Thinking analytically concerning your practice

“…This is what you will have to do. First you must develop the four iddhiphāda: chanda, viriya, citta, vimaṁsā. Chanda means having to like what you do. If you like to meditate, then you will have the heart/ the mind to put in the time and effort which is viriya. And you will have devotion (citta); you will devote all your time to this practice and you will think analytically to figure out what is making you move forward, and what is holding you back (vimaṁsā).

For example, right now you can only meditate for a little while, maybe once a week, or if you are more serious, you might meditate every day. But since you still have to go to work, you might only be able to meditate once in the morning before you go to work, and once in the evening when you come home before you go to bed.

Sometimes you might not feel like doing it because you might feel tired from working, so instead of meditating, you might want to watch a movie just for relaxation. You find that working is a hindrance to your progress because you have little time to meditate. If you want more time, you might have to work fewer hours. So you might have to accept less income.

In order to manage your life with less income, you might have to spend less; you might have to use less money. So you will have to think, what should I do? You might have to give up a certain kind of activity that requires you to spend money. In this way you can have the time to meditate, and you don’t have to work too hard or spend too much time working.

This is what we call vimaṁsā, thinking analytically concerning your practice: what is moving you forward, what is pulling you back. So you must eliminate what is pulling you back and support what is pushing you forward. This is the thing that you have to do. You will find that developing mindfulness continually is the thing that pushes you forward in your meditation practice.

So you want to have more time for developing your mindfulness. And to be successful in developing your mindfulness, you need to be alone and free from other kinds of activity, like working. This is something that you have to analyse so that you can go forward. If you just practice blindly, not knowing what is helping you or what is impeding you, then you will not succeed in your meditation practice.

So these are the four steps to success, the four iddhiphāda: chanda, viriya, citta, vimaṁsā. Once you have these, you will be able to develop mindfulness. And when you have mindfulness, when you sit in meditation, your mind will be focused on one object, and your mind will fall into calm. Your mind will become one and become the knower. Your thinking will stop and you will find peace and happiness from that state of mind.

You’ll find that you will want to do this as much as you can until you become proficient, until you can sit and become peaceful and calm easily and quickly. Once you have this, then the next step is to contemplate the three characteristics of things when you are not sitting in meditation, when you withdraw from that peaceful state, and when you start thinking.

Don’t let your mind think about making more money, gaining more happiness from people around you or from things that you buy because they are all illusions of happiness. They last very briefly and leave you empty-handed while wanting to have more. And no matter how many things you have or how many times you have them, you will still feel the same afterwards.

So you must not let the mind think about those things. Instead you should think that they are impermanent. They only create more stress for you because you will have more desire for them. And when you have desire, you cannot remain peaceful and calm.

So think of what you want to have and do as anicca, dukkhaṁ, and anattā. Anicca means they are temporary. Dukkhaṁ means they don’t give you happiness; they give you stress, worry, anxiety and fear. Anattā means you cannot stop them, you cannot manage them all the time, you cannot control them all the time, and you cannot tell them to give you only happiness because they will leave you sooner or later.

So this is what you do after you have developed samatha or jhāna and become proficient with this practice. And when you come out of jhāna, you can develop insight by contemplating the three characteristics of everything that you possess. In this way you will not cling to them, depend on them, or rely on them for making you happy. You discover that you can be happy with your jhāna, and that’s all you need—peace of mind and calm which you can maintain using mindfulness.

Once the mind has stopped clinging to everything or having any desire for anything, your mind will no longer have any stress. It stops because you have eliminated the cause of your stress or suffering: your desire…”

By Ajaan Suchart Abhijāto