Why meditate, and what will we learn from doing it? Is it just about reducing stress or finding a little more ease in our lives? Or is it something more?
In the opening lines of the Dhammapada, which is a well-known collection of verses of the Buddha’s teachings, the Buddha declared “mind is the forerunner of all things.”
Here, “mind” means more than just thoughts, more than just our intellect. Mind means the basic capacity to know, to be aware—and all of the different qualities that color this awareness in different ways. These qualities are called mental factors, and they’re the qualities that we have cultivated, knowingly or unknowingly, in the course of our lives.
Some mental factors are wholesome, which mean that they are onward-leading to greater happiness, and some are unwholesome, which means that they’re onward-leading to more suffering. Love and hatred, generosity and greed, wisdom and delusion—all of these are mental factors.
“We hop on trains of association, not even knowing we’ve hopped on and with no idea where the trains are going.”
Mental factors are arising in different combinations according to our individual conditioning. What we do, how we feel, all our aspirations, all our regrets—they are all expressions or manifestations of mind.
We might say that meditation is a way of making sense of it all. There’s a line from an ancient, anonymous samurai poem that for me sums up the heart essence of our practice: “I make my mind my friend.”
When I met my first teacher, Anagarika Munindra, he said something so straightforward regarding the practice of mindfulness and meditation that it was an immediate hook for me. He said, “If you want to understand your mind, sit down and observe it.”
It was simple and obvious. How else could we understand our minds except by observing? There was no ritual, no ceremony, nothing to join. Just this very simple practice to learn how to observe our minds—the practice of mindfulness.
When we do this, there’s one insight that comes quickly. I think people who sit for even ten minutes will have this insight, and that is how often the mind wanders, how easily it gets pulled into the stories, plans, memories, judgments, and other thoughts we have. We hop on these trains of association, not even knowing we’ve hopped on and with no idea where the trains are going.
Somewhere down the line, we wake up from being lost in that particular thought and hop off the train—sometimes in a very different mental environment. That’s interesting to observe, too: how our thoughts condition our emotions. But the honest recognition of how often our mind wanders is the first insight. Most people who have not watched their minds don’t know this, and it’s commonplace for all of us. It’s really the beginning of wisdom to see it.
So, the first step is just calming the mind. We start to see that we can train ourselves in habits of attention. And this is important because the habits of attention that we’ve developed shape our lives and how we experience them. For example, as we begin this practice of mindfulness, we might notice many times a state that I call “more-or-less mindful,” where we’re kind of there but not fully there. I’ll share a story that made this clear to me.
Once when I was on retreat in Nepal with my Burmese teacher, Sayadaw U Pandita, I had an experience of the difference between more-or-less mindful and fully mindful. The conditions on this retreat were really bad: poor food and just a cement floor and whatever kind of pad we had brought with us to sleep on. My room was right next to the latrine. A lot of smells. I found myself grumbling a lot inwardly—the inner grumble, the inner complaining.
One day I went for a meditation interview with my teacher, and I told him what I was experiencing, expecting a little sympathy, or at least empathy, about what I was going through. But all he said was, “Be more mindful.”
My first thought was, “Thanks a lot! I’m suffering with all these bad conditions, and you’re just telling me, ‘Be more mindful’?” But I left the exchange, went outside, and started walking meditation. I thought, “Well, he’s a great meditation master. He said to be more mindful. Let me try it.”
In that period of walking meditation, I intentionally brought my attention in closer. My habit of attention had been halfway there, halfway not. But when he said to be more mindful, I realized: “Oh, I can change this habit of attention.”
I noticed with more precision all the sensations I was feeling while walking. Lo and behold, as my mind became more completely present, fully connected to the moment’s experience, all that grumbling and complaining completely disappeared. There was no room for it in the immediacy of the moment’s experience. That’s what’s meant by training our habits of attention.
Meditation is a training to attend to things more carefully, more closely, with more precision. When we do this, there’s increasing clarity in the mind. We see more immediately when the mind is caught up in patterns of greed or aversion—unwholesome states that lead to more suffering—and we learn how not to feed these patterns. In contrast, when we see our minds are in wholesome states—let’s say generosity or love or compassion—we practice cultivating them, and this leads to greater happiness.
The Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh expressed the value of this discernment simply. He said, “Happiness is available. Please help yourselves to it.” We can do that. When we discern the difference between wholesome thoughts and unwholesome thoughts, we can choose what to cultivate and what to abandon. This is all a fruit of our practice.
As we go on, and as the mindfulness gets stronger, we also begin to see an interesting but mostly unnoticed process: In addition to the run of thoughts that we’re familiar with, there is a steady undercurrent of thoughts that arises throughout the day, and we’re hardly aware of them.
These thoughts may be very light and quick, so they often go unnoticed. One Tibetan teacher called these thoughts “the thieves of meditation,” because they enter our minds unnoticed and steal away our attention. They steal our mindfulness.
I had a clear experience of this, again, on retreat. I was going for a walk with the intention to be mindful and was reasonably so for a bit. But then I began to notice the frequency of these quickly passing thoughts—a memory of the past or maybe a quick plan for the future—and that when they went unnoticed, I was simply lost in the various stories of my mind.
It reminded me of an experience which may be familiar to you. Do you sometimes wake up in the morning but then drop back into sleep for a few minutes? In those few minutes, you may enter into a quick dream state, and then, after a few more minutes, wake up especially awake and alert.
This light undercurrent of thoughts that are happening through the day are like that dream state, because we’re going from being aware, mindful of whatever’s going on, to dropping into and becoming lost in this thought. And then a few moments later, we wake up from being lost.
I next noticed that many of these quickly passing thoughts were self-referencing a memory or what I’d do in the future. When I saw this, a phrase came to mind: I’m just dreaming myself into existence. In that dreamlike state of being lost in a thought unknowingly, I was reinforcing this felt sense of self and “I.” When I saw this, it inspired me to pay more attention to the undercurrent of thoughts.
If you’re interested in exploring this, I would suggest taking a short period of time, maybe five minutes, two or three times a day, with the intention to keep an eye out for these very light, quick passing thoughts that without that intention, you may well not have noticed. I think you’ll be surprised at how frequently they come. Light and quick as they may be, when we’re lost in them, they are nonetheless conditioning and reconditioning our minds. It’s like the soundtrack of a movie.
We go to a movie, and we get fully engaged in the story. That’s the whole point of going. But often, when we’re really engaged in the story, we’re not aware of the background soundtrack. And yet that soundtrack is completely manipulating our emotions: The music gets faster, and we start feeling tense. Then the music becomes soft and mellow, and we can feel our hearts relax. The undercurrent of thoughts is like the soundtrack of our lives. Because the thoughts have the power to condition our minds in different ways, it’s good to become more aware of them.
The good news is that every time we get lost in thought, we have the chance to awaken. Rather than judging ourselves for getting lost—”Oh, my mind got lost again. I can’t do this!”—we can take delight in and learn from all those moments of waking up from being lost. All of a sudden, we are vividly aware: “Oh, thinking!” This illuminates what it is we’re actually practicing. We’re practicing wakefulness.
As we continue our practice, we begin to recognize the habit patterns that are driving our lives. Is it obsessive planning, or worry, or anxiety? Is it the judging mind (either of ourselves or of others)? And we begin to see whether our actions are motivated by thoughts of generosity or love, or by desire and anger, or (most likely) some combination of them all. This discernment of seeing the particular habit patterns of our thoughts is not a theoretical exercise; it’s showing us with great clarity how we’re actually living our lives. From there we can pay real attention to what qualities of heart and mind we are strengthening or neglecting. Our whole life becomes a field of exploration.
We are training our minds in ways that lead to greater happiness, greater peace, greater contentment, and we realize that we have agency in this process. None of it depends on blind belief or dogma. The Buddhist teachings are always an invitation just to come and see for ourselves, to test all the teachings in the laboratory of our own lives.
“Resisting change is like holding onto a rope that’s being pulled; the tighter your hold, the more you’ll get rope burn.”
As our attention steadies, we begin to see the difference, very clearly, between concept and direct experience. Usually, we live in a world of concepts. We look out in nature, and we see a tree or a lake. But the eye doesn’t see tree or lake. “Tree” and “lake” are concepts—useful names and designations—but they are not the living reality. What the eye sees is color and form or light and shadow.
