Going in Light

Close your eyes; watch your breath. Wherever you notice the breath is clearest in the body, focus your attention there. Then try to notice if the breath is comfortable. You can try changing it for a while. Make it longer or shorter; heavier, lighter; deeper, more shallow; faster or slower. See what rhythm and texture of breathing feels good for the body right now. Because you want to give the mind a good place to stay inside. If you don’t have a good place to stay in the present moment, you’re going to go searching someplace else: back to the past, up to the future. But you really want to be able to see your mind right here, right now because the present is where you can train it. When greed comes up, if you’re not here, it can take over. Anger comes up, and you’re not here; it can take over. The same with delusion. So you want to be here when these things come and be ready for them.

This principle of training the mind is really important. Otherwise, the mind is like a little puppy you’ve got in the house. It may be adorable. It may be nice. But if it makes a mess all over the place, it’s not all that nice to have around. But when you can train it so that when greed comes, you don’t give in to the greed; when anger comes, you don’t give in to the anger; when delusion comes, you don’t give in to delusion, then you can live together, and the mind is no longer creating harm for you.

One of the most important things you can do in life is to train your mind. This is where you’re responsible. Some people ask sometimes, “Why were we born?” And the Buddha’s answer is because we wanted to. We wanted to take birth. We were dying from some other life. We were looking for another place to go, we saw this opening—and we went for it. But often when people ask that question, “Why were we born,” they actually mean another question, which is, “What’s the purpose in life?”

Here the Buddha says you get to choose. The universe itself doesn’t have much of a purpose. It just goes around and around and around, and it’s driven by the purposes of all kinds of beings, so there’s no unified purpose, no overarching purpose for it. It’s pretty much a free-for-all. But the free-for-all just keeps going and going and going—except that if you do unskillful things, it’s not really free. There’s going to be suffering down the line. Even if you do skillful things, it’s very easy to get attached to the results of those skillful things, which are nice, but then that attachment can eat away at the mind, and you end up doing unskillful things again. You want to see if somehow you can get out of all this. That’s the best purpose of all.

So what your life means is up to you. You can give it the purpose that you want, but just make sure that you choose wisely, because there are so many purposes in life that, even when you gain them, even when you succeed, there’s going to be trouble down the line. You want a purpose that doesn’t create any trouble. In that way, your life is well lived.

The Buddha talks about people of four kinds: those who come in darkness and go in darkness; those who come in darkness and go in light; those who come in light and go in darkness; and those who come in light and go in light. What he means is that when you come in darkness you’re born into a family that’s poor, with not much education. The parents don’t have virtue. Whereas coming in light means you come into a family where you’re well off. You have an opportunity for education, and your parents are virtuous. They know the Dhamma. Or whether they know the Dhamma or not, they’re still virtuous people.

Going in darkness means that you, yourself, become a person who’s not observing the precepts, who’s not training the mind, just allows your greed, aversion, and delusion to have free rein. Going in light means that you gain some control over the mind and you become a person of virtue, a person of concentration and discernment. As the Buddha said, whether we come in darkness or in light doesn’t really matter. What really matters is how we go.

And that’s something that you can determine for yourself. How we come is the result of past karma. But our present karma can make the difference in how we go. So focus there. And where is the present karma being made? Right here in the present moment. So try to get the mind so that it’s happy to be here in the present moment, so that it can see itself clearly. In that way, you can work on a genuinely good purpose for your life, each time you breathe in, each time you breathe out.