Bless Yourself

In translations of the suttas, they often call the Buddha the “Blessed One.” The question sometimes comes up, “Who blessed him?” And the answer is, he blessed himself. He had asked himself, what did he really want in life? He realized that he wanted nothing less than the highest happiness. He also realized that if it was going to happen, he had to do it. He had to create the causes.

The problem was that, when he started out, he didn’t know the causes. He tried various paths before he found the true path. When he had found the true path, he looked back and realized that the happiness he had found did come from his own actions. There was a path of action by which he blessed himself.

There are so many ways in which the Canon describes the path of practice—because each of us is coming from a different place. Some of us have a lot of generosity in our background. Some of us tend to be more intelligent in a book-learning sort of way. Others have intelligence in other ways. Part of the Buddha’s wisdom was realizing that he could take you from wherever you are, and if you followed his instructions, he could get you to where he was.

This is what ties all the practices together: not that they’re coming from the same place, in the sense of the same starting point, but they do go to the same ending point. Which means that for some people, if they’re to the south of the goal, the instructions are to go north. For those people who are to the north of the goal, the instructions are to go south. You can understand how, in practice, what sounds contradictory is actually not.

So the question is, how do you find your path among the many paths the Buddha provided? Start by realizing, as he said, that they all come down to the noble eightfold path. They’re all just variations on this one path.

This is another way in which they’re all consistent. He taught, for instance, the four establishings of mindfulness. He asks, “How do you develop these establishings of mindfulness?” And the answer he gives is that you develop the all eight factors of the path.

There are people who say you can do mindfulness and, as a result, gain wisdom and insight and awakening all without concentration practice. But as the Buddha said, if you want to develop mindfulness, you’ve got to develop concentration as well, because it’s part of the path. If you’re simply mindful of what you should do but don’t do anything about it, that doesn’t take you anywhere. This is why the Buddha said there are extra qualities you have to add to mindfulness, like ardency and alertness.

Alertness is knowing what you’re doing while you’re doing it; ardency is wanting to do it well. In fact, the ardency is what makes all of these factors part of the path. It’s the wisdom factor of those three. And you’re ardent in doing what? Trying to get the mind to settle down.

So as you’re sitting here right now, try to be mindful of why you’re here. Then focus on doing what you need to do. In some cases, we come to the meditation wired, tense, and nervous, so we have to emphasize getting the mind to settle down and be quiet. Other people come and they’re kind of dull and listless to begin with, so they have to be energized. This is where there’s a difference between someone coming from the north and someone coming from the south.

So check your state of mind right now. Is it a northern state or a southern state? What do you need? More energy? If so, think about all the things that would motivate you to want to practice. Think about the fact that even though we have a new year coming on, we’re getting older. We don’t know how much time we have left, but we do know that we have this time right now—this breath coming in, this breath going out. And we can take advantage of that.

This is one of the good things about the Buddha’s teachings on meditation. They don’t require a lot of background study, but they do require that you be really true in realizing that you need to do something good and that it can be done right here. So whatever way of thinking gives you energy, learn how to think in those ways, because thinking is an important part of meditation, especially when you need to be energized.

If you’re already fairly wired and need to calm down, think about topics that are soothing, like goodwill for all. Or think about what a good Dhamma we have here, found by someone who wanted nothing but the highest happiness and held himself to the highest standards. Then, when he found that happiness, he taught it for free. Not only that, he would seek out people. If he sensed that people here or there would be ready for the teaching, he would go to them. He ended up walking all over northern India. Can you imagine anyone doing that now? Even on the very last day of his life, he knew there was one more person he had to teach. So even though he was suffering from dysentery, he walked all day to where that person was, taught him, and then he passed away.

That kind of reflection is calming. You realize that there are good people in the world who have left their goodness behind, along with left instructions on how to become good like them. Those instructions have lasted more than 2,500 years. So let that thought calm you down, at the same time making you want to practice.

This is a large part of the strength of persistence: learning how to motivate yourself and figuring out what kind of motivation you need right now. The strength of persistence is part of a whole set of five strengths.

There’s conviction—conviction that the Buddha really was awakened, that he taught the Dhamma well, and that there have been people who’ve practiced the Dhamma well and gotten results. That thought gives you energy.

Otherwise, you live in a world where no one has found the end of suffering, one in which the Buddha had just a few interesting ideas that might be right, might be wrong: That’s the kind of world it is if you don’t have conviction in his awakening. It’s a miserable world.

But when you have the conviction that the Buddha was able to find a way to end suffering and he was able to do it through his own efforts, that motivates you to want to put forth your efforts, so that you, too, can get the same results.

And you realize, as I said, that you don’t know how much time you have left, so you’ve got to keep these teachings in mind, keep the need to develop skillful qualities in mind, keep in mind the need to abandon unskillful ones all the time.

