A Sense of Yourself

An important part of the practice is having a sense of yourself. The Buddha calls it attaññutā. It’s like going into battle. Before you choose your battles, you have to ask yourself, “Am I strong enough to take this on? Is it worth it?” A lot of times when you realize you don’t have the strength to take on a particular battle, you have to be willing to say, “No, not yet.” Or maybe, “No, not at all.”

We think of the forest ajaans as being really brave, but Ajaan Lee and Ajaan Fuang would both talk very freely about times when they did not take on a battle. They came out looking like losers, but they realized that these were not battles that were worth taking on—either because they didn’t have the strength or it would have cost too much in terms of their reputation, their time, their energy.

Ajaan Lee talks about the time when he was in Burma. A group of Burmese people had gotten together, formed a committee, and wanted to present him with some land to build a monastery. He talked about this to the Thai Ambassador to Burma. Apparently the Thai Ambassador had some connections back in Bangkok. When Ajaan Lee got back to Bangkok and started looking into how this might succeed, he found out there was a senior monk in Bangkok who stood in the way, saying that if he—the senior monk—was not involved in the project, it wasn’t going to succeed. Ajaan Lee knew that he didn’t have that many connections in the bureaucracy, so he just dropped the whole thing and went off into the forest for a while.

He said he looked like a loser, he looked like he was afraid, but he simply realized that some battles were not worth taking on—or that he wasn’t strong enough to take them on.

Ajaan Fuang talked about a similar time when he was first at Wat Dhammasithit. He woke up in the middle of the night one time and heard a group of people stealing the electricity generator. He knew who they were—he recognized their voices. He also knew that if he went down to confront them, they could do him physical harm. He realized it wasn’t worth it. So they stole the generator. It was just their karma then.

So there are times in life when you have to say, “I’m not up for this particular battle. I’ll put it aside—maybe look like a loser.” But what you look like doesn’t matter, because you have other battles, more important battles, that you have to take on.

As the Buddha said, the sign of wisdom is knowing what duties fall to you, what duties don’t fall to you. You take on the duties that do fall to you, and you leave aside the ones that don’t. The duties that do fall to you regardless deal with your defilements. You have to take them on. You can’t just give in to your greed, aversion, and delusion. You need to have a sense that you are competent to take them on. You have the tools you need. If you don’t have the tools you need, you’re going to work on them. This is where having a sense of yourself comes in: knowing what inner tools you have mastered and which ones you have to work on. The Buddha defines these tools in terms of six qualities.

The first tool is conviction. How much conviction do you have in the Teaching? How much conviction do you have in this path that leads to the end of suffering? If you have trouble getting yourself to take on the path— or to get back on the path if you’ve fallen off—how can you talk to yourself to remind yourself that you do want to put an end to suffering? Here’s the Buddha, someone who says it’s possible and he lays out a path. So you owe it to yourself to take on the path—whatever you can do to remind yourself of the dangers of not taking on the path and the advantages of taking it on. Even if it’s going to take a while and require a lot out of you, you’re willing to do it.

We hear so much about the instantaneous path, that we’re already awakened, our nature is already awakened, all you have to do is just relax into your awakened nature, like relaxing into your innate awareness. It sounds like there’s no battle at all. There’s nothing really to do. In fact, it’s all about not doing anything at all.

But the Buddha never used image like that in his description of what you have to do. People taking on the path, he says, are like soldiers; they’re like elephants in battle; like people trying to master a skill. When you master a skill, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t work, and you need to be able to encourage yourself to stick with it even when the going is tough.

There are studies they’ve done of people who really excel in their fields. The studies show that they all had a very live sense of the advantages that came from mastering the skill and a very live sense of the dangers that came from not mastering the skill. That’s how you develop your conviction. Learn how to talk to yourself, correcting any voices inside that are lazy or cynical—because what do they have to offer? Really nothing at all.

So that’s the first quality in having a sense of yourself: knowing the level of your conviction.

The second quality you want to test in yourself is how much virtue you have. How are your precepts? Where could you improve on them?

Similarly with the third quality, generosity: How generous are you with your time, with your energy? An important part of the path is composed of the heart qualities that come with generosity: your sympathy for other beings, your sense that you have more than enough. You develop a sense of inner wealth by being generous. That gives a lot of energy to your practice.

The fourth quality is learning. Why should we learn the Dhamma? The Buddha doesn’t require that you learn the whole Pali Canon. Just have enough familiarity with the basic principles. Have a good idea of what the path is like. Have a general idea of where you’re going and what’s needed to get there—because there’s so much misinformation out there.

