Do, Maintain, Use

One of Ajaan Fuang’s most commonsense teachings was about the three stages or three functions in meditation: One, you have to learn how to do it. Two, you have to learn how to maintain it. And three, you have to learn how to put it to use.

There’s so much in our minds that fights common sense. We like to hear that there’s nothing to do, or that if there’s going to be concentration, it’s going to come and go on its own. We also don’t like to hear that we have to maintain it—when it comes and it goes, we think that we’ve learned something about impermanence.

As for using it, we get lost. We think that if you’re going to do insight practice, you have to drop the concentration and then start on square one and do insight—but actually, insight comes out of the concentration. It comes out of the doing and the maintaining.

But you have to learn how to ask the right questions. In terms of doing it, you focus on the causes. You come to the meditation, you come to your object—like the breath—and then, if you find yourself wandering away, you just have to come right back.

It may seem that the concentration comes and goes and comes and goes without any continuity. But what you’re doing here is that you’re learning how to connect those moments of concentration. Each time you come back, think of it as a continuation and you’ll find that—as long as you’re observant—you get quicker and quicker about sensing when you’re about to go off. You can stop and immediately return to the concentration. You’re connecting things.

Sometimes when concentration comes, it just seems to go on its own. Realize that you made a choice, and that if you chose to do something, then you can choose to undo that choice. All too often, you see the concentration coming and then beginning to fall away, and you think, “Well, I’ve to just give in to this falling away.” You don’t. Actually, you did the falling away. You made a choice about what to focus on, what not to focus on. When you can be clear about what you’re doing, and you see that you made the wrong choice, you can undo that choice and come right back.

You begin to realize that you’re more involved in this than you thought. There’s so much going on in the mind that you don’t notice—but you’re here to learn about it. There are choices being made; value judgments being made—and you want to clearly see what’s happening. That’s how the doing turns into maintaining.

As for using: There’s that five-step program that the Buddha gives for dealing with anything unskillful coming up in the mind. First is seeing its origination: Where does it come from within the mind? That’s an important insight right there—that it’s coming from within the mind. It’s not just floating past. You want to see that—and you see that best in the course of trying to maintain the concentration, because once the mind gets still, you’re not just there to enjoy the stillness. That’s one of the functions of the meditation, for sure, but if you just wallow in the comfort, you lose your focus.

If you’re going to maintain it, you have to figure out how you can continue working and get your salary at the same time. Most of us are like a person who gets a job, gets his first paycheck, and quits work to travel around, forgetting the job. Then he runs out of money and has to come back. In real life, the boss usually wouldn’t take you back. But here, fortunately, the mind is forgiving—it’ll take you back, but you never learn anything much. You have to learn how to be with the comfort but not wallow in the comfort as you focus on the breath. In that way, you get to enjoy your salary and work at the same time, so that the salary keeps coming to you.

One of the jobs you have to do is to see, when the mind is about to leave concentration, what are the steps? In the beginning, you’re with the concentration, then you’re off someplace far away. It’s as if a curtain came down, and you’re in another scene entirely. Well, the curtain coming down is one of the mind’s tricks. That’s ignorance right there. So you have to try to notice the steps as the mind is about to leave. As you get better and better at realizing what’s going on, you’re beginning to see that a decision has been made someplace in the basement of the mind that as soon as your mindfulness lapses, they’re going to go—and they’re ready and waiting for their chance.

A stirring comes in the boundary line between breath and mind. In the beginning, it’s hard to say whether it’s physical or mental—it’s a little bit of both—and you then decide to slap a label on it. You can slap a perception, saying, “This is a thought about x,” and then you run with it. You want to see that—and to see that it involved a decision. You want to get to the point where, wherever there’s a little stirring inside that boundary between the breath energy and the mind, you can zap it; keep it from growing or from going anywhere. Breathe right through it.

You’re like a spider on a web: The spider’s off in one corner of the web and is ready and waiting, sensitive to the entire web. If a fly comes along or another insect gets caught in the web, the spider immediately runs over, wraps it up, and then goes back to its original spot. That’s what you want to do. You zap the potential thought and then you return to your center. That’s how you maintain the concentration.

At the same time, you’re beginning to gain some understanding about that step of origination, when you see that if you don’t go with the thoughts that would give rise to further thought worlds, they just pass away.

So those are the first two steps.

The next two: allure and drawbacks. These two are basically a cost-benefit analysis in the mind. When we hear about the Buddha’s recommendation that we use that kind of analysis to see what it is we like about a particular thought, what the drawbacks are, and be willing to say No to the allure because the drawbacks are so great, it sounds too cerebral, as if it’s all just happening up in the head. But that’s not what the Buddha means.

For one thing, it’s something we’re doing all the time, just that it’s down in the lower realms of the mind. The reasons we’re going with the allure are pretty obscure, and there’s a part of the mind that likes to keep them obscure because they’re usually pretty embarrassing. So, there’s a kind of a cost-benefit analysis going on all the time, but it’s done in a very slipshod way, without much opportunity for discussion, and the mind resists bringing it up to the light of day—because, that way, it can go for the allure whenever it wants.

