Head& Heart Together 9] The Wisdom of the Ego

 Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu

The Wisdom of the Ego

Years back, many Buddhist teachers in the West began using the term “egolessness” to explain the Buddha’s teaching on not-self. Since then, egolessness has come to mean many things to many people. Sometimes egolessness is used to mean a lack of conceit or self-importance; sometimes, a pure mode of acting without thought of personal reward. In its most extended form, though, the teaching on egolessness posits a fundamental error of perception: that despite our sense of a lasting, separate self, no such self really exists. By trying to provide for the happiness of this illusory self, we not only place our hopes on an impossible goal but also harm ourselves and everyone around us. If we could simply see the fallacy of the ego and understand its harmful effects, we would let it go and find true happiness in the interconnectedness that is our true nature.

At least that’s what we’re told, and often with a fair amount of vehemence. Buddhist writers, often so gentle and nonjudgmental, can quickly turn vicious when treating the ego. Some portray it as a tyrannical bureaucracy deserving violent overthrow; others, as a rat-like creature—nervous, scheming, and devious—that deserves to be squashed. Whatever the portrait, the message is always that the ego is so pernicious and tenacious that any mental or verbal abuse directed against it is fair play in getting it to loosen its foul grip on the mind.

But when people trained in classical Western psychotherapy read these attacks on the ego, they shake their heads in disbelief. For them the ego is not something evil. It’s not even a singular thing you can attack. It’s a cluster of activities, a set of functions in the mind—and necessary functions at that. Any mental act by which you mediate between your raw desires for immediate pleasure and your super-ego—the oughts and shoulds you’ve learned from family and society—is an ego function. Ego functions are our mental strategies for gaining lasting happiness in the midst of the conflicting demands whispering and shouting in the mind. They enable you to say No to the desire to have sex with your neighbor’s spouse, in the interest of a happiness that would have less disastrous consequences for the things you truly value in life. They also enable you to say No to the demands of your parents, your teachers, or government when those demands would jeopardize your own best interest.

But ego functions don’t just say No. They also have a mediator’s sense of when to say Yes. If they’re skillful, they negotiate among your desires and your super-ego so that you can gain the pleasure you want in a way that causes no harm and can actually do a great deal of good. If your ego functions are healthy and well-coordinated, they give you a consistent sense of priorities as to which forms of happiness are more worthwhile than others; a clear sense of where your responsibilities do and don’t lie; a strong sense of your ability to judge right and wrong for yourself; and an honest sense of how to learn from your past mistakes for the sake of greater happiness in the future.

From this perspective, egolessness would be a disaster. A person devoid of ego functions would be self-destructive: either a beast with uncontrolled impulses, or a neurotic, repressed automaton with no mind of his or her own, or an infantile monster thrashing erratically between these two extremes. Anyone who tried to abandon ego functioning would arrest his psychological growth and lose all hope of becoming a mature, responsible, trustworthy adult. And as we know, self-destructive people don’t destroy only themselves. They can pull down many of the people and places around them.

This is not only the view of trained Western psychologists. Buddhist communities in the West have also begun to recognize this problem and have coined the term “spiritual bypassing” to describe it: the way people try to avoid dealing with the problems of an unintegrated personality by spending all their time in meditation retreats, using the mantra of egolessness to short-circuit the hard work of mastering healthy ego functioning in the daily give and take of their lives.

Then there’s the problem of self-hatred. The Dalai Lama isn’t the only Asian Buddhist teacher surprised at the amount of self-hatred found in the West. Unfortunately, a lot of people with toxic super-egos have embraced the teaching on egolessness as the Buddha’s stamp of approval on the hatred they feel toward themselves.

These problems have inspired many Western psychologists to assume a major gap in the Buddha’s teachings: that in promoting egolessness, the Buddha overlooked the importance of healthy ego functioning in finding true happiness. This assumption has led to a corollary: that Buddhism needs the insights of Western psychotherapy to fill the gap; that to be truly effective, a healthy spiritual path needs to give equal weight to both traditions. Otherwise you come out lopsided and warped, an idiot savant who can thrive in the seclusion of a three-year, three-month, three-day retreat, but can’t handle three hours caught in heavy traffic with three whining children.

This corollary assumes, though, that for the past twenty-six hundred years Buddhism hasn’t produced any healthy functioning individuals: that the collective consciousness of Asian society has suppressed individualism, and that the handful of dysfunctional meditation teachers coming to the West—the ones who mastered the subtleties of formal meditation but tripped over the blatant pitfalls of American money and sex—are typical of the Buddhist tradition. But I wonder if this is so.

My own experience in Asia certainly doesn’t confirm this. During my sixteen years in Thailand I met, per capita, more people with a genuinely individual outlook on life and far fewer neurotics than I did on returning to the mass-media-produced minds of America. My teacher, Ajaan Fuang, had the healthiest functioning ego of anyone I had ever met—and he knew nothing of Western psychology. This observation doesn’t apply just to the Thai tradition. Psychologists have studied ordinary Tibetan monks and nuns who have survived years of torture—the severest test of healthy ego functioning—and found that they bear no psychological scars.

So there are many Asian Buddhists who clearly know the secret of how to develop a healthy ego. Some psychologists would have us believe that this was despite, rather than due to, their Buddhist training, but that belief could easily be based on a superficial reading of the Buddhist tradition. So we need to put this belief to the test.

One way would be to read the ancient texts with new eyes. Instead of assuming that the not-self teaching is counseling egolessness, how about assuming that it’s part of a regimen for developing a healthy ego? This idea may seem counterintuitive, but that’s no measure of its usefulness. The measure lies in testing it as a hypothesis. So as a thought experiment, let’s look at the earliest record of the Buddha’s teachings, the Pāli Canon, from the perspective of Western psychology and pose a question: is there any evidence that the Buddha was advocating a healthy ego?

