Quick to Change
January 24, 2024

When you focus on the breath, you have to make up your mind you’re going to stay here and not change direction.

This is one of the reasons why we need to develop mindfulness—to remember that we’ve made a good intention. We don’t want the mind to change its course. After all, the mind is very changeable. As the Buddha said, it’s so quick to change direction that there’s nothing else in the world that is as quick as it is. That’s going to be bad news or good news, depending on which direction you’re already going in.

If you’re going in a bad direction, it’s good that you can change very quickly. If you’re already going in a good direction, you’ve got to watch out. You can’t depend on any innate goodness in your nature.

I don’t understand how people can read about the Buddha’s awakening—where he sees how people go up and down, up and down, up and down doing skillful things, then doing unskillful things—and then come to the conclusion after reading that passage that the Buddha would say we’re innately good.

We’re innately changeable. That’s the problem. As the Buddha said, sometimes you’ll be doing good things, and then there’s a change. You can do things that will delay the results of the good things you’ve done. There are two things he points to as especially unskillful behavior: breaking the precepts and developing wrong view, especially at death.

If you develop wrong view at death, that can pull you down, in spite of the good things you’ve done in life. So you have to be really careful and really vigilant to maintain your mindfulness, strengthen your mindfulness, so that once you’re on a good direction, you stay in the good direction, and that you trust the goodness that you can do—in terms of the precepts, in terms of the ability to develop right view—as a real treasure.

He says you can lose your wealth, you can lose your relatives, you can lose your health, yet those losses are not serious. But to lose your virtue, to lose your right view: That’s a really serious loss. So once you know you’re going in a good direction, stay with the good direction. Maintain these things as your treasures: your goodwill; your right view; your precepts—maintaining mindfulness to remember these things so the mind doesn’t change directions on you, taking you down to a place where you don’t want to go.

Each time the breath comes in, goes out, remind yourself that this is where you want to stay. When the mind is tempted to slip off, remind yourself, okay, this is the habit that can make it easy for you to change directions in the wrong way. So watch out.

So you’ve go to be really careful. Be vigilant. Stay on top of things. This is why the Buddha’s last instructions were if you’re going to develop consummation in the practice, you’ve got to be heedful. And this is how you develop your heedfulness, by remembering where you want to go and remembering to stay there.

Stay on course, each time you breath in, each time you breathe out. Every time you make a decision to say, think, or do an action, you want it to go in the right direction.