Now, there are times when you see that a particular desire does have drawbacks that are so strong that you’re going to have to say No. But what the Buddha’s asking you to do is to bring that whole process up into the light of day through right mindfulness and right concentration, and then to inform it with right view—the right view that there are things you do that lead to suffering and things you can do that can lead to the total end of suffering. That broadens your range of choices.

Without the third or the fourth noble truth, we’d be still stuck going back and forth between what we like and what we don’t like—sometimes learning from our mistakes, sometimes not—basically thinking that this is as good as it gets; this is what we have to accept. But this is just a narrow range of choices that we’ve set out for ourselves. And again, there’s part of the mind that likes that because when the range of choices is pretty narrow and not very demanding, you just go for what you like. But, here, the Buddha’s saying there’s something more— total freedom, a total end to suffering, and it can be attained through your efforts.

When you take him seriously, then when you look at something that’s inconstant or stressful, you can see that it really is not worth claiming as self because it’s going to get in the way of that higher possibility. It’s when you take that higher possibility into consideration and treat it seriously: That’s when you’re more willing to look at the allure; to track it down, to see exactly where it is. Because here, again, the mind likes to keep it obscure.

You say you desire something or say desire someone. Is it really that thing? Is it really that person? The real reason may be just a perception. We know the nature of perceptions—they’re representative, in the same way, say, that a congressman or congresswoman represents a district. They’re supposed to represent the voters in that district, but to begin with, not all the voters voted for that person. Even for the people who did vote for the congressman, the congressman doesn’t have all the same opinion as they do. He just represents them in a very general way. That’s how our perceptions function. No perception is an exact copy of what it’s supposed to represent. It’s a sketch. And it’s a sketch for a particular purpose. The extent to which it’s true is measured by how well it serves that purpose. It’s accurate to that extent, but there’s an awful lot that it doesn’t show.

So it is with the other things that create the allure. You begin to realize that you’re dealing with partial truths, you’re dealing with sketches. And you want to track down: Exactly where is that sketch reliable and where is it not?

Even the most reliable perceptions—the three perceptions that the Buddha teaches for the sake of insight—are not the total representations of reality.

We talk about the aggregates being stressful, unpleasant, suffering, but they have their pleasant side as well. As the Buddha said, if it weren’t for that pleasant side, we wouldn’t fall for them. So it depends on what your purposes are, how you sketch them.

You begin to realize that the allure is just a sketch—and sometimes not even an accurate sketch. Sometimes it hides itself—like those bureaucracies where you ask, “Who made this decision?” You talk to person A and he says, “Well, it was person B.” You talk to person B, and he says, “Oh, no, it’s person C.” You talk to C, “Well, no, it’s A." The mind can lie to itself. As Ajaan Chah once said, that’s one of the first things you have to learn as a meditator—how much the mind lies to itself.

This is why we have to maintain our concentration as we’re working on discernment, because only when the mind is really still can you can see these subtleties. Then you can have an accurate and useful comparison between the allure and the drawbacks—keeping in mind that whatever the allure of something may be, however satisfying it may be, when you compare it to the total end of suffering, it’s still got something lacking. With our defilements, the lack is huge. With the factors of the path, it’s subtler, but it’s there.

This is why common sense as a meditator, sometimes, is so hard to maintain—not just because of the mind’s ability to lie to itself or because of its laziness, but also because of the mind’s subtleties. But still, you have to be confident that these are things you can master.

We read about the Buddha and sometimes it sounds like he’s superhuman. But remember, he taught people of all kinds—men, women, children, young, old, rich, poor, well-educated, uneducated, people who had a good background, people who had a pretty shady background—but they all wanted the end of suffering. So you have to tell yourself, “If they can do it, so can I. And it’s something worth doing.”

This is one of the reasons why the Buddha talked about his awakening, and particularly about that first and second knowledges prior to the awakening. The third knowledge was what led to the real awakening, but the first and second knowledges provided the context for getting there—and also for framing your lives: that if you don’t put an end to this constant round of running after your desires, you’re going to keep on coming back, coming back, coming back. If you act unskillfully as you run after those desires, you won’t come back to a good place.

The Buddha teaches these things not just to impress people or to decorate their minds. He does it to remind you that there are value judgments that you have to make within the context of this reality. And he’s teaching you that it is possible, through judging well, to find your way out.

So if you use some common sense as you meditate and you take the Buddha seriously, it helps sort through a lot of decisions you’re going to have to make as you practice—both here at the monastery and when you go home; while you’re sitting with your eyes closed and when you’re walking around in the world with your eyes open. If you take this framework and keep it in mind—you’re doing the meditation, you’re maintaining it and you’re putting it to use—then you can get the most out of it.