090216 the buddha's investment strategy

8/13/2019 090216 the Buddha's Investment Strategy

1/4

The Buddhas Investment Strategy

February 16, 2009

As you focus on the breath and stay with the breath, youre developing good

qualities of mind: mindfulness, alertness. As you apply these qualities to theprocess of breathing, youll see that its a kind of fabrication. Theres a willedand intentional element in there. And because theres an element of will, you canchange it. You can nd ways of calming it down. This way you give rise todiscernment as well, leading to concentration. These two qualities ! discernmentand concentration, as theyre supported by mindfulness and alertness ! bring themind to greater and greater stillness, greater and greater clarity. "o as wereworking with the breath, were not #ust working with the breath. $ere alsogaining insight into the processes in the mind.

This is a very useful and important investment of our time and energy."ometimes you hear it said that when you meditate youre not supposed to have

any sense of gaining or getting anything out of the meditation. %ut that teachingis simply an antidote the impatience we normally bring to the meditation. You doa little bit of meditation and you want to get lots and lots of results right away. "oyouve got to learn how to put that attitude out of your mind. %ut, still, there arereturns, there arebenets that come from meditation. And it is an investment&an investment in something reliable: these qualities of mind. They stay with youwhether the economy goes up, whether the economy goes down. And whetherthe body gets healthier, gets sick, or when it dies, the qualities youve invested inwill stay with the mind.

And so, given the fact we have a limited amount of time, a limited amount ofenergy, we want to make sure that we invest our time and energy in the most

reliable things. 'f you invest in your attachments, youll nd that they give yousome support for a certain amount of time, and then they start changing on you.As the %uddha said, everything fabricated ! which means everything puttogether by causes ! is inconstant. $hen you nd yourself latching on tosomething inconstant, it can give you support only as long as it lasts, and thenits going to change. (ven good qualities of the mind are inconstant, but themore you invest in them, the longer their impact, the longer their ability tosupport you, all the way through the process of aging, all the way through theprocess of illness, all the way through the process of death. These things staythere. And they can help you. The body is something youre going to have to letgo of, and eventually youre going to have to let go of your memories, your

thoughts, everything having to do with this life. At that point, the irrevocablequality of time really pushes itself on you.

'n terms of our day)to)day life, we tend to live in our narratives, our storiesabout this person, and that person, and the relationships we have with them, thethings weve done. The reassuring quality of a narrative is that you can tell itagain and again and again, and it seems to put this constant *ow of time at bayfor a while. %ut as things close down with the body, those narratives dontprovide any help. 'n fact, they can make things even worse. The things youregoing to miss, the things youre going to regret having done, will come pressing


2/4

in on you. And you have to let go. 'f you havent had any practice in letting go,its going to be hard.

"o this is an important skill to invest in: learning how to let go. The %uddhatalks about di+erent forms of wealth in the mind that you can invest in ! in otherwords, qualities you can develop that can see you through ! and the ability to letgo is an important one.

iscernment is another. The %uddha had a very pragmatic approach to truth.As we talk about the truth of our statements, the things that we say, to whate-tent can you encompass the truth of the e-perience in words /oets strugglewith this all the time, and are constantly admitting that words are poor when itcomes to capturing the actual e-perience of something. /ictures are a poorrendition of e-perience. As they say, a pictures worth a thousand words, but itcan lie much more than a thousand words, too. $hats really real in life are theprocesses happening right here, right now, the way we create words, the way weuse words, the way we use ideas, and then the impact they have in terms ofcausing stress and su+ering, or alleviating stress and su+ering: Thats a truth,thats a reality, much truer than the words themselves.

"o you want to focus on really getting in touch with that reality. This doesntmean that words are totally false. They convey some truth, and theyre useful astools. The impact they have on the mind is real. You look at the story of the%uddhas Awakening. They say he had three knowledges in the course of thatnight. The rst was looking back on his past lifetimes. You think you havenarratives to deal with in your life: 0e suddenly remembered eons and eons ofnarratives&where he had been, what he had been, his name, his appearance, thefood he ate, the pleasure and pains that hed e-perienced in that life, and thenhow he died. And then he moved on to another life, then another life.

