Separate

A lot of the evil in the world comes from clinging. You hold on to something and you feel that your happiness has to depend on that. Yet it’s something that can be taken away from you, so you’ll do anything you can to make sure it doesn’t get taken away. This is the source of a lot of conflict in the world. As people’s clinging gets more and more extensive, they feel more and more threatened.

Sometimes we’re told that, living in an interconnected world, we should feel safe and secure that the interconnected net is supporting us. But you look at interconnected systems: It’s not the case that they work for the good of everything or everybody involved in the system.

Sometimes we’re told that the idea of having a separate self is the source of evil. But having a separate self can actually be a source of strength and of reliable goodness. You realize that you have within you the potential to find something that cannot be taken away from you and you learn how to cultivate that potential. Then you have nothing to fear—because you have something inside that’s absolutely safe.

This is why refuge and protection are such strong images in the Buddha’s teachings. We take refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, in the sense that we see what good qualities they have and we try to develop those good qualities within us. That would come down to wisdom, compassion, and purity—and these are all strengths.

The wisdom, there, is to see not that things are so much interconnected—although you can see how things are interconnected, but you’re not looking for that. You’re looking for something that’s independent. The Buddha says that the essence of discernment is to see things as separate, as other. Things you used to hang oto, things you used to even think as an extension of yourself, really are separate from you. As long as you feel that you have to depend on them, that’s going to be a scary thought. But when you realize that you don’t, that’s one less thing to cling to, one less thing to you have to fear. When you don’t have that fear, then people can’t take advantage of that fear.

We see this all around us—people being driven by their fears. Unscrupulous leaders prey on peoples’ fears. But you can make yourself independent and self-reliant, and that’s one less person in the world who can be tempted to do things that are really unskillful.

So when you’re meditating, it’s not a selfish activity, even though you are focusing on training yourself. The important point is that you’re training yourself to be reliable.

So you have to learn how to see things as separate. We talked this morning about seeing how your awareness of things is something separate from the things themselves. That separate awareness is where you’re going to be looking for that independent source of strength inside.

This is why we focus on our awareness in the present moment, directing it first to the breath, so that we can leave thoughts of past and future, and get all the mind gathered around one thing. Try to expand the breath—your sense of the breath—so that it fills the whole body and feels good throughout the whole body.

They talk about the oneness of concentration, and it is one in two ways: first, in the sense that you have one topic; and second, in the sense that that one topic fills your awareness. You’re basically blocking out any interest in other things so that you can ‘catch’ your awareness.

Ajaan Fuang’s image here is not a pretty one but makes the point. If you’re trying to catch eels, you don’t jump down into the mud, trying to grab them, because they’d slip off every whichway. But if you find something they like, they’ll come. As he said, eels like a dead dog—so you take a dead dog and put it in a big jar, and you put the jar down into the mud. The eels will go into the jar on their own accord.

In the same way, if you’ll create a sense of well-being with the breath and allow it to fill the whole body, that brings all the scattered parts of your awareness right here. When things are gathered together like this, then allow them to be still for a while. It’s like salad dressing in a bottle. You’ve got the vinegar, you’ve got the oil and as long as you keep shaking things up, they’re going to stay mixed. But when you let things sit still for a while, they begin to separate out naturally.

This is what we’re trying to do as we meditate: Let your awareness of the breath separate naturally from the breath itself. A greater sense of independence comes with this. Now, this isn’t the goal of the practice—the goal is much subtler than this—but it gives you a beginning sense of having something inside that’s much more valuable than things outside and is separate from them. That way, your concentration works together with your discernment to give you something inside that you can rely on.

That’s the kind of wisdom you can take as a refuge.

As for compassion and goodwill, the Buddha says, you want to make your goodwill as large as the earth, as solid as the earth. In other words, you put your goodwill together with patience and endurance.

And the Buddha talks about goodwill as a strength. He says that a mind filled with goodwill is hard to penetrate, hard to attack. It’s interesting, because we tend to think of goodwill as being a soft virtue—but he saw it as a strong and an impermeable one. As he said, outside influences cannot come into your mind when you’re radiating goodwill.

