Joy & Discontent

There’s a passage where the Buddha says that when you see that you’ve done something right, you’ve managed to say or think or do something that didn’t harm anybody, then you should take joy in that fact and continue training. But there’s another place where he says that the secret to his awakening was discontent with his skillful qualities. In other words, as long as he hadn’t attained the deathless happiness that he was looking for, he wouldn’t rest content.

So which is it? The answer, of course, is both. Knowing the right time and the right place to encourage yourself and knowing the right time and place to come down hard on yourself: That’s a skill and it’s an important part of the practice.

Notice that even when the Buddha is telling you to encourage yourself, to take joy in having done something right, he tells you not to stop there. You want to keep on training. That’s what it means to be discontent. In other words, you know you’ve done something well and you want to tell yourself, “Yes, you did that well, but you don’t stop there.”

Ajaan Fuang once told me that he was afraid to praise people about their practice because often they would just stop right there, thinking they were good enough. That’s one of the reasons I almost never got any praise from him. His attitude was that you can always do better, but you still have to take joy in the fact that you’re making progress. Otherwise, you get discouraged. If there’s no joy in doing things right, then when the critical voices come, when you see you’ve done something wrong, you just dump on yourself. That’s not helpful.

You need to train your inner voices to have a sense of time and place. Think of the Buddha’s strictures for the words he would speak. First they would have to be true. Then they have to pass the next checkpoint, which is: Are they beneficial? If they were true but not beneficial, he wouldn’t say them. If they were true and beneficial, then the next checkpoint was: Is this the right time and place to be critical or to be encouraging? Three checkpoints. Most of us don’t bother with any checkpoints at all. Whatever pops in our mind just pops right out our mouth.

Even if it doesn’t come out our mouth, it just keeps running around inside the mind. Think about how much work we had to put in to learn language when we were small. Then look what it does to us. It turns around and criticizes us inside, tells us we have to worry about this, worry about that; we’re wrong about this, wrong about that; we’re no good at this, we’re no good at that. It’s like Pandora’s box. Open the box of language and it takes over our brains. Often there’s not much to keep it under control.

This is one of the skills we need to develop in meditation. We were talking today about getting the mind under control. Part of it is just staying focused on the breath, having a sense of being with that sensation and not wandering off. But an important part of the meditation is also how you talk to yourself. It’s called directed thought and evaluation. That’s part of right concentration. And even before right concentration, it’s how you talk to yourself throughout the path.

People sometimes come and ask, ”How do I do this directed thought and evaluation?” Well, you’re doing it all the time. You pick up a topic and then you comment on it. Pick up another topic and comment on it. Or you just circle around one particular topic, which may or may not be useful, and that inner voice—or those many inner voices—can really harass you. You’ve got to exert some control. Lay down some laws.

And the good laws are the ones I mentioned just now. Whatever you say to yourself has to be true. It has to be beneficial. It has to be at the right time and place to be critical or encouraging. If the inner voices don’t abide by those rules, they may keep on chattering, but you just decide, “I’m not going to listen. Wherever this inner voice came from, I don’t have to trust it.”

Here again you bring out the five-step program that the Buddha would recommend for dealing with anything going on in the mind. First, see its origination. What’s propelling it? Say you’ve got a sense in the mind that you have to worry about things. If you don’t worry about things, everything’s going to fall apart. That’s what a voice inside is telling you. Well, question that attitude. First bring it out. Sometimes it operates behind the scenes, because it knows that if you actually listen to what it had to say, it’d sound pretty stupid. So it whispers in short spurts. Suppose there’s an asteroid coming to the earth. Well, worrying about it is not going to change its course. There’s this kind of magical thinking that “If I worry enough about something, that’ll fend it off and it’ll go away.” That’s not true. Or “If I worry about it enough, I’ll be prepared for it.” That’s not true, either.

The way you prepare for things in the future is to focus on the skills you can develop in the present—in terms of mindfulness, alertness, and ardency—that will enable you to think quickly and on your feet when something unexpected happens in the future. All too often, we’re told to focus on the present moment for its own sake: It’s a wonderful moment, or it’s the only moment there is. But the Buddha never said that. All the cases where he talks about focusing on the present have to do with getting prepared for the fact that you’re going to die, and you need to do the work that needs to be done—about what you’re going to have to let go, about what choices you’ll be need to be prepared to make, about how to develop the mindfulness you need, how to develop the discernment you’ll need, so that as the time comes to leave this body, and options are open to you, you want to choose the right options. At the very least, choose a place where you can meet up with the true Dhamma and practice it.

This means you’re in the present for the sake of the future. So you keep reminding yourself that this is where the real work is done. It’s not just for the sake of being here. It’s for the sake of dealing with whatever’s going to come up in the future as well.

Now, you are creating a sense of well-being right now. But that sense of well-being is not the end in and of itself. It’s part of learning how to do the work well. It’s also part of learning how to step out of the voices of your mind. When you can stay with a sense of the breath as a purely physical sensation, you can pull out of all those chat rooms inside the mind, get some rest, and see them from the outside.

That’s the important thing. As long as you identify with the voices inside—the ones that are critical or the ones that say the wrong thing at the wrong time—they’re going to run your life. You have to be able to step out and say, “This is not what I want. It’s not true or it’s not beneficial or this is not the right time. I’ve got something better to do.” You work on developing your mindfulness, your alertness, and your ardency right now, because those are the tools you’re going to need. We talk about developing these qualities to help put aside greed and distress with reference to the world, but we’re also developing them so that when you do have to deal with the world, you’ll be able to deal with the world in a wise way. You can see the world best when you’ve been able to step out of it. That includes not only the world outside, but also the world—or the worlds—of your mind.

So establish some rules of order inside the mind. This doesn’t mean you’ll be able to stop the voices in the mind right away. But it does mean that you can learn how not to take them so seriously. If they’re going to chatter, have them chatter in the other corner of the room. You’re in this corner of the room where you’re going to do some work, the work that needs to be done right now.

And, yes, when you do it well, find joy in it. That’s an important rule for dealing with anything unskillful in the mind. When you can finally get past it, even just temporarily, notice how good it feels. Notice that you’re able to do this. There will be part of the mind that comes back and says, “Well, you can do it only temporarily,” or, “It doesn’t really count.” If you don’t have a positive voice inside to counteract that, what are you going to do? You’re going to succumb to the negative voice.

So learn to develop some positive voices inside, ones that have confidence in the practice, confidence in you, that this is something good to do and you can get good at it. And it keeps on getting better and better.

That’s how you can take joy at the same time that you’re discontent. In other words, you recognize your progress and you recognize also the fact that you haven’t reached the goal. But you don’t beat yourself up over that. Take joy in the fact that you’re progressing and you want to keep on progressing. In that way, the paradox between taking joy and being discontent will disappear.