Good For What Purpose？ (Buddha's Psychology)

Good for what purpose? Buddha's psychology. The Buddha has a list of what he calls craving verbalizations. Things we tell ourselves because of craving. Two of them are, I am good and I am bad. You might wonder, why would the Buddha mark these out as being craving verbalizations? Well, suppose you believe that you're innately bad. How could you practice? All your intentions would be corrupt. All your perceptions would be corrupt. You'd have to depend on some outside force to come in and save you. And there are teachers who take advantage of that. Telling you that you're basically depraved and you need their help. But the idea that I'm basically good also has its problems. To begin with, it makes you complacent. You think that you can trust whatever urges come up in the mind. Yet, who knows what's going to come up in the mind. As the Buddha said, the mind can change directions very fast. If the mind is basically anything, it's basically changeable. And quickly changeable at that. So, what do we do? I know some people who say they don't want to believe in rebirth, for instance. Because the idea of having to be moral simply because you're afraid of punishment strikes them as childish. But the Buddha never said that that was the meaning of the teaching of rebirth. He taught, basically, that you're responsible. Your actions have impacts that will extend not only into this lifetime, but also into future lifetimes. So, you want to be heedful. When you do something, you want to think about why you're doing it, what the consequences are going to be. That's called being responsible. And that's an attitude that he actually does encourage. So, we take his teachings as working hypotheses, realizing that they make us adults. Responsible adults. Mature adults. Mature in the sense that we tell ourselves, if we're going to get anywhere in this practice, it's going to be up to us. We do have that potential within us. We're not innately bad, but we do have some bad characteristics. We have a whole stable of different selves in here. Some of them can be pretty selfish. Some of them can be pretty nasty. And we have to recognize that fact. But we also have to recognize that we have some good selves in here as well. Selves that are more skillful. They're all based on the desire for happiness, in the sense of what actually works to bring happiness about. As we take on the path, the Buddha wants to give us a higher standard of what it means to work. This is called a pragmatic approach to the truth. When you take on your perceptions and your views with an eye to what they will lead to, what they lead you to do, and what the consequences of those actions will be. Because we're proactive, we come into the world, we learn a few perceptions, and then we start pasting them onto things. And the question is, the perceptions we have that don't come from the objects themselves, but come from within our minds, where do they come from? Being careful about this point is called safeguarding the truth. Then you have to ask yourself, what are those perceptions useful for? They may be useful for all kinds of things. For instance, when there's a pain in the body, part of the mind really wants to know where the pain is so that you can identify what's wrong. Sometimes that's wise. If you don't pay attention to the pain, it could lead to bigger problems down the line, especially if it's something internal. But the question is, when you locate the pain, what are you doing? You're putting together some perceptions, and they may actually make the pain worse. So, when you're sitting here meditating and there's a pain, say, in your legs, in your knees, whatever, ask yourself, this tendency I have to want to locate the pain, pinpoint the pain, is that actually helpful right now? How about not pinpointing it, not placing that label on it? See what that would do. So, you're questioning your perceptions, a perception that might have been useful for one purpose may not necessarily be useful for the path. As you're sitting here, you can see the body as one thing, the pain as something else, your awareness as something else. You can divide things out like this. To begin with, it makes it a lot easier to live with the pain and not feel oppressed by it. It doesn't invade your mind and remain. At the same time, you learn the arbitrary nature of your perceptions. It does get you thinking about the arbitrary nature of your sense of who you are, and of those various tables of selves you have inside. Some you find easier to identify with than others. But you have to ask yourself, for what purpose? In many cases, it's simply out of the force of habit. But how about changing your habits? This is what the Buddha wants you to Change your habits. Change your way of looking at things. We tend to really resist that. For many of us, our attitude is that our view of ourselves, our view of the world, is perfectly adequate. But he wants to point out that it's not. This may be one of the reasons why he focuses on the issue of suffering, stress, pain. Because those are the facts that make you sometimes wonder. This view that you have of things, is it really good enough? Or is it actually part of the problem? When you can start asking questions like that, you can pull yourself out of your old habits, your old ways of looking at things, your old ways of slapping perceptions on things, and get some distance from them. It's when you get distance like this, through this process called metacognition, that you can actually train yourself. If you can see that what you already have is not innately good, or not necessarily innately bad, but the purposes they used to work for are not necessarily what you want anymore, you're raising your standards for what works. This is one of the complaints that's usually leveled against