Actually, tips on healthy ego functioning fill the texts. To begin with, the Buddha defines a wise person as one who knows the difference between what are and are not his personal responsibilities, who takes on only his own responsibilities and not those of others. This is the first principle in any ego functioning. Then there’s the famous verse at Dhammapada 290:

If, by forsaking a limited ease,

he would see an abundance of ease,

the enlightened person

would forsake the limited ease

for the sake of the abundant.

This is practically a definition of how ego functions function well.

These insights aren’t random. They’re based on another assumption necessary for a healthy ego: the teaching on karma, that we’re responsible for our actions and that we’re going to experience their results. This assumption in turn is framed by the larger psychology of the noble eightfold path. As any therapist will tell you, a healthy ego is strengthened by developing a healthy super-ego whose shoulds are humane and realistic. It’s also strengthened by the ability to safely satisfy your raw demands for immediate happiness so that the ego’s long-term strategies don’t get derailed by sudden overwhelming desires. These two functions are filled, respectively, by the path factors of right view and right concentration.

Right view contains the Buddha’s shoulds, which are in service to the desire to find true happiness. You divide your experience into four categories: suffering, its cause, its cessation, and the path to its cessation. Then you take to heart the imperatives proper to each: comprehending suffering, abandoning its cause, realizing its cessation, and developing the path. That’s the Buddhist recipe for a healthy super-ego—a series of shoulds that are on your side, that never ask you to sacrifice your own true well-being for the sake of anyone or anything else.

As for right concentration, one of its crucial factors is a sense of bliss independent of sensual objects and drives. When you’ve gained some skill in meditation and can tap into that bliss whenever you want, you can satisfy your desire for immediate pleasure, at the same time weakening any demand that the pleasure be sensual. As the Buddha once noted, people pursue sensual pleasure, with all of its inherent limitations, simply because they see no other alternative to physical and mental pain. But once you’ve mastered this more refined alternative, you’ve found a new way to feed the demand for pleasure right now, freeing the ego to function more effectively.

You have also learned the key to the Buddha’s strategy for true happiness: it is possible to taste an immediate gratification that causes no harm to yourself or anyone else. Genuine happiness doesn’t require that you take anything away from anyone—which means that it in no way conflicts with the genuine happiness of others.

This understanding is revolutionary. For people dependent on sensual pleasures, happiness is a zero-sum affair. There are only so many things, only so many people, to go around. When you gain something, someone else has lost it; when they’ve gained, you’ve lost. In a zero-sum world, the pursuit of your own happiness constantly has to be negotiated and compromised with that of others. But when people access the bliss of right concentration, they’ve found a way to satisfy their own desire for happiness in a way that can actively augment the happiness of those around them. When they’re more content and at peace within, they radiate a healthy influence in all directions. This is how healthy ego functioning, from the Buddhist perspective, benefits others as well as yourself.

The classic image illustrating this point is of two acrobats, the first standing on the end of a vertical bamboo pole, the second standing on the shoulders of the first. To perform their tricks and come down safely, each has to look after his or her own sense of balance. In other words, life is a balancing act. In maintaining your balance you make it easier for others to maintain theirs. This is why, in the Buddhist equation, the wise pursuit of happiness is not a selfish thing. In fact, it underlies all the qualities traditionally associated not only with the path the Buddha taught to his disciples, but also with the Buddha himself: wisdom, compassion, and purity.

Wisdom, the Buddha says, starts with a simple question: What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness? The wisdom here lies in realizing that your happiness depends on what you do, and that the pursuit of happiness is worthwhile only if it’s long-term. The test of how far your wisdom has matured lies in the strategic skill with which you can keep yourself from doing things that you like to do but that would cause long-term harm, and can talk yourself into doing things that you don’t like to do but that would lead to long-term well-being and happiness. In other words, mature wisdom requires a mature ego.

The ego basis for compassion is depicted in one of the most delightful stories in the Canon. King Pasenadi, in a tender moment with his favorite consort, Queen Mallikā, asks her, “Is there anyone you love more than yourself?” He’s anticipating, of course, that she’ll answer, “Yes, your majesty. You.” And it’s easy to see where a B-movie script would go from there. But this is the Pāli Canon, and Queen Mallikā is no ordinary queen. She answers, “No, your majesty, there isn’t. And how about you? Is there anyone you love more than yourself?” The king, forced into an honest answer, has to admit, “No, there’s not.” Later he reports this conversation to the Buddha, who responds in an interesting way:

Searching all directions

with one’s awareness,

one finds no one dearer

than oneself.

In the same way, others

are fiercely dear to themselves.

So one should not hurt others

if one loves oneself. — Ud 5:1

In other words, true self-love requires an appreciation that others feel self-love, too. This principle works in two ways: First, you recognize that if your happiness depends on the misery of others it won’t last, for they’ll do whatever they can to destroy that happiness. Your long-term happiness thus has to take into account the long-term happiness of others. Second, in a less calculating way, you recognize what we all have in common. If you take your own self-love seriously, you have to respect the self-love of others. In this way, compassion is based not on a sense of your superiority to those who are suffering but on a sense of mutual respect—a respect solidly based in your own self-interest.

