2] Right View | The Noble Eightfold Path : 13 Meditation Talks

2] Right View | The Noble Eightfold Path : 13 Meditation Talks

Right View

NAVIGATIONBooks/Noble Eightfold Path/Right View

November 20, 2007

The discourse we chanted just now—“Setting the Wheel of Dhamma in Motion”—starts with the whole noble eightfold path and then goes into right view. And that’s all it discusses in detail: right view, going through the four noble truths. 

Simply listening to this talk on right view, one of the Five Brethren had his first taste of the deathless—or, as they say in the text, he experienced “the arising of the Dhamma Eye.”

So right view is important. As one analysis of the path says, three qualities circle around every factor of the path. 

1. One is right view. 
2. The second is right effort. 
3. The third is right mindfulness. 

So try to make sure that these three qualities are circling around your practice right now.

There are basically four truths covered by right view. 

First is the truth of suffering or stress; dukkha is the Pali term. Sometimes we’re told that the first truth is that “life is suffering” or “everything is suffering,” but that’s not the case. The Buddha basically said that “there is suffering.” 

It’s one of four things you’re going to encounter in life that you should pay attention to. You could argue with the idea that life is suffering, but you can’t argue with the idea that there is suffering. You see it all around you. You see it inside you as well. The Buddha’s simply asking you to take it seriously.[happyness also?]

To take suffering seriously means that you should learn how to comprehend it. 

To do that, you have 

• to put yourself in a position where you can watch it, 
• to see how it comes, how it goes, 
• what comes and goes along with it. 

The coming and going along with it: That’s essentially what the word samudaya—usually translated as “cause” or “origination”—means. "arising", "coming together",

You want to see that every time there’s real suffering in the mind, it’s accompanied by craving—any one of three kinds of craving to be specific: 

• craving for sensuality, 
• craving for becoming, 
• craving for non-becoming.

Craving for sensuality is easy enough to explain: the desire to have sensual desires. 

That’s one of the most interesting parts of the analysis: 

• that sensual attachment is not so much to ‘things out there’; 
• we’re more attached to our plans for things out there, 
• our scheming for things out there, for pleasant sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations. 

We spend a lot more time planning and working toward these things than we do in actually tasting them.

Often the taste is very fleeting. Think of the food we eat. Exactly how long does it really taste good in your mouth? Look at that little burst of taste, and then think of how much work goes into buying the food, preparing the food, cleaning up after the meal. Of course we do it for more than just the taste; we do it to keep the body going. But, there’s an awful lot of energy expended in the idea, “Let’s make this taste really good”—and then it’s gone.

We’re actually more attached to our plans for these things, our desires for these things, than we are to the things themselves. It’s easy enough to replace a desire for one sensual pleasure with a desire for another sensual pleasure. It’s hard to drop our desire for sensual desire entirely. That’s one of the causes of suffering

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---- craving 갈망, 열망

Another cause is craving for becoming. You want to become something, to take on a particular identity, within a particular world of experience. We choose our worlds, you know: the context in which we see ourselves, the context in which we move and exert an influence. These two things are entwined: both the world in which we have a self and the sense of self that functions within that world.

 Sometimes the world is on the sensual level. Sometimes it’s on the level of form, as when we’re meditating and fully inhabiting the form of the body. 

Sometimes it’s on the formless level—any abstraction, any formless experience, anything without a form, as when we experience space in our meditation, or a sense of formless “knowing.” 

And again, we tend to go from one of these types of becoming to another, to another, to another. This is what the wandering on is all about. 

We go from one bhava, one state of becoming, to another. 

These are the locations that the mind focuses on.

 And we suffer from this because none of these locations can last; none of these positions can last. 

Whatever we latch onto as a self, it just keeps melting away. 

The world around us just keeps melting away.

Then there’s craving for non-becoming, the desire to destroy whatever you’ve got, whatever you identify yourself with. 

Or you want to destroy the world around you. 

It’s unpleasant. Outrageous. You don’t like it. 

You want to get rid of it, which can either be an external destructive urge or an internal destructive urge. 

Paradoxically, this type of craving leads to becoming as well. 

Why is that? Because in taking on the identity of the Destroyer, you’re assuming another identity.

In taking delight in the idea of destruction, you’re watering a sense of identity; you’re watering a sense of becoming. 

