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Eightfold Path: Right Effort (2 of 3)

So this morning I want to talk a little more about what's known as the Four Right Efforts, or the Four Right Endeavors. People would like to know, "What should I do with my life? What endeavor, what purpose should I live my life?" It's one of the great questions. And the Buddha offers in the Four Right Efforts a response to that question. It's not a response that gives something specific, but rather gives practices, overarching practices with which to endeavor or approach everything we do.

And that is to prevent what is unskillful. I have to use really poor English, you know that, but just to make it really simple, it is to prevent what's bad, abandon the bad that has arisen, evoke what's good, and maintain what's good. So again, of course, good and bad are a little bit problematic ideas, but it makes it very simple to say it that way.

To put a little bit more Buddhist flesh on it, it's to prevent the arising of active actions, activities of mind, body, and speech which cause harm and are unskillful. So to prevent them from occurring, and if they do occur, if we are doing things which are harmful and unskillful, then to let go of them. And then to cultivate, develop, and evoke things which are beneficial, skillful, and wholesome. And once they've been evoked, maintain them and keep them going.

So in this way we become the caretakers of our own heart, caretakers of our inner life. And that's really the purpose of this Buddhist practice. When we get to this sixth step of the Eightfold Path, we're talking now about how to be a caretaker for our inner life.

We have a beautiful, wonderful potential within us, and every single one of us has it. There is no doubt that we have beauty inside. But we don't often take time to recognize it, to allow it, to evoke it. And sometimes because we don't take time, or we're in a hurry, we're reactive, we're caught up in greed, hatred, and delusion, all too easily unskillful things arise from us. Sometimes those are maintained, and they become habits. And we're trying to develop different habits in the Dharma, different default settings from which to live our lives.

Mindfulness and Honest Assessment

So these Four Right Efforts are kind of the overarching way to care for this heart, for this inner well-being. And so it takes mindfulness, it takes some awareness to be able to track what's going on in our minds, what's going on within, and to be able to recognize in a skillful way when we are unskillful. And that is really one of the important arts of all this: to be able to recognize things which we do which are not salutary^[1], that we don't feel good about necessarily, and maybe are unfortunate, that are unskillful. And how in mindfulness to be aware of that skillfully, so we don't cause more harm.

And it's a little bit of a delight to do this when you get the hang of it, kind of a bittersweet delight, maybe. To be able to feel something about ourselves which is off, something which we feel is a foible, or something that's not quite right, or we've caused harm maybe to ourselves or others, and something about ourselves we don't feel good about—"this doesn't seem right"—but to be aware of it with kindness, with openness, with non-reactivity. To make space for it, to hold it graciously. To say, "So that's how it is."

When I was a newer student and was around the most senior, kind of mature Buddhist practitioners that I met in my life, one of the things that inspired me a lot about them was that if they talked about themselves, sometimes they would be very honest about an inner life that was difficult for them. But what was inspiring was not that they talked about it, but how utterly undefended, relaxed, open, and unjudgmental they were about their honesty. About saying, "This is what I'm working with. This is what's going on for me." That sometimes they get angry and they were working with the anger and trying to not be angry, but it wasn't a problem for them. They weren't judging themselves for it. They were just kind of like, "Oh, there's anger, and I'm working with it."

So part of Buddhist practice is, in fact, an honest assessment of ourselves. Buddhism should not be a kind of recourse to only see ourselves as wonderful, special, and all good, and to become partial. To become whole, we want to see all of what we are: the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful. And that's where we can find our freedom. That's the movement. That's what's onward-leading, a very important Buddhist word. Onward-leading to freedom and greater goodness.

And we start by almost training ourselves to see. So we want to learn to see, "Oh, that wasn't so good." When I was in the monastery, I remember that a big part of my training then was to look at my anger. And I would sit in meditation many, many hours with anger and just sit there and look at it. And certainly in the beginning I was reactive to it, and discouraged by it, and worse things were happening about my self-worth. But over time I learned just to sit with it. With sadness and guilt and anger and fear and all these things, and just hold it broadly and openly, and not make it a problem. To start feeling whole with these things.

Preventing Unskillful States

So to see what's going on inside of us and know that we have a tendency to maybe do things which are unkind, to do things that are unskillful, maybe even harmful. And because of that honesty, to then do two things.

The first of the two right efforts is to find a way to prevent these things from arising. And very simply, it could be something like, if you know that you have a problem with candy—you tend to eat a lot of candy, and it's not healthy for you, and you feel lousy afterwards—then perhaps don't bring candy home. Or don't go down the supermarket aisle where the candy is. That kind of avoiding going to where you're tempted is a way of preventing something unwholesome from arising. And that sometimes is a very wise thing to do.