Purity grows from providing your ego-based wisdom and compassion with a reality check. The Buddha once taught his son, Rāhula, that purity is developed by examining your actions and their results to make sure that they actually cause no harm to yourself or to those around you. If you anticipate harm from an intended action, you don’t do it. If you see unanticipated harm coming from something you’ve done, you freely admit your mistake and learn how not to repeat it. You don’t cling childishly to the need to always be in the right. But if you see that you aren’t causing harm, you can take joy in the fact that you’re on the path to true happiness.

Because the Buddha saw how these enlightened qualities of wisdom, compassion, and purity could be developed through the pursuit of happiness, he never told his followers to practice his teachings without expecting any gain in return.  He understood that such a demand would create an unhealthy dynamic in the mind. In terms of Western psychology, expecting no gain in return would give license for the super-ego to run amok. Instead, the Buddha taught that even the principle of renunciation is a trade. You exchange candy for gold, trading lesser pleasures for greater happiness. So he encouraged people to be generous with their time and belongings because of the inner rewards they would receive in return. He taught moral virtue as a gift: when you observe the precepts without ifs, ands, or buts, you give unconditional safety to all other beings, and in return you receive a share of that safety as well.

Even when advocating that his disciples abandon their sense of self, the Buddha justified this teaching on the basis of the rewards it would bring. He once asked his monks, “If anyone were to burn the trees in this monastery, would you suffer with the sense that they were burning you?” “No,” the monks replied, “because we’re not the trees.” “In the same way,” the Buddha continued, “let go of what’s not you or yours: the senses and their objects. That will be for your long-term well-being and happiness.”

Notice that he didn’t say to abandon the sense of self as a form of self-sacrifice. He said to abandon it for the sake of true well-being and happiness.

This point highlights one of the special features of the Buddha’s instructions for healthy ego-development. In Western psychology, ego-development is impossible without assuming a clear sense of self. But in Buddhism, with its realization that there is no clear dividing line between your own true happiness and that of others, the underlying assumption of ego-development is a clear sense of cause and effect, seeing which actions lead to suffering, which ones lead to short-term happiness, which ones lead to a happiness that lasts.

This is one of the reasons why the Buddha never used terms like “ego-development” or “a well-integrated self.” The types of functioning we associate with a well-developed ego he would have described as a well-integrated sense of cause and effect focused on insights into the results of your actions. Buddhist practice is aimed at refining these insights to ever greater levels of sensitivity and skill. In this way he was able to teach healthy ego functioning while avoiding the twin pitfalls of ego-obsession: narcissism and self-hatred.

Because the Buddha’s basic terms of analysis were actions understood under the framework of cause and effect, we have to understand his use of “self” and “not-self” under that framework. For him, “self” and “not-self” aren’t metaphysical principles. They’re mental actions that can be mastered as skills.  This is why he was able to use both concepts freely in his teaching. When the concept of self was conducive to skillful action, he would talk in terms of self—not only on the level of generosity and virtue, but also on the level of meditation. If you think that meditation is an exercise in not-self from the very beginning, read the discourses on mindfulness and you’ll be surprised at how often they describe the meditator’s internal dialogue in terms of “I,” “me,” and “mine.”

As for the concept of not-self, the Buddha would advise using it whenever unskillful attachment to things or patterns of behavior got in the way of your happiness. In effect, he would have you drop unhealthy and unskillful ways of self-identification in favor of ways that were more skillful and refined. Only on the highest levels of practice, where even the most skillful concepts of self get in the way of the ultimate happiness, did the Buddha advocate totally abandoning them. But even then he didn’t advocate abandoning the basic principle of ego functioning. You drop the best happiness that can come from a sense of self because an even greater happiness—nibbāna, totally timeless, limitless, and unconditioned—appears when you do.

So this is where our thought experiment has led. If you open your mind to the idea that the Buddha was actually advocating ego development instead of egolessness, you see that there’s nothing lopsided or lacking in his understanding of healthy ego functioning.  In fact, he mastered some ego skills that Western psychology has yet to explore, such as how to use right concentration to satisfy the desire for immediate pleasure; how to develop an integrated sense of causality that ultimately makes a sense of self superfluous; how to harness the ego’s drive for lasting happiness so that it leads to a happiness transcending space and time.

These principles have taught many Asian Buddhists how to develop healthy egos over the centuries—so healthy that they can ultimately drop the need to create “self.” All that remains is for us to put these principles to the test, to see if they work for us as well.

Head& Heart Together 10] Ignorance

 

Ignorance

Ignorance, the Buddha said, is the ultimate cause of stress and suffering. By “ignorance” he meant not a general ignorance of the way things are — what we usually call delusion, or moha—but something more specific: ignorance of the four noble truths. And the Pāli word he chose for ignorance—avijjā—is the opposite of vijjā, which means not only “knowledge” but also “skill,” as in the skills of a doctor or animal-trainer. So in stating that people suffer from not knowing the four noble truths, he wasn’t just saying that they lack information or direct knowledge of those truths. He was also saying that they lack skill in handling them. They suffer because they don’t know what they’re doing.

The four truths are (1) stress—which covers everything from the slightest tension to out-and-out agony; (2) the cause of stress; (3) the cessation of stress; and (4) the path of practice leading to the cessation of stress. When the Buddha first taught these truths, he also taught that his full Awakening came from knowing them on three levels: identifying them, knowing the skill appropriate to each, and knowing finally that he had fully mastered the skills.

The Buddha identified these truths in precise, fairly technical terms. When identifying stress he started with examples like birth, aging, illness, and death; sorrow, distress, and despair. Then he summarized all varieties of stress under five categories, which he called five clinging-aggregates: clinging to physical form; to feelings of pleasure, pain, and neither pleasure nor pain; to perceptions or mental labels; to thought-constructs; and to sensory consciousness. The cause of stress he identified as three kinds of craving: craving for sensuality, craving to take on an identity in a world of experience, and craving for one’s identity and world of experience to be destroyed. The cessation of stress he identified as renunciation of and release from those three kinds of craving. And the path to the cessation of stress he identified as right concentration together with its supporting factors in the noble eightfold path: right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, and right mindfulness.