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The Buddha’s image is of a seed planted in the ground. 

The seed is your consciousness. 

The ground is your kamma, past and present, as it’s manifesting right now. 

Then there’s the delight in doing something with these things, either creating something out of them or destroying them. 

All of that counts as a cause of suffering. 

It may sound pretty abstract, but as you get to know the mind, you begin to sense the movement as it’s going in one of these directions or another: 

toward becoming or non-becoming. 

In one sense we’re in a double bind; 

the desire to get rid of becoming itself is a way of creating becoming—but this is where the Buddha’s genius as a strategist comes in.

He’s says that you go beyond becoming not by destroying becoming but 

• by learning how to create new forms of becoming that are more skillful, particularly the “becoming” of concentration, 
• getting the mind to settle down and be in one spot. 

As long as you’re going to have a location, develop a solid steady location within the form of the body, because it’s a blameless way of giving rise to happiness. Then, when you can see things clearly from this location, you can simply let the processes of becoming go.

Sometimes you hear about the dangers of being stuck on concentration. 

But if you look through the texts, the Buddha talks about them only in very rare cases. 

He mentions the dangers of delighting in the state of equanimity or 

of not wanting to go beyond a particular state of concentration, 

but these are pretty harmless, pretty minor compared to the dangers of staying stuck in sensuality.

The Buddha gave long, long discourses about all the suffering and conflict that come from sensual craving. 

• You have to work hard to gain what you crave and sometimes your efforts are fruitless. 
• Or, even when they do bear fruit in what you want, those things don’t really stay with you. 

As the Buddha says, sometimes fire burns them, water washes them away, thieves or kings will make off with them—I like that: pairing thieves with kings—or hateful heirs make off with them. 

It’s because of sensual craving that there are conflicts within the family, conflicts among nations. This is why we go to war. 

I don’t think that anyone has ever gone to war over attachment to jhana, attachment to concentration. But we kill, steal, have illicit sex, lie to one another, indulge in intoxicants, all because of sensual craving, sensual attachment—none of which happens because of our attachment to jhana. The only danger of being stuck on jhana is that as long as you’re stuck, you don’t gain awakening.

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dhyāna (Sanskrit) or jhāna (Pāḷi) is the training of the mind, commonly translated as meditation,

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So jhana is a relatively blameless form of happiness. 

It gives us nourishment on the path and at the same time is a very transparent form of becoming. We watch ourselves doing it because we have to do it so carefully. 

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This is where the mindfulness comes in. 

That’s one of the elements in the Canon’s definition of mindfulness: 

• being very meticulous. 

The more meticulous you are, the better you remember things. 

You need to be very meticulous in keeping something in mind in order to maintain your concentration. 

This is one of the functions of right mindfulness. 

Once you’ve entered into a skillful mental state, mindfulness enables you to keep remembering to stay there. 

If you’re meticulous in doing this, you begin to see more clearly exactly what’s involved in getting the mind to settle down. 

This is why jhana is a transparent form of becoming: As you watch it, you begin to understand what becoming is all about. You can begin to identify which part of the practice is based on old kamma, which part is based on new kamma, which part is based on your present consciousness and all the other things that go along with it, and which part of it is watered by the sense of delight.

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KAMMA AND REBIRTH

The Pali word Kamma (Karma in Sanskrit) literally means action or doing. The belief in karma and reincarnation was prevalent in India before the days of the Buddha. However, it was the Buddha who explained in detail and formulated the doctrine of Kamma and Rebirth as found in the ancient Buddhist texts.

Kamma determines the state into which a being is born. It the chief cause of inequalities in the world. Some are born into happy circumstances, with good health, wealth, mental and physical characteristics, while some others are born into abject misery.

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So the trick here is that once you’ve learned how to do this, the Buddha says, 

you learn how to see things simply as they have come to be. In other words, you just look at what past kamma is being offered up to you right now. Our instinctive reaction is to make something out of it, to do something with it. But to watch it simply as it comes into being without trying to create something out of it, without trying to destroy it, without even taking delight in the equanimity of watching it: That’s hard.  평정

It’s pretty easy to get into a state of equanimity just watching these things, 

• but it takes a lot of insight to realize that equanimity itself is a kind of doing. 
• It’s a way of creating something out of your experience, something you can delight in. So this goes deeper than just plain equanimity. 
• The Buddha says you have to learn how not to make anything out of anything; even out of the jhana, even out of your strong concentration. 
• When you can do that, you can break through to the deathless.

