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Mindfulness of Breathing (60) The Present is Change

As I talked about yesterday, the fourth tetrad, the fourth and final group of four practices or steps to mindfulness of breathing, involves observing. We settle back and observe our experience. A big part of the ability to observe, what's being implied here, is not to be assertive or to be doing things—interpreting, changing, fixing, or escaping our experience. Instead, it is learning to have the stability, the ease, and the strength of awareness to settle back and just really see clearly what is happening here, to observe clearly the moment. When we don't overlay our ideas and our concepts, what we see is change. We see that things are changing all the time. It doesn't take a lot to appreciate, I think, that even aside from any ways in which we think things are unchanging, moment by moment there's always change. The day changes, the lighting changes slowly over time, maybe sometimes imperceptibly. If you're in a city, the sounds of the city are constantly changing. The sensations of your body are changing through the day. You could watch the changes as we get hungry, we eat, and we don't feel hungry, or we feel uncomfortable. We engage our bodies in different ways, different muscles are used at different times, and therefore different sensations come into play. There's a constantly shifting, changing landscape of where attention focuses and what it takes in.

Even with things that don't necessarily change themselves, what's changing constantly is how we're perceiving it, how we see it. If I look at the wall that's opposite me here, the natural thing when I'm relaxed is to have my eyes not fixate on a spot, but just kind of roam around. Even though the wall is not changing, what's changing is where my eyes land, or the flowing of the perception of the wall. So whether it's something that's constantly shifting like a river flowing and we're watching it, or whether the act of perception itself is constantly shifting, moving, and going around, what we experience is a constantly shifting landscape of change.

It turns out that this is central to the deeper insights of Buddhist meditation. In the fourth step of Anapanasati^[1]—the fourth tetrad—it begins: "One trains observing inconstancy, I breathe in; one trains observing inconstancy, I breathe out." Inconstancy here is one of the words for change. Here is to really begin appreciating and seeing the depth of how things are changing all the time. One of the reasons why Buddhism puts such a strong emphasis on being present, on having present-moment attention, is that that's where change happens. If we're thinking about the past, the past in a certain kind of way is not changing anymore, except perhaps in how we remember it. The future maybe doesn't really exist to change; it's just a projection of our imagination. But the present moment is where we see the change. That's where the river of change flows by. According to the Buddha, everything is inconstant.

This is not necessarily obvious in ordinary consciousness and ordinary ways of being, but it's really central to what happens in deeper meditation. In meditation itself, we're no longer paying attention to the wall on the opposite side of the room or a mountain and saying, "Well, the mountain's not changing," and then having to use our logic to say, "Well, it's slowly being worn down and eroding." In meditation with the eyes closed, sitting here, as we begin to really open up to the present moment experience and really feel it, sense it, experience it, observe it—what we experience in that context of meditation is a constantly shifting flow of phenomenon. It's experienced after developing strong stability.

Part of the paradox is that in meditation, the more still, the more stable the mind is, the more the mind observes change and impermanence. The more unstable the mind is, the more scattered and preoccupied it is, the more unsettled, the more we tend to impute permanence. We tend to get caught up in our ideas, thoughts, and stories, which often carry with them a feeling that things are constant or permanent: "This is the way things are." I certainly have fallen into the delusion of permanence, often unconsciously. If I think about it, of course I don't believe what I'm feeling, but it's the way I'm acting sometimes.

I remember one day many years ago, having a difficult day with my child. My wife and I were hovering over him and trying to manage with this highly spirited child. Then my wife just looked up at me and said, "We're having one of those kinds of days." As soon as she said that, I realized that I was emotionally operating as if "this is it, we're always going to be this way, it's not going to change." Of course, if I had thought about it, I wouldn't have been that way. I would have known better, but the emotional feeling was of permanence: "This is it." As soon as she said, "We're having one of those kinds of days," I relaxed and realized, okay, it's the manifestation of the moment. This is how it is now, and it will change. We'll have a different day tomorrow. This imputing of permanence—even an emotional feeling like "this is it"—interferes with our ability to step back and benefit from the wisdom of change, the wisdom of how things move and are constantly shifting.

This is one of the key insights of the Buddha. He doesn't say it this particular way, but this is my interpretation: things are always changing, and change is not random. Change happens because of the conditions that precede what's happening now. As conditions shift and change, the direction in which things unfold changes accordingly. Generally, we don't have rain without clouds; the clouds are the condition for the changing weather of rain happening.

When I feel cold, perhaps it's harder for me to get concentrated when I meditate. I've meditated sometimes in very cold weather, and the conditions were not there for me to get settled and calm. There was still change happening, and things were being in all kinds of different ways, but it wasn't a condition that supported becoming concentrated. There are times when the weather has been comfortable or I've been bundled up nicely, and my body is not coping with cold and shivering. I have different conditions of being cozy and settled, and it's easier then to allow the changing into a concentrated state of meditation.

So depending on the conditions that are present, change goes in different directions. A key point that is really central to the Buddhist teachings is that things can go either in a helpful direction or an unhelpful direction, in a wholesome, nourishing direction or an unhelpful, unnourishing direction. We're a little bit responsible for putting the conditions in place to support the directionality of change. We can't control it absolutely; we can't make things be a certain way, but we can put the conditions in place to support a tendency in healthy, beneficial directions.

A deep appreciation of change shows us that things are malleable. Things are changeable because they're always changing, and we have a role to play in the direction of that change. If we're floating down a current in a river, we understand that we're being carried by the flowing change of the river, but we also understand which part of the current we're in. We can avoid the eddies, we can avoid the parts of the current that take us up against the shore, and we can gently guide ourselves in that river in a way that keeps us in the central current, keeping us flowing down the river.

Being attuned to change is part of this thirteenth step of the sixteen steps of mindfulness of breathing. It is to observe inconstancy. I'll talk more about that tomorrow, but it's part of this family of concepts that relate to change, things becoming different, and impermanence. So we observe inconstancy, observe change, and find some degree of freedom—the same kind of freedom that we would have if we're floating in the river. There's a freedom in being carried, but then we're also careful about what current we go in, where we're floating, and maybe even which river we're floating in.

Practice for the Next 24 Hours

This might be the theme for this next 24 hours for you: to notice change, and notice how change arises and goes in different ways depending on conditions. Also, notice your role, where you find yourself in your relationship to change. How you relate to that change puts you on different currents. If you're resisting change, fighting change, or attached to a change, that puts you in a different river than one that is with change in an open, relaxed way.

There are different words, different concepts, different ways of talking about the same thing. The Buddha used different words. For now, I'm using the word inconstancy and focusing mostly on change. Tomorrow we'll pick up this idea of inconstancy more directly. The word in Pali^[2] is often translated into English as impermanence, but we'll see tomorrow that inconstancy might be a better translation. Thank you all very much, and I look forward to tomorrow.