These four truths are not simply facts about stress. They are categories for framing your experience so that you can diagnose and cure the problem of stress. Instead of looking at experience in terms of self or other, for instance, or in terms of what you like and dislike, you look at it in terms of where there’s stress, what’s causing it, and how to put an end to the cause. Once you can divide the territory of experience in this way, you realize that each of these categories is an activity. The word “stress” may be a noun, but the experience of stress is shaped by your intentions. It’s something you do. The same holds true with other truths, too. Seeing this, you can work on perfecting the skill appropriate for each activity. The skill with regard to stress is to comprehend it to the point where you have no more passion, aversion, or delusion toward doing it. To perfect this skill, you also have to abandon the cause of stress, to realize its cessation, and to develop the path to its cessation.

Each of these skills assists the others. For example, when states of concentration arise in the mind, you don’t just watch them arise and pass away. Concentration is part of the path, so the appropriate skill is to try to develop it: to understand what will make it grow steadier, subtler, more solid. In doing this, you develop the other factors of the path as well, until the doing of your concentration is more like simply being: being a luminous awareness, being present, being nothing, being one with emptiness.

From that perspective, you begin to comprehend levels of stress you never noticed before. As you abandon the cravings causing the grosser levels, you become sensitive to subtler ones, so you can abandon them, too. In doing this, your ignorance gets pealed away, layer by layer. You see more and more clearly why you’ve suffered from stress: You didn’t grasp the connection between the cravings you enjoyed and the stress that burdened you, and didn’t detect the stress in the activities you enjoyed. Ultimately, when you’ve abandoned the causes for other forms of stress, you begin to see that the being of your concentration contains many layers of doing as well—more layers of stress. That’s when you can abandon any craving for these activities, and full Awakening occurs.

The path to this Awakening is necessarily gradual, both because the sensitivity it requires takes time to develop, and because it involves developing skills that you abandon only when they’ve done their job. If you abandoned craving for concentration before developing it, you’d never get the mind into a position where it could genuinely and fully let go of the subtlest forms of doing.

But as your skills converge, the Awakening they foster is sudden. The Buddha’s image is of the continental shelf off the coast of India: a gradual slope, followed by a sudden drop-off. After the drop-off, no trace of mental stress remains. That’s when you know you’ve mastered your skills. And that’s when you really know the four noble truths.

Craving, for instance, is something you experience every day, but until you totally abandon it, you don’t really know it. You can experience stress for years on end, but you don’t really know stress until you’ve comprehended it to the point where passion, aversion, and delusion are gone. And even though all four skills, as you’re developing them, bring a greater sense of awareness and ease, you don’t really know why they’re so important until you’ve tasted where their full mastery can lead.

For even full knowledge of the four noble truths is not an end in and of itself. It’s a means to something much greater: Nibbāna is found at the end of stress, but it’s much more than that. It’s total liberation from all constraints of time or place, existence or non-existence—beyond all activity, even the activity of the cessation of stress. As the Buddha once said, the knowledge he gained in Awakening was like all the leaves in the forest; the knowledge he imparted about the four noble truths was like a handful of leaves. He restricted himself to teaching the handful because that’s all he needed to lead his students to their own knowledge of the whole forest. If he were to discuss other aspects of his Awakening, it would have served no purpose and actually gotten in the way.

So even though full knowledge of the four noble truths—to use another analogy—is just the raft across the river, you need to focus full attention on the raft while you’re making your way across. Not only does this knowledge get you to full Awakening, but it also helps you judge any realizations along the way. It does this in two ways. First, it provides a standard for judging those realizations: Is there any stress remaining in the mind? At all? If there is, then they’re not genuine Awakening. Second, the skills you’ve developed have sensitized you to all the doings in simply being, which ensures that the subtlest levels of ignorance and stress won’t escape your gaze. Without this sensitivity, you could easily mistake an infinitely luminous state of concentration for something more. The luminosity would blind you. But when you really know what you’re doing, you’ll recognize freedom from doing when you finally encounter it. And when you know that freedom, you’ll know something further: that the greatest gift you can give to others is to teach them the skills to encounter it for themselves.

Head& Heart Together 5] Strength Training for the Mind

 Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu 

Strength Training for the Mind

Meditation is the most useful skill you can master. It can bring the mind to the end of suffering, something no other skill can do. But it’s also the most subtle and demanding skill there is. It requires all the mental qualities ordinarily involved in mastering a physical skill—mindfulness and alertness, persistence and patience, discipline and ingenuity—but to an extraordinary degree. This is why, when you come to meditation, it’s good to reflect on any skills, crafts, or disciplines you’ve already mastered so that you can apply the lessons they’ve taught you to the training of the mind.

In teaching meditation, I’ve often found it helpful to illustrate my points with analogies drawn from physical skills. And, given the particular range of skills and disciplines currently popular in America, I’ve found that one useful source of analogies is strength training. Meditation is more like a good workout than you might have thought.

The Buddha himself noticed the parallels here. He defined the practice as a path of five strengths: conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. He likened the mind’s ability to beat down its most stubborn thoughts to that of a strong man beating down a weaker man. The agility of a well-trained mind, he said, is like that of a strong man who can easily flex his arm when it’s extended, or extend it when it’s flexed. And he often compared the higher skills of concentration and discernment to the skills of archery, which—given the massive bows of ancient India—was strength training for the noble warriors of his day. These skills included the ability to shoot great distances, to fire arrows in rapid succession, and to pierce great masses—the great mass, here, standing for the mass of ignorance that envelops the untrained mind.