So instead of just operating on the desire to get rid of things, 

we first develop a different kind of desire: 

the desire to learn how to create something really skillful out of them—

which includes learning to develop skillful desires before you ultimately let them go. 

This is a basic pattern in the Buddha’s path. 

The fourth noble truth is to abandon unskillful states and to give rise to skillful states in the mind so you can understand what’s involved in giving rise to a state. 

Then you get more sensitive to exactly which part in the present moment is the given and which part’s being added. 

In general, we’re very ignorant of what we’re adding to things. 

Yet even our normal experience of space and time is something that has already been added to.

The aggregates of form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness come in a potential form and then—based on which things we’re interested in, which things we want to create, which things we want to destroy—we actually create our experience of the present out of these different potentials. 

So we need to do a lot of digging down into our experience of the present moment to see what’s just the potential without anything added at all, not even equanimity. This requires that we get the mind really still, really alert, and really interested in what it’s doing.

This is how right view hovers around the meditation. 

Right effort and right mindfulness hover along with it. 맴돌다

You try to give rise to what’s skillful no matter what the situation: That’s the right effort. 

Right mindfulness means being mindful to give rise to what’s skillful, to abandon what’s unskillful and—once you’ve entered into what’s skillful—

being mindful to stay with it. 

It’s all very proactive, but it’s proactive in a transparent way.

This is why, when you begin to delve into right view, you realize that it covers the whole path. It’s not just a matter of understanding something in an abstract way.

 It’s learning how to see things in a new light and then acting on what you’ve seen in an appropriate way. It’s not just a theory; it’s a guide to action.

And while we’re sitting here getting the mind to settle down and be still, Ajaan Lee’s image is that it’s like raising a chicken that lays eggs. The eggs stand for becoming. You eat some of the eggs to keep yourself nourished and you take the other eggs apart to see what eggs are made of, what their parts are. Or you watch how they develop. The analogy breaks down there, but ultimately you get to the point where you don’t need the eggs any more, either for the nourishment or for the purpose of your investigation.

That’s when you put the path aside. Even right view gets put aside. That’s when you experience the noble truth of cessation: total freedom from craving, and as a result, total freedom from suffering and stress. But in the meantime, you want to make sure that right view is always there, hovering around your meditation to keep it on course and to make sure that what you’re doing is transparent to you. That’s how the process of becoming in concentration leads to something that goes beyond becoming, where there’s no suffering at all.

And that, as the Buddha said, is the end of the problem.

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希修

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1. 불교수행의 목적:

(a) 고통으로부터의 해방.

(b) 윤회하는 한 고통으로부터 완전히 자유롭지 않기에, 끝없이 반복되는 윤회(rebirth)로부터 완전히 벗어나야만( =해탈해야만) 진정한 자유.

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2. 고통 혹은 윤회의 원인이 되는 것들을

 'unskillful' = 'unwholesome' = '惡'이라 부르며, 탐(craving) - 진(aversion) - 치(ignorance)가 대표적. 

이 중에서도 가장 근본적인 원인은 고와 고의 소멸에 대한 무지(ignorance). 그렇기에 무지/어리석음의 반대인 Right View가 중요. 부처님은 고와 고의 소멸에 대해서만 가르침을 남기셨음. (불교에서 '선'은 상식적 '착함'이 아니고 '해탈에 도움이 되는 것'을 의미.)

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3. 욕망을 크게 3종류로 분류

(a) craving for sensualities,

(b) craving for becoming,

(c) craving for non-becoming.

* 존재하고 싶지 않아 하는 (c)조차도 존재/윤회로 귀결된다는 것이 딜레마.

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4. Right View

(a) mundane.

(b) transcendent.

(c) final.

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[참고] '무아와 윤회'

https://www.facebook.com/keepsurfinglife/posts/1150079848697430

1] An Overview of the Path | The Noble Eightfold Path : 13 Meditation Talks

1] An Overview of the Path | The Noble Eightfold Path : 13 Meditation Talks

An Overview of the Path

July 7, 2011

The noble eightfold path forms the framework for all the Buddha’s teachings. It was the first topic he mentioned in his first sermon, and the last topic he mentioned in his last.