That’s how, when reflecting on the need for persistence, you see the need for mindfulness. That, too, is a strength. When mindfulness develops, it turns into concentration. The mind settles down and has a sense of well-being—right here, solidly right here. Its thoughts about other things, you’ve already put away. So you can stay focused right here.

Your mind takes on so much work in the course of the day—dealing with this person, that person, this duty, that duty, this job—and the body has its needs, or your emotions come up and you have to deal with them: so many different things the mind has to deal with.

It’s good to be able to tell yourself, “I don’t need to even think about those things right now. I can stay right here. If my mind is going to deal well with those things, it needs to be cared for. It needs to be allowed to rest.” In this way, it’s like the body. When you hire people to do work, you don’t expect them to work 24 hours a day, because you realize the quality of the work will go down. So you give them a reasonable amount of work and then a reasonable amount of time to rest. The mind needs a reasonable amount of time to rest, too.

When I recommend to people that they meditate at least two hours a day, some people say, “That’s a huge chunk of time.” But two hours out of 24—it’s just barely enough to keep abreast of what you need to do. And often in those two hours you have to clean out the mess that’s been made during the other 22 hours.

So realize that this is something you don’t keep your mind focused on only while you’re sitting here with your eyes closed, but also as you go through the day. The word for meditation in the Pali language, bhavana, doesn’t mean just meditating with your eyes closed. It means to develop: to develop good qualities in the mind. And that’s something you want to do all day long.

Only when the mind settles down like this can it see things clearly. This is where your real strength lies—the strength of discernment—when you see clearly what you’re doing and along with the results of what you’re doing. Part of discernment is alertness on steroids—you’re very clear about what your actions are and you see where you’re causing yourself unnecessary suffering, and you can see how you stop.

Again, this is where ardency comes in. You remember what the Buddha said about how true happiness comes from letting go of anything that causes suffering, so you draw on your conviction in what the Buddha taught, and you try to let go of the things that you see are causing suffering right here in your mind.

Now, if you didn’t believe that letting go of those things would lead to a greater happiness, you wouldn’t let go. There are people who think, as I said, that concentration is as good as things get, so you might as well hold on. But when you’re convinced in what the Buddha said, and your conviction has been verified many times as you practice—as you’re persistent in the practice, mindful, develop concentration—you get more and more trust in the Buddha that it really would be good to let go of things that are very dear to you inside. A lot of your attitudes, a lot of your sense of who you are: Once you see that these things are stressful, you can let them go.

It’s in this way that all the strengths come together in discernment. As the Buddha said, they’re based on heedfulness, the realization that your actions really are important, and you’ve got to be careful. But also, based on that heedfulness, once you develop conviction, you’re more likely to be able to develop the discernment you need—the ability to let go of things that otherwise you wouldn’t be able to let go.

So think of all five of these strengths as working together. The Buddha’s image is of a house. You put up the rafters, but the rafters are not really solid until the ridge pole is in place. They support the ridge pole, and the ridge pole is what makes them solid, too. So think of all five strengths as working together. The first four support discernment, and discernment is what makes them solid. In this way, you find that you, too, can develop the strengths the Buddha’s had.

As he said, whenever he tried to master a path that was taught in those days, he tried to develop these five strengths, because it was through developing them that he was able to test them for sure, to see how far they went. When he found that they were lacking, he realized that the lack was not in him, the lack was in that particular path.

When he got on to the right path, again, he brought these same five qualities to bear, and in this case, they worked. He had conviction in the right thing; he made a persistent effort in the right way; he was mindful of the right things; concentrated in the right way; and gained discernment in the right way. All of these things worked together to bring him the happiness he had been searching for. He was able to prove for himself that, yes, through human effort it is possible to find the highest happiness.

He spent the rest of his life teaching that. The people who listened to him and benefited from practicing based on his teachings passed that teaching down to us. And here we are, with one more year to add to the life of the Buddha’s teachings. What keeps them alive is not the fact that they exist in books on the shelves. They stay alive in our practice. So think of this as a good year to extend the life of the Buddha’s teachings for one more year, at least.

As I said, we don’t know how much more time we have left. As Ajaan Swat once said, the human realm is going to get pretty bad for a while. If, when you die, you have to come back, come back as a deva—better than as a human being. After all, devas can practice, too. And how are you going to get that opportunity? By practicing as much as you can right now.

A woman once came to see Luang Pu Dune and said that she didn’t want to practice meditation now because practicing under the current Buddha was really difficult. She was going to wait until the time of Maitreya, the next Buddha, when it’s said that people will find it a lot easier to practice. But as he told her, “If you don’t practice now, you’re not going to get an opportunity to come back then. If you’re lazy now, there’s no opening for lazy people in the time of a Buddha like that.”

So, think about time in whatever way it encourages you to practice right now. After all, where else and when else are you going to practice? This is the time; this is the place. So keep doing your best right here. That’s how you bless yourself here and now.