So even if you’ve been pumping great masses instead of piercing them, you’ve been learning some important lessons that will stand you in good stead as a meditator. A few of the more important lessons are these:

• Read up on anatomy.  If you want to strengthen a muscle, you need to know where it is and what it moves if you’re going to understand the exercises that target it. Only then can you perform them efficiently. In the same way, you have to understand the anatomy of the mind’s suffering if you want to understand how meditation is supposed to work. Read up on what the Buddha had to say on the topic, and don’t settle for books that put you at the far end of a game of telephone. Go straight to the source. You’ll find, for instance, that the Buddha explained how ignorance shapes the way you breathe, and how that in turn can add to your suffering. This is why most meditation regimens start with the breath, and why the Buddha’s own regimen takes the breath all the way to nibbāna. So read up to understand how and why.

• Start where you are.  Too many meditators get discouraged at the outset because their minds won’t settle down. But just as you can’t wait until you’re big and strong before you start strength training, you can’t wait until your concentration is strong before you start sitting. Only by exercising what little concentration you have will you make it solid and steady. So even though you feel scrawny when everyone around you seems big, or fat when everyone else seems fit, remember that you’re not here to compete with them or with the perfect meditators you see in magazines. You’re here to work on yourself. So establish that as your focus, and keep it strong.

• Establish a regular routine.  You’re in this for the long haul. We all like the stories of sudden enlightenment, but even the most lightning-like insights have to be primed by a long, steady discipline of day-to-day practice. That’s because the consistency of your discipline allows you to observe subtle changes, and being observant is what enables insight to see. So don’t get taken in by promises of quick and easy shortcuts. Set aside a time to meditate every day and then stick to your schedule whether you feel like meditating or not. The mind grows by overcoming resistance to repetition, just like a muscle. Sometimes the best insights come on the days you least feel like meditating. Even when they don’t, you’re establishing a strength of discipline, patience, and resilience that will see you through the even greater difficulties of aging, illness, and death. That’s why it’s called practice.

• Aim for balance.  The “muscle groups” of the path are three: virtue, concentration, and discernment.  If any one of these gets overdeveloped at the expense of the others, it throws you out of alignment, and your extra strength turns into a liability.

• Set interim goals.  You can’t fix a deadline for your enlightenment, but you can keep aiming for a little more sitting or walking time, a little more consistency in your mindfulness, a little more speed in recovering from distraction, a little more understanding of what you’re doing. The type of meditation taught on retreats where they tell you not to have goals is aimed at (1) people who get neurotic around goals in general and (2) the weekend warriors who need to be cautioned so that they don’t push themselves past the breaking point. If you’re approaching meditation as a lifetime activity, you’ve got to have goals. You’ve got to want results. Otherwise the whole thing loses focus, and you start wondering why you’re sitting here when you could be sitting out on the beach.

• Focus on proper form.  Get your desire for results to work for you and not against you. Once you’ve set your goals, focus directly not on the results but on the means that will get you there. It’s like building muscle mass. You don‘t blow air or stuff protein into the muscle to make it larger. You focus on performing your reps properly, and the muscle grows on its own. If, as you meditate, you want the mind to develop more concentration, don’t focus on the idea of concentration. Focus on allowing this breath to be more comfortable, and then this breath, this breath, one breath at a time. Concentration will then grow without your having to think about it.

• Pace yourself.  Learn how to read your pain. When you meditate, some pains in the body are simply a sign that it’s adapting to the meditation posture; others, that you’re pushing yourself too hard. Some pains are telling the truth, some are lying. Learn how to tell the difference. The same principle applies to the mind. When the mind can’t seem to settle down, sometimes it needs to be pushed even harder, sometimes you need to pull back. Your ability to read the difference is what exercises your powers of wisdom and discernment.

Learn, too, how to read your progress. The meditation won’t really be a skill, won’t really be your own, until you learn to judge what works for you and what doesn’t. You may have heard that meditation is non-judgmental, but that’s simply meant to counteract the tendency to prejudge things before they’ve had a chance to show their results. Once the results are in, you need to learn how to gauge them, to see how they connect with their causes, so that you can adjust the causes in the direction of the outcome you really want.

• Vary your routine.  Just as a muscle can stop responding to a particular exercise, your mind can hit a plateau if it’s strapped to only one meditation technique. So don’t let your regular routine get into a rut. Sometimes the only change you need is a different way of breathing, a different way of visualizing the breath energy in the body. But then there are days when the mind won’t stay with the breath no matter how many different ways of breathing you try. This is why the Buddha taught supplementary meditations to deal with specific problems as they arise. For starters, there’s goodwill for when you‘re feeling down on yourself or the human race—the people you dislike would be much more tolerable if they could find genuine happiness inside, so wish them that happiness. There’s contemplation of the parts of the body for when you’re overcome with lust—it’s hard to maintain a sexual fantasy when you keep thinking about what lies just underneath the skin. And there’s contemplation of death for when you’re feeling lazy—you don’t know how much time you’ve got left, so you’d better meditate now if you want to be ready when the time comes to go.

When these supplementary contemplations have done their work, you can get back to the breath, refreshed and revived. So keep expanding your repertoire. That way your skill becomes all-around.