Shortly after his awakening, when he first taught the Five Brethren, he started by telling them that the eightfold path was the true way to awakening, that it avoided the dead-end extremes of sensual indulgence and self-torment. Then he explained the first factor of the path—right view—and at the end of his explanation Kondañña, the eldest of the five, reached the first level of awakening—proof that this really was an effective path.

Shortly before the Buddha died, Subhadda the wanderer asked him: Is it only in the Buddha’s teachings that there are awakened people or do other teachings have awakened people as well? At first the Buddha put the question aside. He said: “Put that aside and I’ll teach you the Dhamma.” But then after teaching the Dhamma, he went on to say that only in teachings where the eight factors of the noble path are taught will you find awakened people. And only in the Buddha’s teaching are all eight factors taught. So when he put that question aside, it was simply a matter of etiquette. Actually, he went on to answer the question, saying that this path is The Way: not simply an effective path. The effective path.

We like to hear that there are lots of different ways, lots of different paths to the top of the mountain. That gives us the option of choosing what we like without the fear of making a wrong choice. But if you’ve ever been on a mountain, you know that not all the trails lead to the top. Some of them wander off someplace else—down the mountain or off the edge of a cliff. And so when the Buddha, having been to the top, comes back to say that this is the only way up there, he wants us to give his words some credence. In fact, he says that one of the signs of actually attaining the first level of awakening is that you realize there is no other path. This is it.

So look at the factors. 

The first two are right view and right resolve; 

-   these come under the heading of discernment. 

There’s also right speech, right action, and right livelihood; 

-   these come under the heading of virtue. 

And then right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration; 

-   these come under the heading of concentration.

•  It’s important to remember that each of these factors is a part of a path. 
• It’s meant to go someplace. Its purpose is strategic.
•  We don’t practice the path for the sake of arriving at right view or any of the other factors. 
• We use right view as a factor in the path to take ourselves to release—or it might be better to say that we arrive at release, because a lot of “ourselves” doesn’t get taken to release. 
• It’s going to get left behind as unnecessary baggage along the way.

Right view starts with conviction in the principle of action, that your actions come from your choices, and they do make a difference: that by acting on skillful intentions, you’re going to meet with pleasant results; by acting on unskillful intentions, you’re going to meet with unpleasant results. 

The Buddha has to start here with the principle of action because there were a lot of teachings in his time that denied the role of action. Some said that actions were illusory and didn’t really exist. Others said that actions may exist but they don’t really have an effect on anything. Another school of thought said that whatever you do is already predetermined so you really have no choice.

If you’re looking for a path of practice that leads to the end of suffering, you can’t adopt any of those views, because they make the whole idea of a path meaningless. The whole idea that your efforts could bring about an end of suffering would become meaningless. 

So the Buddha never approved of the teaching that things were totally predetermined by the past. 

If you really want to put an effort into ending suffering, you’ve got to accept the principle that your efforts, your actions, really do have consequences. 

Some people like the idea of determinism. It lets them off the hook—as long as they’re doing relatively well. But when they’re suffering, if you give them the choice, “Would you like the choice not to suffer?” they would probably say Yes. At that point they would like to have the power of choice.

The important point is that the simple power of choice is not enough. You’ve got to develop skills to go along with it. 

That’s what the next level of right view is about: seeing things in terms of four noble truths—stress, its cause, its cessation, and the path to its cessation—and developing the skills appropriate to each: 

1. Stress is to be comprehended, 
2. its cause abandoned, 
3. its cessation realized, and 
4. the path to its cessation developed. 

This means that all the factors of the path are skills you need to develop to bring about the goal you’ve set for yourself.

Next, after right view, comes right resolve. You realize that unskillful actions are going to cause trouble, so you resolve not to get tied up in thoughts of sensuality, ill will, or harmfulness, because you know these thoughts, if you foster them, are going to take you down the path to suffering.

Then you look at your actual actions. This is where right speech, right action, and right livelihood come in.

To what extent do your words, your deeds, and your livelihood actually cause harm to other people? To what extent do they cause harm to yourself? 

The Buddha has you use this reflection as a way of developing honesty. For him, the prime virtue is the virtue of truthfulness. 

If you can’t admit to yourself that the things you say or do are causing harm, or the way you gain your livelihood is causing harm, there are going to be huge blind spots in your mind.

