Sobering Up

Close your eyes and take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breathing most prominently in the body and focus your attention there. Watch it all the way in, all the way out. If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you can change—take shorter breathing, more shallow, faster, slower, heavier, lighter. Try to get in touch with this breath element in the body.

The breath isn’t just the air coming in and out of the lungs. It’s the whole flow of energy through the nervous system that allows that air to come in and go out. You could feel that anywhere. You get really sensitive: You realize you could feel it all over the body and you can use it to make a sense of well-being and maintain a sense of well-being inside the body.

This is going to be important because there are a lot of things in the world we know that we like to do that are going to give bad, long-term results—or that we don’t like to do but give good, long-term results. We may know these things, but sometimes we just don’t have the strength to follow through with that knowledge. Or sometimes we decide we don’t care.

It’s good to stop and ask yourself: If you don’t take care of your own mind, take care of your own present moments in your future, who’s going to take care of them for you? You’ve got to look after these things yourself.

So here’s a good way of settling down and watching yourself, then taking the knowledge that you know is going to be useful for your long-term happiness and having the strength and the willingness to put it into practice.

As the Buddha said, we live our lives intoxicated, and he doesn’t mean that we’re intoxicated with liquor or marijuana all the time. It’s more a deeper kind of intoxication. Yesterday, during the ordination, there was that passage that I chanted for the new monks at the very end. A lot of people wonder: What’s being said there? Well, the Buddha is basically giving you a list of things you need to know. At the very end, the passage gives a list of reasons why we practice—what’s the purpoaw of the practice—and one of the purposes is to overcome our intoxication.

As the Buddha said, we’re intoxicated with youth, with health, and with life. When we’re young, we think we’re going to be young for a long time, and we look down on older people. When we’re healthy, we don’t think we’re going to get sick very easily. And as long as we’re alive, we tend to think, well, death isn’t going to come anytime soon. Yet we forget that youth, health, life are not all that solid. They’re very precarious.

Another kind of intoxication is saying, “Well, if these things are precarious, let’s just try to have a good time while we can.” But you really have to prepare because consciousness itself is not going to be willing to die together with the death of the body. It’s going to move on, take on whatever rebirth presents itself as a possibility. And sometimes when you’re really desperate—you’ve got to leave the body—and you’re looking around, you can just go for anything.

So you want to make sure that your mind goes for things that are good. For that you have to develop good qualities in the mind. There’s work to be done inside the mind right now. As the Buddha said, if you see any qualities of the mind that would make it difficult to let go of this life and to be careful in choosing the next life, you’ve got to work on getting rid of those qualities. Now.

As for qualities that would help, things like mindfulness, alertness—or as yesterday’s teaching to the new monks stressed again, and again, and again: virtue, concentration, and discernment—these are the things that will help you.

Virtue is what keeps you honest. You take on a precept like no killing, no stealing, no illicit sex, no lying, no taking of intoxicants, and then you make up your mind to stick with it, but then when you find yourself tempted to break the precept, you find ways of making sure that you don’t. That keeps you honest and also gets you in touch with the intentions in your mind, because you break a precept only if you do it intentionally. So this gets you more and more clear about when you’re doing something while you’re doing it. This is going to be useful knowledge as you try to train the mind in concentration and discernment. But the important thing is that it keeps you honest, alert, mindful.

These are all qualities that you’re going to need as you go through life and as you leave this life to go on to others. So there is a training. This is what the ordination is for, so that people can devote themselves full-time to the training. For people who can’t ordain, you can devote yourself as much as you can. The important principle is that you try not to be intoxicated with your youth, with your health, with your life. You’ve got to prepare for the time when these things are not going to be with you anymore so that you can handle the situation wisely.

It starts with something very simple like this: training the mind to stay with one object. If you can’t do this, it’s going to be hard to do anything that’s more difficult.

So. Learn how to keep coming back, coming back, coming back to the breath and getting on good terms with your breath, so that this becomes a good place to stay to which you want to come back. That’s a large part of discernment: making yourself want to do what you know will lead to your long-term welfare and happiness.

So these are things that are always useful to keep in mind.