• Take your ups and downs in stride.  The rhythms of the mind are even more complex than those of the body, so a few radical ups and downs are par for the course. Just make sure that they don’t knock you off balance. When things are going so well that the mind grows still without any effort on your part, don’t get careless or overly confident. When your mood is so bad that even the supplementary meditations don’t work, view it as an opportunity to learn how to be patient and observant of bad moods. Either way, you learn a valuable lesson: how to keep your inner observer separate from whatever else is going on. So do your best to maintain proper form regardless, and you’ll come out the other side.

• Watch your eating habits.  As the Buddha once said, we survive both on mental food and physical food. Mental food consists of the external stimuli you focus on, as well as the intentions that motivate the mind. If you feed your mind junk food, it’s going to stay weak and sickly no matter how much you meditate. So show some restraint in your eating. If you know that looking at things in certain ways, with certain intentions, gives rise to greed, anger, or delusion, look at them in the opposite way. As Ajaan Lee, my teacher’s teacher, once said, look for the bad side of the things you’re infatuated with, and the good side of the things you hate. That way you become a discriminating eater, and the mind gets the healthy, nourishing food it needs to grow strong.

As for your physical eating habits, this is one of the areas where inner strength training and outer strength training part ways. As a meditator, you have to be concerned less with what physical food you eat than with why you eat. If you’re bulking up for no real purpose, it’s actually harmful for the mind. You have to realize that in eating—even if it’s vegetarian food—you’re placing a burden on the world around you, so you want to give some thought to the purposes served by the strength you gain from your food. Don’t take more from the world than you’re willing to give back. Don’t bulk up just for the fun of it, because the beings—human and animal—who provided the food didn’t provide it in fun. Make sure the energy gets put to good use.

• Don’t leave your strength in the gym.  If you don’t use your strength in other activities, strength training becomes largely an exercise in vanity. The same principle applies to your meditative skills. If you leave them on the cushion and don’t apply them in everyday life, meditation turns into a fetish, something you do to escape the problems of life while their causes continue to fester.

The ability to maintain your center and to breathe comfortably in any situation can be a genuine lifesaver, keeping the mind in a position where you can more easily think of the right thing to do, say, or think when your surroundings get tough. As a result, the people around you are no longer subjected to your greed, anger, and delusion. And as you maintain your inner balance in this way, it helps them maintain theirs. So make the whole world your meditation seat, and you’ll find that meditation both on the big seat and the little seat will get a lot stronger. At the same time, it’ll become a gift both to yourself and to the world around you.

• Never lose sight of your ultimate goal.  Mental strength has at least one major advantage over physical strength in that it doesn’t inevitably decline with age. It can always keep growing to and through the experience of death. The Buddha promises that it leads to the Deathless, and he wasn’t a man to make vain, empty promises. So when you establish your priorities, make sure that you give more time and energy to strengthening your meditation than you do to strengthening your body. After all, someday you’ll be forced to lay down this body, no matter how fit or strong you’ve made it, but you’ll never be forced to lay down the strengths you’ve built into the mind.

Head& Heart Together 6] Mindfulness Defined

 Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu 

Mindfulness Defined

In recent years, the world has been awash in a flood of books, articles, teachings, and courses that promote two theories about the practice of mindfulness (sati). The first theory is that the Buddha employed the term mindfulness to mean bare attention: a state of pure receptivity—nonreactive, nonjudging, noninterfering—toward physical and mental phenomena as they make contact with the six senses (counting the mind as the sixth). The second theory is that the cultivation of bare attention can, on its own, bring about the goal of Buddhist practice: freedom from suffering and stress. Even in non-Buddhist circles, these theories have become the standard interpretation of what mindfulness is and how it’s best developed.

Viewed in the light of the Buddha’s teachings in the Pāli Canon, though, these two theories are seriously misleading. At best, they present a small part of the path as the whole of the practice; at worst, they discredit many of the skills you need on the path and misrepresent what it actually means to taste awakening.

The practice of mindfulness is most fruitful when informed by the Buddha’s own definition of right mindfulness and his explanations of its role on the path. As he described the term, right mindfulness (sammā-sati) is not bare attention. Instead, it’s a faculty of active memory, adept at calling to mind—and keeping in mind—instructions and intentions that apply to your present actions. Its role is to draw on right view about the nature of suffering and its end, and to work proactively in supervising the other factors of the path—such as right resolve, right speech, right action, and right livelihood—to give rise to right concentration (MN 117). Then it builds on right concentration to bring about total release.

In the following passage, the Buddha defines sati as the ability to remember, at the same time illustrating its function in meditation practice with the four satipaṭṭhānas, or establishings of mindfulness:

“And what is the faculty of mindfulness? There is the case where a monk, a disciple of the noble ones, is mindful, highly meticulous, remembering & able to call to mind even things that were done & said long ago. [And here begins the satipaṭṭhāna formula:] He remains focused on the body in & of itself—ardent, alert, and mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. He remains focused on feelings in and of themselves… the mind in and of itself… mental qualities in and of themselves—ardent, alert, and mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world.” — SN 48:10

The most extensive discussion of the satipaṭṭhānas (DN 22) starts with instructions to be ever mindful of the breath. But, as the satipaṭṭhāna formula shows, mindfulness isn’t the only quality you need to bring to the breath. You must also be alert and ardent.

The Pāli word for alertness, sampajañña, is another term that’s often misunderstood. It doesn’t mean comprehending or being choicelessly aware of the present, as it’s sometimes defined. Examples in the Canon shows that sampajañña means being aware of what you’re doing, as you’re doing it, in the activities of the body and mind. After all, if you’re going to gain insight into how you’re causing suffering, your awareness of the present has to be focused on what you’re actually doing. If you’re just mindful of lessons from the past or broadly receptive to everything happening in the present, you won’t see cause and effect in action. This is why mindfulness always has to be paired with alertness as you meditate.