pragmatism, which is the philosophy that says that we hold to our ideas of truth based on what works for us. That's true in a lot of ways. But the criticism is that for a lot of people, their standard for what works is pretty low. What works for making a good profit, what works for getting people to do what you want them to do. And pragmatism, in its pure form, can't really say that any one particular purpose is better than another. This is why the Buddha put so much emphasis on his four noble truths and on the fact that suffering can be ended. It's something that human beings can do. And when that can be done, why settle for anything less? The answer for most people is, well, force of habit. That's the way I'm used to doing things. So even though we talk about how you shouldn't be focusing on the goal all the time, how you should focus instead on the path going to the goal, sometimes you do have to remind yourself, where is this path going? So that you can see clearly the things that come up in the mind, which thoughts, which ideas, which perceptions actually are part of the path and which ones are not. Think of those standards that the Buddha taught to Mahapajapati as to what counts as dharma and what doesn't. The question is always, where does this lead? Does it lead to being fettered or being unfettered? Does it lead to passion or dispassion? Does it lead to modesty or to self-aggrandizement? Does it lead to entanglement or seclusion? Does it lead to contentment or discontent? Does it lead to laziness or aroused effort? The teachings are all judged on where they lead. So, you should look at your senses of self, your ways of perceiving things and ask, where do these lead? After all, facts are not just individual poker chips that just sit there. The facts of our awareness, the facts of our consciousness are all fabricated. And what is fabrication? Fabrication is putting things together for the sake of something. In other words, there's an intentional element, there's an aim, there's a desire underlying everything. This is why the Buddha said, all things are rooted in desire. So, you have to ask yourself which desires are being served by this particular way of looking at things or this particular way of looking at yourself. It's not a question of whether you're basically good or basically bad or your ideas are basically good or basically bad. The question is, what purpose do they serve and can you serve a better purpose? Those are the Buddha's standards. His teachings are fabrications too. But he's thought very carefully about where these fabrications lead. What happens when you adopt them? What happens when you breathe in line with his instructions? What happens when you talk to yourself in line with his instructions? What happens when you use his analogies and similes to look at your life? If you see that the results are good, okay, adopt them. This helps to give you a more fluid sense of who you are and the world you're in with a slightly skeptical attitude toward your perceptions that this has got to be this way and that has to be that way. You can ask yourself, well, for what purpose? This is how we test the truth of our perceptions. Do they serve our purposes and are our purposes good enough? The Buddha's purposes for his own life focused on putting an end to suffering and then teaching that way to others. He has a purpose for your life. But of course, it's up to you to decide whether you want to take it on or not. He doesn't force this on anybody. But he left behind a whole series of teachings that are basically for you to use for the highest purpose possible. Your own freedom from suffering. It's almost as if he had more compassion for you than you have for yourself. But you can change. As I said, you're not innately bad. You're not innately good. You're changeable. And you're free to change in many different directions. Even though a lot of the things you experience are based on past karma, past actions, not everything is. How you put it all together is determined by your fabrications right now, your intentions right now, your desires right now. And you're free to choose those. So this is what we're trying to train. What kind of desires are really useful for you? Just because something comes up in the mind doesn't mean it's part of your innate nature that you've got to follow. You can say yes. You can say no. So it's through the practice that we take our ideas of what's right and what's wrong, what's true and what's false. And we test them for the purpose of putting an end to suffering. That's when you're on the path. That's when you're practicing the Dharma in accordance with the Dharma. As the Buddha said, that's how he wanted people to pay homage to him. It's basically a matter of paying homage to your desire someplace inside your heart and mind for happiness that doesn't let you down. Things as they function. Often you hear that insight is a matter of seeing things as they are. The actual phrase in Pali though means seeing things as they've come to be. In other words, we're looking at processes. We're seeing things as they function because we want to figure out how to take those functions and use them for a good purpose. Putting an end to suffering. Like right now as you're meditating, you're bringing an intention into the present moment. And the intention is to stay with one object. That object is the breath. And it's good to hold in mind a perception about the breath that it's not just air coming in and out of the nose, but it's the sense of energy flow in the body. You'll notice that when you change the perception, you change what you actually experience. This gives you some inkling of the fact that what you're going to experience has a lot to do with what you bring to the experience. After all, that's the message of the four noble truths. It's because we approach our experience