Now, remember, goodwill is not saying, “May everybody be happy just doing whatever they’re doing.” You look at happiness in terms of the teachings on kamma: People are going to be genuinely happy when they’re doing skillful things. So you’re actually wishing, “May all beings be skillful.”

Of course, that’s something you can’t bring about through your own efforts. You can’t make other people skillful—but what you’re doing is to set your intention in the right direction. What you’re contributing to the world is the determination that if anybody wants to be skillful, you’d be happy to help. So the Buddha said to make your goodwill radiate out like that.

Make the goodwill like the river Ganges. People can try to set fire to the river Ganges, but they just can’t. It’s not the Cuyahoga river in Cleveland, back in the 70’s, which actually was set on fire. But the Ganges is—or at least, it was at the time of the Buddha—cleaner than that If people came with a torch and tried to set the river on fire, they couldn’t. In other words, you want your goodwill to be such that it’s not only large but it’s also cool and it can’t be provoked.

On top of that, the Buddha said, make your goodwill like space. Nobody can write anything on space. If you take a paint brush and you wave it around in space, the paint doesn’t stick, because there’s nothing there to stick to. You want the words of other people and their actions to slough off your mind in the same way.

So when you generate thoughts of goodwill and you find that your mind gets, as the Buddha said, in a state of awareness-release, it’s a strong concentration. It’s being released from ill-will, released from resentment, and there’s a great sense of freedom that comes with that.

So that, too, is a strength. That, too, makes your goodness independent of the goodness of the world. You’re doing it not because you think other people will be good because you’re wishing them goodwill. You’re doing it because you need it. You want to make sure that your intentions with regard to others are totally pure.

They tell stories of people who were subjected to torture—and the worst part of the torture is if torturers know of something underhanded or dishonest that the person being tortured has done and they prey on that. That’s the psychological aspect of torture, the part with which the person being tortured adds to the torture. But if you have goodwill for everybody, then no manner of torture can harm your mind and they won’t be able to get you through psychological torture.

So, again, you’re looking for something good inside that nobody else can take away, that no one else can harm—and that’s when you start trusting yourself in the world.

As for purity, the third virtue of the Buddha: You look at your actions and you want to make sure that they’re in line with your goodwill, they’re in line with your wisdom. In other words, you make sure that you’re not harming anybody, because if you harm other people, you harm yourself. So you’re careful with your actions.

Before you do anything, you ask yourself, “This action I intend to do: What do I expect will come about as a result?” If you can foresee any harm, then you don’t do it. If you don’t foresee any harm, then you can go ahead and do it. Then, while you’re doing it, you watch to see what actual results are coming out. If you see that your action is causing harm, you stop. If you don’t see any harm, continue. When you’re done, you look at the long term. Here, again, if you didn’t expect to cause any harm, you didn’t see any harm while you were doing it, but then over the long term you saw that it was harmful, then you resolve not to repeat that mistake. You go and talk it over with someone else who’s more advanced on the path, to borrow some of their wisdom. But if you don’t see any harm, take joy in that fact and continue training.

The Dhamma is not the sort of teaching that tells you not to have pride in your good actions. You should have pride; you should have a good feeling about your good actions. What else do we have to withstand the voices in the mind that are very hyper-critical? It’s okay to take joy in the fact that you’re training.

But don’t just stop there. As the Buddha said, keep on training. That, he said, is how you become pure. When you become pure in your actions, you’re very careful—so, there are no regrets. When there are no regrets, your mind is more independent. There’s nothing that the world outside can grab hold of to make you suffer.

So, in independence there’s freedom, and then, in that freedom, you’re free from fear. When you’re free from fear, there are no handles that anybody can get on your mind. In that way, the mind has a strong sense of its separate goodness. It’s not in the least bit evil, this separateness. It’s a source of goodness in the world.

As long as you strengthen your goodness so that it doesn’t depend on the world, then the world will be able to depend on your goodness and you can be a positive force. If nothing else, you’re a good example. You won’t be swept up by the waves of fear that the people try to transmit across the society.

So work on the potentials you have inside. Develop strong concentration, mindfulness, and discernment, because these are the qualities that allow you to have that sense of something separate that no one else can touch. It’s the most valuable thing in your life.