So these factors of the path force the quality of honesty on you. If you want to follow the path, if you want to reach the end of suffering, you have to look very honestly at how you’re living your life, and make changes in cases where you’re causing trouble.

All these factors working together make it easier to meditate. Notice that effort, mindfulness, and concentration all come under the last heading of the path, the heading of concentration. 

The Buddha never talked about mindfulness as one kind of practice and concentration as something else. 

Recently, I was reading an author who said that because mindfulness and concentration are two different factors in the path, they must be radically different; otherwise the Buddha wouldn’t have divided them into two different factors. The problem is that the author made them so different as to be antithetical: mindfulness was an open, accepting, non-reactive state of mind, whereas concentration was narrow and willful. It’s hard to see how the two could go together. In fact he said that the practice of right mindfulness on the one hand and right effort and right concentration on the other hand are two separate paths—giving you a sixfold path and a sevenfold path to choose from. But that’s not how the Buddha taught them. As with all the factors of the path, he distinguished between them, but also showed how they blended into each other. Just as discernment shades into virtue, and virtue shades into concentration, right mindfulness and right concentration shade into each other.

To begin with, they’re both part of a single heading: concentration. And as the Buddha described the relationship between them, the four establishings of mindfulness are the themes of concentration. These establishings are not just objects; they’re sets of activities. 

• You’re ardent, alert, and mindful, 
• focused on the body in and of itself, or feelings or mind or mental qualities in and of themselves, 
• putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world:
•  That’s the practice of right mindfulness. 

Included within that practice is right effort, 

the quality of ardency, in which you 

    generate desire, focus your intent, and stay persistent in trying 

        - to prevent unskillful qualities from arising or 

        - to abandon unskillful qualities that have arisen, 

        - to give rise to skillful qualities, and then 

        - to maintain skillful qualities once they’ve arisen: 

That’s how right effort gets folded into right mindfulness.

Right mindfulness then gets folded into right concentration when the mind is able to stay with this set of activities until it settles down, abandoning all unskillful mental qualities, all thoughts of sensuality. 

Sensuality here doesn’t mean the objects of your desire. It means your desire or obsession for the desires themselves. 

That’s a problem in the mind. 

We really like fantasizing about sensual pleasures, and it can set the mind on fire. 

But if you’re mindful enough to abandon that kind of obsession, 

the mind can calm down and settle into strong states of concentration, where you really do stay focused just on the topic of your object of mindfulness, the activity of mindfulness.

Say that you’re focused on the breath, working with the breath in various ways to make it a good place to stay. 

You can really get absorbed in that. This takes you all the way through the four levels of jhana, which constitute right concentration.

Those are the factors of the path, the main frame for what we’re doing here.

So when you look at your life and look at your mind, 

to what extent is it actually on the path and 

to what extent are you allowing it to wander off into the brush? 

What qualities need to be developed? What qualities need to be abandoned?

 This is part of what the Buddha calls the customs of the noble ones—which are the values of the noble ones: that you learn how 

• to delight in abandoning whatever you have to abandon, and 
• to delight in developing whatever needs to be developed. 

The path involves a fair amount of abandoning. 

Right resolve involves abandoning unskillful thoughts. 

Right speech, right action, right livelihood, and right effort all involve abandoning unskillful activities, unskillful mind states. 

Right mindfulness involves abandoning greed and distress with reference to the world. 

The things you need to develop tend to be right view and right concentration, along with whatever skillful qualities you can manage, particularly the ones that 

help you to see where you’re causing stress and suffering, and 

help to stop causing them.

All too often we’re thinking about other things. We have other issues. And that right there is ignorance. 

Ignorance isn’t just a matter of not knowing things. 

You know things, but you’re looking at them in the wrong way, with the wrong priorities. And because your priorities are wrong, they make you do the wrong things.

You’ve got to develop the Buddha’s sense of priorities. 

The big problem in life is that you’re causing suffering even though you don’t want to. 

All too often, you’re causing suffering in areas that you would rather deny. That’s why the quality of honesty and truthfulness is so important: so that you can look squarely at your actual actions and their actual results. That way you learn to be sensitive to whatever stress you’re creating.

This is one the reasons why we need to get the mind into concentration: so that our sensitivity as to what counts as stress gets heightened. Things you used to accept as normal, you begin to realize: “This really is a burden on the mind.” 