%ut that knowledge wasnt his Awakening. "o he went on to the secondknowledge, which was knowledge of beings dying and being reborn all over the

cosmos. 'n other words, moving from his own personal narrative, he went to amore general look at the cosmos as a whole, seeing that he wasnt the only onewho was going through this process of repeated birth and death. 1any, manybeings all the way from beings in hell, beings up to the various levels of heaven,even %rahmas, in states of innite space, innite consciousness, nothingness,neither perception nor non)perception: They are all dying and being reborn, andmoving around from level to level. "eeing all these movements, he was able tosee that there was a general principle to them all, by looking at the cosmos as awhole. The general principle was that people su+ered pleasure and pain becauseof their actions ! their intentions ! which in turn were determined by their views.'f their views were wrong ! in other words, if they felt that actions didnt have

any impact, that it didnt really matter what you did, what you said, what youthought ! they were going to su+er, because they were going to act on that beliefand su+er from their lack of skill. 'f they believed that their actions did have animpact, were important, and it was important that you looked at your intentions,at your actions, and at their results, theyd e-perience pleasure.

(ven seeing that, though, still didnt put an end to his own su+ering. %ut it didgive him some clues. 2iews and intentions are important. And so in terms of thethird knowledge that night, he started looking at his views, looking at hisintentions, right in the present moment, seeing them as activities in the mind:


3/4

These intentions, based on a misunderstanding of what su+ering is, where itcomes from, how it can be ended, lead to more su+ering. The views that dounderstand where su+ering comes from, lead you to make the intention of thepath, to put an end to that su+ering, based on correct understanding of howyouve got to look at the processes here in the present moment, particularlyseeing how craving arises and how the mind *ows with the craving, from

moment to moment. As the %uddha later said, the way craving goes frommoment to moment in this lifetime is the same process thats going to *ow fromthe last moment of this life to the rst moment of the ne-t.

"o youve got your laboratory right here. $ere not concerned with what youare3 the concern is with what you do. And you can see that. $hat you are is anabstraction, but what you can do is something you can watch right here, rightnow. Thats something you can always watch if you have the intention and theunderstanding that helps you reali4e that this is something important to look at.1ost of the time, though, we tend to look at other things. $e get wound up in allour other narratives, all our other views, which tend to de*ect our intention fromthe present moment. The mind is like a politician: The politician is doing his dirty

work, but he keeps diverting our attention, pointing out that 5Those other peopleare horrible3 look at those horrible things other people are doing.6 %ut if youkeep looking right here, right here, right here, staying with the breath, thenbecause the breath is the closest thing to the mind, you begin to see themovements of the mind. You see how they cause su+ering, and how they can putan end to su+ering. That understanding is real. That process is something youreally see and it really happens. Thats something you know for sure.

$illiam 7ames, the philosopher, talks about whats called a pragmaticapproach to truth. You reali4e that the truth of a statement can only beappro-imate: $ords can never give a totally comprehensive account of reality.%ut watching the mind in the process of creating a statement, watching it in the

process of creating any of its views about reality, you see that it really does havean impact. "o the statement ! even though it may only be an appro-imate truth !does lead to a certain type of action, and the action leads to certain type ofresult, which you can e-perience directly. The e-perience of that process is atruth of a di+erent order.

"o its important that you learn how to develop the ideas that will lead you toact in ways that put an end to su+ering. 'f you encounter any idea that leads tomore su+ering, more ignorance, more craving, you dont have to hold onto it. Youcan let it go.

"o as were sitting here, trying to stay focused on the breath and noticingwhen the mind wanders o+: That ability to drop a thought mid)sentence, drop a

thought even when its all loose ends, is an important skill. You catch yourself inthe middle of creating a little reality there but then you can reestablish yourframe of reference in the present moment. You get more and more skillful atletting go, able to catch yourself in these various processes more and morequickly, and you gain a deeper understanding of why you go for these things. Allof these skills are going to stand you in good stead. Theyre good skills to investin.

"o you need to make the time&the time isnt going to happen on its own, youknow&you have to make the time to practice. 8reate the time to practice. 9pen


4/4

that space in your life, so you can invest that time in the skills that are reallygoing to be helpful all the way through. %ecause su+ering is real ! but the end ofsu+ering is also real. Thats why the time spent investing in understanding thesethings, mastering the skills for putting an end to su+ering, is time well spent. Yousu+er less. The people around you su+er less as well. As you go through theprocess of aging, illness, and death, if you can manage your mind, the other

problems that come up are going to be minor."o this is the %uddhas investment strategy ! invest in good qualities of themind, develop a mind that you can trust not to go *ailing around when things getdi+icult. Thats the wisest investment of all.

090216 the buddha's investment strategy

Documents