It can also be wise, if you're going someplace that you know is going to be challenging—someone really makes you angry or makes you afraid or something—to prepare before you go. You know that if you're tired, hungry, and stressed out, it tends to be very hard when you go there, and then your reactivity arises. So you prepare yourself for it. You meditate, you eat well, you rest well, maybe you go for a walk beforehand, so you arrive in a relatively good space. So you're creating the conditions so you're less likely to have these unskillful states arise.

In the depth of Buddhist practice, what we're looking for eventually is a kind of equanimity and freedom where we see how things are arising and passing. We see things coming and going, the constant flow of change. And in becoming sensitive to the flow of change and inconstancy of life, being relaxed, open, and present, then there's a kind of overview or space where we can see even things which are difficult arise, and we don't pick them up. We just see it as part of the river of life, part of the flow of change. We just see how it comes and goes.

Someone says something to us that's unkind, and there's enough presence of mind to just see it as something that arises and comes and goes. And there's nothing inside the mind that wants to pick it up, nothing encounters it, it doesn't strike against anything in the mind. Those words just go right through. And so to have a presence of mind with equanimity and clarity of mindfulness is another way of preventing these unwholesome, unskillful states from arising.

Letting Go and Restraint

But when they do arise, then the practice is to let go of them. And many people say letting go is hard. Some people don't understand how to let go. The Buddha said that it's actually easier to let go than it is to prevent. There's something about preventing which is maybe harder, because it takes a stronger mind, a stronger kind of being grounded in an open, whole mindfulness to really be free so these things don't arise. But letting go is often what we have to do, and there are two kinds of things related to letting go.

One is, if you're holding on tight to something, to release the grip. And what's so nice about the heartstrings is that if we release the grip on the strings, then the strings will start vibrating again, making nice music. So if we're preoccupied with certain thoughts and resentments about someone, you can sometimes feel physically where that holding and tightening is: in the forehead, in the temples, in the jaws, in the chest, or somewhere. And to really feel the physicality of contracting around some idea or some feeling is a real aid to helping to let go. Because then if we relax the body, then sometimes we can relax the grip we have on the ideas and the thoughts we have.

So to learn to let go is a skill that we develop. And we start in small ways and slowly start building and building, until we can let go of the big, difficult things. It might be a small thing, like you're driving a car and you come up against a red light, and you feel impatient. It doesn't really help the light to turn green faster to be impatient, so maybe there you can let go of the impatience, relax, open, and just be present in a calm way until the light changes. And maybe we can practice in small places like that what letting go is.

And then we grow. The other aspect of abandoning unskillful states is what's called restraint. It's not a very popular idea, I think, in the United States, but it was very popular traditionally in Buddhism, in the teachings of the Buddha, and down through the centuries. And that is, granted, it's understood that all kinds of unwholesome, maybe even harmful impulses will arise, and there's no need to feel bad about that. But we can choose not to give into it, if we don't pick it up and act on them. And the ability to let these things be there and not pick them up, act on them, or be pushed into speaking or doing because of them—that's called restraint. And that's considered to be a tremendous safeguard, a protection for ourselves and the world around us. Sometimes it's a lot less painful to restrain than it is to try to clean up afterwards when we've said something that was unkind.

Summary

So, in summary, the first two of these Four Right Efforts are the effort to prevent unskillful or unwholesome states from arising, and if they do arise, to learn to let go of them. To do this, we have to learn to recognize that they're there. We have to learn to recognize what are not necessarily our best qualities inside, and to do it with lots of generosity, lots of openness, lots of kindness, lots of willingness. Kind of, "Yes, okay, this too is here," without needing to define ourselves by it or feel bad about ourselves for it. In fact, it's actually a very good personal quality to have this self-honesty: "Oh, it's like this."

And if you want a little extra help to make it easier, then I don't know if this is helpful or easy to do, but it's kind of nice to be amused by yourself. Be amused by all the shenanigans that go on inside, kind of like, "Wow, that's quite something happening in there." And that might break some of the trance, some of the strong identification we have around some of these negative states that can happen, whether it's through kindness or amusement.

I hope that you value the idea of an honest assessment of where we are, and learning wisely and happily to avoid, to prevent, and to let go. And over time, to learn that this is one of the great arts of a wise life. It's an art that allows us to come into wholeness, because the unskillful states tend to be states that come out of our being divided from ourselves, or disconnected in some way from ourselves. So I hope that you move in the direction of greater wholeness and goodness, and that you find it valuable to practice the first two Right Efforts.

Thank you.