Sensing that burden, sensing that it’s not necessary: That’s how you begin to gain some freedom.

The Buddha once said that of the factors of the path, right concentration is the main one, and the others are its accessories. 

Right concentration is the one we have to work at the most, to get the mind to stay with its one object, to learn not only the techniques of how to do this, but also the sense of values to remind you of why this really is important. 

Without this skill, you miss everything else. 

You can know about all the other factors of the path, you can read all about right view, but you can miss the whole point. 

I was reading a book recently by a professor of Buddhist Studies. And it was amazing: Here was someone who had devoted his career to studying the Pali Canon, and yet the whole book was very wrongheaded. He could quote all the passages but he just totally missed the point.

So it’s not just a matter of knowing about the factors. You have to give them priority and master them as skills. 

The Buddha talks about different levels of discernment. 

To begin with, there’s 

• the discernment that comes from listening or reading, and 
• the discernment that comes from thinking things through. 

And although it’s important to master those levels of discernment, 

the really important level is the discernment that comes from actually developing skillful qualities in the mind. That’s when you get hands-on practice.

And as you work on the factors of the path, they do their work on your mind. The mind becomes more sensitive, more alert to what it’s doing, more open to the possibility that the suffering you’re experiencing in life is not something you can blame on other people, or on conditions beyond your control.

 The essential suffering that’s weighing down the mind is something that you’ve been creating through your own actions, and you can learn how to stop. 

That’s what abandoning means. You realize that there’s something you’ve been doing over and over again and you don’t have to do it. So you stop.

The way to get yourself to stop is to see that these actions really aren’t worth doing. Whatever pleasure you get out of them is nothing compared to the pain that you’re causing. 

You have to see that fact in action, as it’s happening, if you want to be able to drop that particular habit. And often the habits we have to drop are the ones we really, really, really like. 

Only by getting the mind a lot more sensitive will you be able to see through that liking, to see through the blindness and the ignorance that underlies it, so that you’re willing to let go.

This is why we’re sitting here with our eyes closed, focused on the breath.

We’re not off reading through the texts and trying to learn all we can about what the texts have to say. 

We’re here looking at our own breath to see what our actions have to say—when viewed from the point of view of a mind that’s centered, still, clear, stable here in the present moment. 

That’s the point from which we can develop a more refined sense of where there’s suffering and what action it’s coming from, so that once we really see where it comes from, we can let go. We can stop.

This is how you develop a sense of disenchantment and dispassion for the actions that you used to feel enchanted and impassioned about. 

Your enchantment and passion kept you doing those things, so when you have no more passion for them, they stop. 

And their results stop in the present moment as well. The things that used to weigh down the mind all go away. 

As the Buddha said, at that point they don’t even leave a trace. 

They may have been weighing down your mind for who knows how long, but when they’re gone, they’re gone. 

They don’t leave any scars. They don’t leave any marks. 

It’s simply that you’ve been doing this to yourself over and over and over again. And you suddenly realize you can stop—and you would prefer to stop. That’s it. The mind is freed. 

That’s the freedom the Buddha is aiming his teachings at. Everything else is a means in that direction.

So try to make sure that you use the teachings for their intended purpose. That way you get the most out of them and you fulfill the Buddha’s intentions in teaching them to begin with. 

There’s that passage toward the end of his life where the devas were worshiping him with flowers, incense, and song, and the Buddha explained to the monks that this is not the way to really pay respect to the Buddha. 

You pay respect to the Buddha by practicing the Dhamma in line with the Dhamma, which means that 

you learn how to look at sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and ideas with the purpose of giving rise to disenchantment. 

You look for their inconstancy. 

You look for the stress that’s involved in trying to find happiness in them. 

And you learn to see them as not self. 

That, he said, is how you pay true respect to the Buddha.

What does that have to do with the eightfold path? What does that have to do with the four noble truths? 

The way that you normally take the material that comes from your senses and turn it into suffering: That’s the problem. 

You use the eightfold path 

• to learn how to look into those processes, 
• to see how you fashion the raw material from the senses into suffering, and
• to learn how to undo those habits. 

Because we’ve been clinging to these habits, 

we have to learn how to see what we’re actually doing so that we can develop dispassion for those habits. 

The factors of the path are essential for strengthening the factor of right concentration, so that the mind is steady enough and still enough and sensitive enough to see what’s happening.