When mindfulness deepens, we experience the reality beneath the concepts. What’s actually happening moment after moment in our lives is very simple. Sensations, colors, sounds, movements, all arising moment after moment, and passing away moment after moment.
The Buddha described this underlying reality in the Sabba Sutta, a surprising and radical discourse. In it, the Buddha described the totality—the all—of our experience in six short phrases: the eye and visible objects, the ear and sounds, the nose and odors, the tongue and taste, the body and physical sensations, and the mind and mind objects (meaning thoughts or emotions or images seen by the mind). We think life is so complicated, so confused. On the level of concepts, it certainly can be. But when we drop into the meditative understanding of the underlying reality, only six things are ever happening: sights, sounds, smells, tastes, sensations, and objects of mind. When we see directly without the overlay of thought, our experience of the world becomes vivid, alive.
Once a student came to Suzuki Roshi, the Zen master who founded San Francisco Zen Center, and said, “Roshi, I’ve been listening to your talks for years, and I still don’t understand. Could you please express Buddhism in a nutshell?” Roshi thought for a moment and replied, “Everything changes.”
Intellectually, we all know that everything changes, but how often are we living and manifesting the implications of real understanding? If we love summer and are attached to it, how do we feel as the weather gets colder? If we’re attached to youth and clinging to it, how do we feel as the body ages and becomes weaker? If we are attached to that which is changing, that attachment is going to be the cause of suffering.
Once when I was on a retreat, a meditator came in and told me he’d had this insight. He said resisting change is like holding onto a rope that’s being pulled; the tighter your hold, the more you’ll get rope burn. You’re holding onto something that by its very nature is being pulled through your hands, so to speak, because it’s in a process of change.
Through mindfulness, we begin to see this very clearly, and this awareness can, over time, get refined. It begins to permeate all aspects of our lives. As we cling less to changing phenomena, we experience more ease.
As our lived, immediate experience of impermanence deepens, we also start to understand the liberating realization of selflessness. We cling less to the idea of the self. We have the idea that there is an essential someone, a “me,” an “I,” behind all experience to whom it is happening. But this “I” is just another concept.
You’re probably familiar with the constellation the Big Dipper. If you go out at night, it’s not hard to spot. But is there really a “big dipper” in the sky? No. What we’re seeing are the lights of the stars in a certain pattern, and the pattern looks like a big dipper, so we put this name on it.
The naming is useful. If you happen to be in the middle of the ocean trying to navigate, looking for the Big Dipper can help you find the North Star. But “Big Dipper” is not the reality of what’s being experienced. It’s a concept, like the self.
Try going outside at night and not seeing the Big Dipper. It’s extremely hard not to see it because we’ve been conditioned to perceive it almost immediately.
Just as it’s difficult not to see the Big Dipper, it’s even harder to understand not-self, because “self” is like “Big Dipper.” Self is a concept describing a certain pattern of elements, combined in a certain way. We get up in the morning, we look in the mirror: “Yeah, that’s me.” We recognize the pattern reflected.
Our practice really begins to unpack this concept of self. We might ask: If it’s just a concept, why is the belief in it so deeply conditioned in almost everybody?
Although self is a mental construct, we are beguiled by the felt sense of self, which happens in any moment where we are identified with an arising experience. We have the idea of “my thought” or “I am thinking.” Anger arises, and instead of “There is anger,” we think “I am angry.”
The I and mine are extra, added to our bare attention, bare mindfulness. The felt sense of “I” is so strong because we’re in the habit of identifying with so many different parts of our experience, of the body, of the mind.
Another way of framing our experience might be to take the “I” out of it: There is anger. There is love. It’s not, “I’m thinking,” but rather the thought is thinking itself. The thought is the thinker. Love loves. Anger angers. Fear fears. These mental qualities are simply manifesting their nature.
When we see this—which we do through paying mindful attention—we drop into a level of experience where we are not identifying with phenomena as it’s arising. The Buddha highlighted the importance of this realization when he said, “Letting go of ‘I am’ is the end of suffering.”
When that felt sense of self drops away, even for a moment, we get a glimpse, a little taste, of freedom. Through the practice of mindfulness, we see how the mind works, how suffering arises, and how peace is possible. It’s truly the doorway to wisdom.
The post The Doorway to Wisdom appeared first on Lion’s Roar.
Recent Comments