Like the idea that just relaxing into your already existing awareness counts as mindfulness. It’s not mindfulness. You’re just relaxing into the aggregate of consciousness—and yet that’s something you have to comprehend, to see where you’re clinging to it. It’s not a place to rest. It’s something you have to investigate.

Learning how to investigate is when you have to use real mindfulness, which is the ability to keep things in mind, to keep your duties in mind as you take on the path. That way, you know what has to be comprehended, what has to be abandoned, what has to be developed. You’re mindful.

You’re also alert—very clearly seeing what you’re doing and the results of what you’re getting. Alertness is not a general awareness of the present moment. It’s a very specific awareness of what your decisions are, why you’re making those decisions, and what the results are.

And finally, ardency. You’re trying to do this really well. That’s where it becomes a skill.

As the Buddha said, how do you develop mindfulness? You practice all the factors of the eightfold path. There’s a belief in some places that there’s the path of mindfulness that leads to awakening, and a separate path of concentration that leads to awakening. The path bifurcates, and although either fork takes you to the goal, you have to choose or the other. But the path doesn’t bifurcate—there’s one path. And you’re going to develop your mindfulness by practicing right concentration, which is one of the factors of the path. That means that mindfulness is devoted to getting the mind to settle down with a sense of well-being. So use your powers of mindfulness, alertness, ardency for that purpose. When you know what the Canon actually says on these topics, it helps protect you from so much misinformation that’s out there.

The fifth quality in having a sense of yourself is your ingenuity. The Buddha lays out the path in very general steps, and you have to figure out: How are you going to apply it to your life? How are you going to apply it to your specific problems?

This is where you develop your own discernment, which is the sixth quality. You try things out—see what works, what doesn’t work. And, in the course of trying things out, you get a good sense of cause and effect. The Buddha defines discernment, in this case, as penetrating knowledge of arising and passing away.

The fact that it’s “penetrating” means you’re not just watching things coming and going. You’re trying to understand why they come and what they do when they come. If they’re skillful mind states, what you can do to maintain them? If they’re not skillful, what you can do to get rid of them?

So discernment is all very active. You’re playing a huge role in this path, which is why the Buddha doesn’t say there is no self. Ultimately, he says, you will get to the point where you don’t need your sense of self because the sense of self is part of a strategy—trying to figure out what, in your experience, is worth holding on to and what’s not, for the sake of finding happiness.

Once you’ve made up your mind that you’re going to follow this path, then the question is, which aspects of you, of the many “you’s” in your mind, are really going to be helpful in the path and which ones are not? You have to sort through them.

After all, you’re going to be doing battle with your defilements—and who are your defilements? Members of the committee of the mind, all claiming to be you. If they have all the power, if they have all the selves and you have no self, then who’s going to do battle? Who’s going to have the techniques? Who’s going to have the skills? Who’s going to be able to work on the skills that are needed?

You’ve got to develop a skillful sense of self. This is why the Buddha says, “The self is its own mainstay.” You use the self as a governing principle to keep you on the path. Use your sense of competence: “If other people can do this—they’re human beings, I’m a human being. If they can do it, why can’t I?”

So the Buddha does encourage you to develop a healthy sense of self on the path as part of your strategy to find the happiness that lies at the end of the path. When you get to the end of the path, you find the ultimate happiness, so you don’t need that strategy anymore. You can put it aside.

But some people think that, because the ultimate step is going to involve letting go of your sense of self, why not let go of your sense of self right now? There’s a good reason why not: We have to use it first, before we let it go.

It’s like tools for building a piece of furniture. If you’ve got a pile of wood there and you say, “Ultimately I’ll be letting go of the tools, so I’ll just let go of the tools now,” then nothing’s going to happen to the pile of wood if you let go of your tools too early. The proper course is to use them: Pick them up when necessary, put them down when you don’t need them, pick them up again when you do need them again. Finally, when that piece of furniture is done, then you put the tools down. At the same time, you’ve got the desk or table or chair that you wanted.

So learn to have a clear sense of yourself and develop the parts of yourself that need to be developed. This is a duty that does fall to you. This is the battle that you do have to take on if you want to find the end of suffering, if you want to find true happiness.

As for other battles outside, sometimes you have to lose, but they’re not nearly as important as winning this battle. So this is where you focus all your attention, all your energy.

And learn how to define yourself as someone who practices. Anything else inside that doesn’t want to practice, you don’t have to identify with it. That’s how you use the concept of not-self as you’re on the path. This is where the battle is really worth fighting. And really worth winning.

So don’t let other conflicts get in the way. There are so many times when you might win in another conflict, but you create a lot of karma. Yet if you win with this conflict, there’s no karma left at all. You’re done with your work and you’re totally free.