with ignorance that we're going to suffer. And part of that ignorance has to do with the processes that follow after sensory contact. Sights coming to the eyes, sounds to the ears, smells to the nose, tastes to the tongue, tactile sensations to the body, ideas appearing in the mind. We're ignorant about how we deal with these things and shape them afterwards. But how we shape them beforehand is an even bigger mystery, which is why that's where a lot of the teachings are aimed. Now, the term things as they have come to be has a special meaning because the Buddha says our problem is that we fall for the craving that leads to becoming. And becoming is your sense of who you are in a particular world of experience. Yet that sense of who you are and that sense of the world have been shaped by a lot of things. If you just take them as a given, you're going to miss an awful lot of what's going on behind the scenes. But if you look at the process as it has come to be, you begin to understand how these things form. Once there's becoming, you have one of two reactions. Either you want the becoming to continue or you want it to be destroyed. You want it destroyed because you find yourself in a particular situation and you don't like it. You don't like your identity, you don't like who you are or you don't like the world around you and there's a destructive impulse there. That's called craving for non-becoming. The Buddha says both of those cravings lead to more becoming because as long as you think of yourself as somebody in a world, even if you want to destroy that world and that somebody, that frame of thinking carries you on. You cling to that particular idea and around that clinging comes another sense of self and another sense of the world. So, as the Buddha says, the way out is to look at these things as they've come to be. In other words, you look at the processes that lead up to becoming before they coalesce into a state of becoming. You trace them back to clinging and craving, feeling, sensory contact, the senses, name and form, in other words, your sense of the body, activities in the mind, consciousness and fabrication. Fabrication here is three things, bodily fabrication, your in and out breath, verbal fabrication, your thoughts about an object, when you direct your thinking to an object and evaluate it, make comments on it, ask questions about it, then there are feelings and perceptions which are mental fabrications. These fabrications are usually based on ignorance, which is why we suffer. But if we bring some knowledge to this process, then we can begin to see things as they've come to be. These are the things we're focused on as we meditate. You watch the breath. You get very conscious about how you talk to yourself about the breath. All too many people, when they hear that the first level of right concentration has directed thought and evaluation, say, how do you do that? The answer is, it's something you're doing already. It's your internal conversation. And these conversations have been going on ever since you learned language. What's special here is simply that, for the sake of concentration, you're going to be very conscious about what you're directing your thoughts to and what kind of evaluation is useful. Like right now, evaluating the breath to make it comfortable. That's a useful use of your powers of evaluation. You're trying to create a good place here, a good place to stay. We're surrounded by the heat right now. And as long as you have that perception of being surrounded by the heat, it gets oppressive. So, switch your perception over to the breath. The breath can permeate the body. Some people even feel a breath energy around the body like a cocoon. Take that as your object. Or you could take off thoughts of goodwill as your meditation object. It's the same sort of thing. You have to breathe calmly as you're developing goodwill. And then, you direct your thoughts to all beings. May all beings be happy. Then you evaluate that wish. Are there any beings out there for whom you feel hypocritical about saying that? Why? What's the problem? In other words, if you want your goodwill to be genuine, you have to think it through. Remind yourself that very few people feel they've been justly punished when they're punished for their misdeeds. So, why do you wish punishment on them? Why do you wish for anybody to suffer? The best thing would be for them to have a change of heart, see the error of their ways, and behave in better ways. Try to wish that for all the beings that you find hard to have goodwill for. Hold in mind that perception that it's good for you and it's good for them. Some people say, I don't think they deserve my goodwill. Well, it's not the question of they're deserving or not deserving. It's a question of your needing your goodwill to ensure that you don't do or say or think anything unskillful around them. If you have ill will for somebody, it's really easy to say, well, I'm justified in speaking in unskillful ways and acting in unskillful ways, because that other person has been so unskillful. If your good behavior depends on their good behavior, you're living in a very dangerous world. You have to find the resources inside that allow you to say, okay, I can have goodwill for these beings. My heart can be large enough to encompass their happiness. As you think that, you realize you've learned something important. You do have these resources inside to do and say and think things that are really skillful. In that case, you don't have to depend on resources outside. In other words, other people's goodness or the goodness of the environment. You're a lot safer if you have this independent source of strength inside. It's the same with contemplating the body. When the Buddha talks about the body, he says it's composed of different properties. The word in Pali is