Ardency—ātappa—means being intent on what you’re doing, trying your best to do it skillfully. This doesn’t mean that you have to keep straining and sweating all the time, just that you’re persistent in developing skillful habits and abandoning unskillful ones. That, in fact, is the role of right effort, the factor in the path that immediately precedes right mindfulness. Mindfulness fosters that effort by remembering what’s skillful and not, and recalling your need to keep trying to be skillful.

Mindfulness, alertness, and ardency get their guidance from what the Buddha called yoniso manasikāra, appropriate attention. Notice: That’s appropriate attention, not bare attention. No act of attention is ever bare. The Buddha discovered that the way you attend to sensory contact is determined by your views about what’s important: the questions you bring to each experience, the problems you want to solve. If there were no problems in life, you could open yourself up choicelessly to whatever came along. But the fact is there is a big problem smack dab in the middle of everything you do: the suffering that comes from misunderstanding what suffering is, how it’s caused, and how it can be ended. This is why the Buddha doesn’t tell you to view each moment with a beginner’s eyes. You’ve got to give priority to the problem of suffering, and keep an informed understanding of the problem and its correct solution always in mind.

Otherwise inappropriate attention will get in the way, focusing on questions like “Who am I?” “Do I have a self?”—questions that deal in terms of being and identity. Those questions, the Buddha said, lead you into a thicket of views and leave you stuck on the thorns (MN 2). The questions that lead to freedom focus on comprehending suffering, letting go of the cause of suffering, and developing the path to the end of suffering. Your desire for answers to these questions is what makes you alert to your actions—your thoughts, words, and deeds—and ardent to perform them skillfully.

Mindfulness, then, is what keeps the perspective of appropriate attention in mind. Modern psychological research has shown that attention comes in discrete moments. You can be attentive to something for only a very short period of time and then you have to remind yourself, moment after moment, to return to it if you want to keep on being attentive. In other words, continuous attention—the type that can see connections between cause and effect over time—has to be stitched together from short intervals. This is what mindfulness is for. It keeps the object of your attention and the purpose of your attention in mind.

This is why an accurate understanding of mindfulness and its role on the path is not just a nitpicking matter for scholars to argue over. It has a genuine impact on how you practice. If you can’t identify the differences among the qualities you bring to your meditation, they glom together, making it hard for real insight to arise.

For example, one popular definition of mindfulness is that it is awakening, and that each moment of mindfulness is a momentary taste of awakening. But mindfulness is conditioned and nibbāna is not. Mistaking one of the factors on the path to awakening for awakening itself is like reaching the middle of a road and then falling asleep right there. You never get to the end of the road, and in the meantime you’ll get run over by aging, illness, and death.

Other contemporary definitions of mindfulness may avoid the mistake of confusing mindfulness with awakening, but they still confuse it with qualities that sometimes are and sometimes aren’t useful on the path. For instance, mindfulness is sometimes portrayed as affectionate attention or compassionate attention, but affection and compassion are not synonymous with mindfulness. They’re separate things. If you bring them to your meditation, understand that they’re acting in addition to mindfulness, because skill in meditation requires seeing when qualities like compassion are helpful and when they’re not. As the Buddha says—and as most of us have experienced in our own lives—affection can sometimes be a cause for suffering, so you have to watch out.

Mindfulness has also been equated with appreciating the moment for all the little pleasures it can offer: the taste of a raisin, the feel of a cup of tea in your hands. In the Buddha’s vocabulary, this appreciation is called contentment. Contentment is useful when you’re experiencing physical hardship, but it’s not always useful in the area of the mind. In fact, the Buddha once said that the secret to his awakening was that he didn’t allow himself to rest content with whatever attainment he had reached (AN 2:5). He kept reaching for something higher until there was nowhere higher to reach. So contentment has to know its time and place. Mindfulness, if it’s not confused with contentment, can help keep that fact in mind.

Other popular definitions describe mindfulness as a type of non-reactivity or total acceptance. If you look for these terms in the Buddha’s vocabulary, the closest you’ll find are equanimity and patience. Equanimity means putting aside your preferences and accepting what you can’t change. Patience is the ability not to get worked up over the things you don’t like, to stick with difficult situations even when they don’t resolve as quickly as you want them to. But in establishing mindfulness you stay with unpleasant things not simply to accept them but also to observe and understand them. Once you’ve clearly seen that a particular quality, such as aversion or lust, is harmful for the mind, it doesn’t pay to keep developing patience or equanimity around it. You have to make whatever effort is needed to get rid of it and to nourish skillful qualities in its place by bringing in other factors of the path: right resolve and right effort.

Mindfulness, after all, is part of a larger path mapped out by appropriate attention. You have to keep remembering to bring the larger map to bear on everything you do. For instance, you try to keep the breath in mind because you see that concentration, as a factor of the path, is something you need to develop, and mindfulness of the breath is a good way to do it. The breath is also a good standpoint from which you can directly observe what’s happening in the mind, to see which mental qualities are giving good results and which ones aren’t.

Meditation employs lots of mental qualities, and you have to be clear about what they are, where they’re separate, and what each one of them can do. That way, when things are out of balance, you can identify what’s missing and can foster whatever is needed to make up the lack. If you’re feeling flustered and irritated, try to bring in a little gentleness and contentment. When you’re lazy, rev up your sense of the dangers of being unskillful and complacent. It’s not just a matter of piling on more and more mindfulness. You’ve got to add other qualities as well. First you’re mindful enough to stitch things together, to keep the basic issues of your meditation in mind and to observe things over time. Then you try to be alert to see whatever else your ardency should stir into the pot.

