimes come to their senses and say, “Wait a minute. These are poor human beings. How can I shoot human beings who are poor like me?” Then they turn on the king. So you don’t want to harm anybody, you don’t want to get them to do harm. Which means that if you’re really wise in your search for happiness, you want to have goodwill for others: Take their happiness into account.
Which further means that your happiness has to be harmless. Again, you go back to generosity, virtue, and meditation. These are things that harm no one. In fact, the more you try to find happiness here, the more happiness you give to others.
When you’re generous, of course, they receive the gifts. They’re happy. And you develop that quality of a spacious, wealthy heart.
When you observe the precepts in cases where you could have the power to harm somebody else but you choose not to, they’re going to appreciate that. At the same time, you maintain your sense of honor.
And when you meditate, you’re reducing the number of times you give into greed, aversion, and delusion. You benefit; the people around you benefit as well. And you benefit not only now, but also in the long term. These practices get you to think in the long term.
That’s another important part of spreading thoughts of goodwill. As the Buddha said, this is the question that lies at the beginning of discernment or wisdom: “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term harm and suffering? What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?”
Thinking about the long term is what makes you wise. We hear so much about how the Buddha taught to pay attention to the present moment, but it’s not just the present moment for its own sake. It’s always in the context of realizing that we don’t have much time left. Death could come at any time. Are you ready to go? If you realize you’ve got some qualities in the mind that make it difficult to go, then that’s what you’ve got to work on right now.
That’s why the Buddha has you focus on the present moment. But you’re focusing on the present moment because what you do in the present moment has long-term consequences. So it’s not just the present moment for its own sake. It’s the present moment as it leads into the future.
You realize you’ve got to learn the skill of how—when there’s something you’d like to do but you know is going to give long-term harm—you can talk yourself out of doing it. You basically get yourself so you don’t want to do it. This means thinking about that harm, taking it seriously, not just giving in to your desire to do what you feel like doing right now.
The same with things that you don’t like to do right now but you know are going to give long-term good consequences: You learn to talk yourself into wanting to do them—not grudgingly but learning how to want to do them. That’s a sign of real wisdom.
We hear so much about Buddhist wisdom that sounds paradoxical: Emptiness. Not-self. But the Buddha says actually wisdom is pragmatic. If you know your likes are going to get in the way of your long-term happiness, you have to learn how to get past your likes.
So these are some of the things you learn when you think thoughts of goodwill and reflect on what you’re doing: practicing metta metacognition.
The same principle applies throughout all the meditation. When you focus on the breath, you want to be alert to what you’re doing, alert to the results. As you do that, you’re learning about your mind, all the many minds you have. This is one thing you learn. It’s not mentioned in the Canon, but you realize you have many, many opinions in there, and each of them identifies itself as you: “I think this. No, I think this. No, I feel this. I feel that.”
You have to realize that the way you deal with these different voices is going to be really important, because basically they’re the voices of past karma: ideas you’ve had in the past, ways you’ve sought for happiness in the past—which worked to some extent, at least enough to satisfy you at the time. It may not have been satisfactory in the long term, but it may have been at least a quick fix. You have to realize, “I can’t identify with every voice in my mind.” Learn how to see them as something separate.
This, the Buddha said, is also an aspect of wisdom: seeing the events in the mind as separate. When there’s a thought going through, don’t tell yourself it’s your thought. It’s just a thought. Then the question is, “Is it a good thought to go with?” If it’s not, you can say, “I don’t want it. I don’t have to go there.”
A part of the mind may want to go. You’re going to have to learn how to dig that out. That part of the mind may have seized your breath to put some pressure on the issue. You’ve got to take the breath back. You consciously decide how you’re going to breathe. Make it as comfortable, easeful, soothing, refreshing as possible. You’ll find that the desire to follow through, say, with a bout of anger, a bout of lust, gets weakened a great deal.
So we’re here to learn about the mind and the heart. This is another important lesson you learn from metta metacognition: We’re not training only the mind to be smart and intelligent, we’re training the heart to be intelligent as well—in other words, to will things in a way that really is for your true happiness.
If it’s just the mind, it’s pretty weak. But if you’ve got the mind working together with the heart, and you’ve got the breath on your side as well, then you begin to realize you can go far.
This is the lesson of all this practice of alertness: that training the heart and mind together is necessary for true happiness.
So, make sure that goodwill is a part of your practice, and that you reflect on it as you do it. Think on what it means to wish for happiness. Think what it means to be happy in a way that’s satisfying and is worth of all the effort that has to go into being happy. Take the issue of true happiness seriously, and you’ll find that you can learn a lot that’s conducive to happiness that really is genuine.