dhatu. Sometimes it's translated as elements, which makes it sounds like the chemical elements, which it's not. It's more the qualities of warmth, coolness, energy, and solidity in the body. As the Buddha notes, many of these properties are really potentials. The heat potential, for example, can get greater or lesser. The same with the coolness of water or the energy of the breath. The theory is that they're provoked. And you notice this as you work with the breath. Change your perception of the breath, and the breath feels different. Change your perception of the solidity of the body, and the body feels different. Think of all the atoms composing the body. We all know from science that atoms are mostly space. The nucleus of each atom, proportionally, is a tiny, tiny thing. So hold that perception in mind. Your body is mainly space, and it doesn't have to be heavy. Or you can think of the coolness of water. That's a good perception to hold your mind right now. Which parts of the body are cooler than the other parts, wherever that might be. Focus your attention there, and then think of that coolness seeping through the rest of the body. If you can hold to the perception, strongly enough, consistently enough, you see that it actually does change your experience of the body. The same principle applies to the qualities of the mind. The Buddha applies the same theory about dhatu, or properties or potentials, to the mind as well. He says you have the potential for a lot of unskillful things in the mind, such as the potential for sensuality. You start thinking about things that are beautiful, things that are attractive, and that stirs up the potential. Or, in the terms they use in Pali, it provokes that potential. And you find the mind overrun with thoughts of sensuality. There are also good potentials. For example, there's the potential for effort. I remember the very first time when Ajahn Phuong said we were going to be sitting all night in meditation. My first thought was, I can't possibly do that. I don't have enough strength to make it all the way through the night. On top of that, he was going to be sitting with a group of laypeople, and he didn't want me there. He wanted me to go off to sit and meditate on my own. So I didn't even have the support of the group. But I started thinking, the Ajahns in the past have sat up all night. It's not that their bones were made out of iron. They probably had the same physical properties that I have in my body. They had the same potentials for weakness, but also potentials for strength. Where are those potentials for strength right now? As I was able to think in those terms, I finally could tap into some unexpected reserves, and I made it all the way through the night. I realized that a lot of the problem had been the limits I had imposed through my own perceptions. So be very careful about the perceptions you bring to your experience, because they can provoke helpful things or unhelpful things in the body and the mind. You realize that we're not here just to see things as they are. We're here to see things as they function, and to try to take advantage of potentials of those functions. Among other things, we have the potential for energy, we have the potential for mindfulness, the potential for all kinds of good qualities. Ajahn Lee once said that human beings have lots of potentials, both physical and mental, that they don't take advantage of. And it's a shame. There's a lot of good we can do as we explore these potentials. So we're not here to be as passive as possible to say that we're seeing things just as they are. Look at the way the Buddha approached awakening. He didn't just sit there passively. He tried different approaches. He focused his mind in different places. He took different things as the themes of his meditation. Then he evaluated the results. How did it work? What was he able to do? And what was not up to his expectations? Then the question always was, what am I doing wrong? He would turn around and check out other possibilities. He experimented, which meant that he had to act and then look at results of his actions, pass judgment on them, and then decide what to do next based on that judgment. It was through this process of committing himself to doing what he thought was the wisest and most skillful thing to do, and then reflecting on the results that he was able to come up with And that's what the four noble truths are, standards for judgment. Which kinds of actions are worth doing? Which ones are not worth doing? Which kinds of actions lead to suffering? Which kinds of actions lead away? By applying that framework, he found that he could learn an awful lot about how things function, and how he could steer their functioning in the direction of the end of suffering. So this is why we meditate. If the problem of suffering were caused by sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations, we'd have to go out and change them. But here, it's actually caused by the activities we bring to sensory contact. And those activities are happening in the mind. This is why the meditation aims inside, does its work inside. Now, in some cases, we start the work outside and move in. In other words, we practice generosity, we observe the precepts, and that trains the mind. Then we use that trained mind to look deeper into the mind. But it's never a question of just sitting there and looking at whatever comes up in the mind. You're trying to get the mind to act in as skillful a way as possible in its thoughts, its words, and its deeds. Then you learn from what you've done in the quest to create even more skill. Which is why the insights that you gain from acting in this way are insights about action, the power of action, the nature of causality, insight into how things function, especially when you can get them to function in the best way possible.