This process is a lot like cooking. When you don’t like the taste of the soup you’re making, you’re not stuck with the single option of adding more and more salt. You can add onion, garlic, oregano—whatever you sense is needed. Remember that you’ve got a whole spice shelf to work with, and that the spices should be clearly labeled. If they’re all labeled “salt,” you won’t know which “salt” to use.

And remember that your cooking has a purpose. Right mindfulness is supposed to lead to right concentration. We’re often told that mindfulness and concentration are two separate forms of meditation, or even two separate paths to awakening, but the Buddha never made a clear division between the two. In his teachings, mindfulness and concentration are interwoven: mindfulness shades into concentration; concentration, in turn, forms the basis for even better mindfulness. The four establishings of mindfulness are also the themes of concentration, and the highest level of concentration is where mindfulness becomes pure.

As Ajaan Lee, my teacher’s teacher, once noted, mindfulness combined with ardency turns into the concentration factor called vitakka, or directed thought, where you keep your thoughts consistently focused on one object, such as the breath. Alertness combined with ardency turns into another concentration factor: vicāra, or evaluation. In this case, you evaluate what’s going on with the breath. Is it comfortable? If it is, stick with it. If it’s not, what can you do to make it more comfortable? Try making it a little bit longer, a little bit shorter, deeper, shallower, faster, slower. See what happens. When you’ve found a way of breathing that nourishes a sense of fullness and refreshment, you can spread that fullness throughout the body. Learn how to relate to the breath in a way that nourishes a good energy flow throughout the body. When your sense of the body is refreshed, the mind can easily settle down in the present.

You may have picked up the idea that you should never fiddle with the breath, that you should just take it as it comes. Yet meditation isn’t a passive process of being nonjudgmentally present with whatever arises and not adjusting it at all. Mindfulness keeps reminding you to stick with the breath in the present, but it also reminds you that there’s a path to develop for good results in the future, and that adjusting the breath to help settle the mind is a skillful part of that path.

This is why evaluation—judging the best way to maximize the pleasure of the breath—is essential to the practice. In other words, you don’t abandon your powers of judgment as you develop mindfulness. Rather, you train them to be less judgmental and more judicious, so that they yield tangible results.

When the breath becomes really full and refreshing throughout the body, you can drop the evaluation and simply be one with the breath. This sense of oneness is also sometimes called mindfulness, in a literal sense: mind-fullness, a sense of oneness pervading the entire range of your awareness. You’re at one with whatever you focus on, at one with whatever you do. There’s no separate “you” at all. This is a type of mindfulness that’s easy to confuse with awakening because it can seem so liberating, but in the Buddha’s vocabulary it’s neither mindfulness nor awakening. He calls it by a technical name: cetaso ekodibhāva, unification of awareness. In the nine levels of concentration attainments, this is a factor that’s present from the second level, the second jhāna, up to the sixth, the infinitude of consciousness. It’s abandoned on the seventh level, when the mind needs to drop the oneness to reach the dimension of nothingness. So oneness isn’t even the ultimate in concentration, much less awakening.

Which means that there’s still more work for your mindfulness, alertness, and ardency to do. Mindfulness reminds you that no matter how wonderful this sense of oneness is, you still haven’t solved the problem of suffering. Alertness tries to focus on what the mind is still doing in that state of oneness—what subterranean choices you’re making to keep that sense of oneness going and what subtle levels of stress those choices are causing—while ardency tries to find a way to drop even those subtle choices to be rid of that stress.

So even this sense of oneness is a means to a higher end. You bring the mind to a solid state of oneness in order to drop your habitual ways of dividing up experience into me vs. not-me, but you don’t stop there. You then take that oneness and keep subjecting it to all the factors of the path. That’s when the activities underlying the oneness become clearly distinct. Ajaan Lee uses the image of ore in a rock. Staying with the sense of oneness is like resting content with the knowledge that there’s tin, silver, and gold in your rock: if that’s all you do, you’ll never get any use from those metals. But if you heat the rock to their different melting points, they’ll separate out on their own. Only then will you benefit from them.

Liberating insight comes from testing and experimenting. This is how we learn about the world to begin with. If we weren’t active creatures, we’d have no understanding of the world at all. Things would pass by, pass by, and we wouldn’t know how they were connected because we’d have no way of influencing them to see which effects came from changing which causes. It’s because we act in the world that we can understand it.

The same holds true with the mind. You can’t just sit there hoping that a single mental quality—mindfulness, acceptance, contentment, oneness—will do all the work. If you want to learn about the potentials of the mind, you have to be willing to play with sensations in the body, with qualities in the mind. That’s when you come to understand cause and effect.

But apprehending cause and effect requires all your powers of intelligence. This doesn’t mean book intelligence. It means your ability to notice what you’re doing, to read the results of what you’ve done, and to figure out ingenious ways of doing things that cause less and less suffering and stress: call it street smarts for the noble path. Mindfulness allows you to see these connections because it keeps reminding you to stay with these issues, to stay with the causes until you see their effects. But mindfulness alone can’t do all the work. You can’t improve the soup simply by dumping more pepper into it. You add other ingredients, as they’re needed.

This is why it’s best not to load the word mindfulness with too many meanings or to assign it too many functions. Otherwise, you can’t clearly discern when a quality like contentment is useful and when it’s not, when you need to bring things to oneness and when you need to take things apart.

So keep the spices on your shelf clearly labeled, and learn through practice which spice is good for which purpose. Only then can you develop your full potential as a cook.