Honest & Observant

Close your eyes and make up your mind you’re going to stay here. This quality of truthfulness is an important part of the path. Of all the precepts, the Buddha said the one about telling the truth, the one about not lying, is the most important, because if you get used to lying to people outside, you start lying to yourself. If you’re lying to yourself, how are you going to gain any discernment? How are you going to see what’s going on in your own mind?

After all, a large part of the training is self-training. Other people can give you advice, set an example, but you have to be willing to take on that advice, to follow that example.

And a lot of the work is done inside—purely your ways of thinking, your ways of talking to yourself, your ways of perceiving the world. You have to check and see: Are they helpful or are they not? Are they causing stress or are they not causing stress? You have to learn how to depend on your powers of observation, so you have to make them truthful.

That’s why when the Buddha was teaching the Dhamma to his son, the very first point he made was the importance of being truthful—and then being observant: watching what you’re doing, watching the results, and when you see that the results are not good enough yet, you try to figure out which way to make them better.

So it’s an inner training. Your desire for an end to suffering has to take priority over other desires. That means there’s going to be a struggle because some of those other desires don’t give up easily. But if you’re observant enough, you see that those other desires lead you to stress, lead you to suffering, lead you to doing things you really shouldn’t be doing. When you’re truthful enough to admit that, then there’s hope. Otherwise, you just stay in your old habits. And if people had to stay in their old habits, the Buddha wouldn’t have taught.

As he said, it’s because he saw that people can change their habits—they can develop skillful qualities; they can abandon unskillful qualities—that it was worth his while to teach. So we have to take that same principle and learn how to teach ourselves, because we can make a difference in our minds.

So make sure that, every time you breathe in, every time you breathe out, the choices you’re making are making a difference in the right direction.