Have You Come Here to Die?

Have You Come Here to Die? 

At one retreat that I gave recently I said, “Try and meditate without having a destination”. The people asked me what I meant by that. They said, “We can’t do that; we’ll fall asleep and the mind will just go all over the place.” I said, “Give it a go and see what happens, but be consistent throughout the whole meditation. For the whole nine days have no destination”.

If people have no destination they feel lost. Why do they feel lost? Because at last they have nothing to do and they can’t get into the ‘doing’ business. They can’t get a handle on something to aim for or to do, so it confounds the ‘doer’, it confounds the ‘controller’, and underneath all of that is the confounding of the sense of ‘self’. This is why the meditation seems so hard.

In the first year of my life at Wat Pah Pong, Ajahn Chah used to ask, “Have you come to Wat Pah Pong to die?” Obviously he didn’t mean physical death; he meant the death of the ‘self’. It was one of those constant refrains that you hear in any monastery. You’ll also notice that with me: I’ve got phases and fashions I go through, little teachings which are repeated over and over again for about three or four months, and then they change and I get into another fashion. I will go back to that teaching after a few years and repeat these old things – they are all still valid – but I put them into a different perspective.

“Have you come here to die?” That’s what it feels like when you start meditating properly. 

There is something inside you that dies or comes close to death. That’s the aspect of the ‘self’ called the ‘doer’, the ‘maker’, the active participant in life that always wants to manage, to work things out, so that you can describe it to yourself or tell your friends. Even the will to know, to understand, is part of this ‘doer’ business. That’s why it gives rise to doubt.

Each one of the hindrances keeps the mind active and stops it from being still enough to see that the five hindrances are all about doing something. Obviously the first hindrance of sensory desire, craving, wanting something, is all about going to some sort of destination, someplace you want to get to. Aversion, the second hindrance is  about not wanting to be here in the first place, and that creates ‘doing’. It’s being averse to this moment, to the wandering mind – being averse to anything. ‘I don’t want to be here, I want to be somewhere else.’ The third hindrance, sloth and torpor, is the result of doing too much. You’ve burnt out the mind. You’re just too tired, and the mind has no energy because it’s all been wasted in doing things. When people start ‘doing’, when they start struggling and striving to get out of sloth and torpor, it’s just more doing and it stirs up the mind. I’m sure you think you’ve got to stir the mind up to become alert again. But you don’t really stir up the mindfulness, instead you stir up more craving. Sure, that brightens up the mind and you don’t have sloth and torpor, but you have restlessness instead.

In a previous talk I said it was a great insight for me to see that I was always oscillating between sloth and torpor and restlessness. I’d be slothful in the morning because Thailand is such a hot country for a Western monk. The food was terrible and there was no nutrition in it. No wonder we had low energy levels; it was a physical problem. At three o’clock in the early morning when we had to get up we hadn’t had enough sleep and we didn’t get enough nutrition. We were hot and sticky, not used to that environment at all. 

Physically, of course we were tired. So, what did I do? I struggled to get through that tiredness: ‘Come on Brahm, get your act together! Be more mindful’. And because I was controlling and managing and forcing, yes, I would break through the sloth and torpor, but then I would be restless thinking about all sorts of things. I was oscillating between the two. When I got restless I’d calm down, stop the thoughts, and then I’d just go into dullness again. Some of you may recognize that oscillation between dullness and restlessness. 

This oscillating between those two hindrances all comes from ‘doing’, from trying to control. 

That’s the reason I’ve had incredible success on meditation retreats when I tell people, “If you feel sleepy go and rest”. They say, “Oh, but I should fight my sloth and torpor. I can’t go and rest. That’s being lazy”. 

I say, “Listen, go and rest”, and because Malaysians and Singaporeans are quite faithful and have a lot of trust in me they do that, and they always get good meditations afterwards. They usually only rest in the first few days and afterwards they have all this energy.  At the last retreat I taught in Ipoh we had some incredible results. One lady, who was already sitting for four, five, or six hours at a time, sat for eight and a half hours on the last day. It was just so easy, she had so much stillness that she didn’t want to move. 

That was because she had stopped ‘doing things’. She had stopped making the mind move. Stillness was her goal, not, seeing nimmittas or holding on to the breath, not attaining jhānas or Enlightenment. She had a meditation that had no destination. The aim is not getting somewhere, it’s being here. Being here and being still.

The last of the hindrances is doubt, always ‘wanting to know’. That is just another ‘doing’. 

Knowledge is almost like control: measuring is how we find out where we are in life. And that ‘doing’, measuring, and ‘wanting to know’, makes the mind move. Be quiet! You’ll know later on. 

Don’t interrupt the lecture; just wait and don’t do anything. This is the path of samādhi.

by AJAHN BRAHM 

http://www.meditation2.net/htdocs/Books4/Simply_this_Moment/19.Perfect-Stillness.pdf

20th December, 2022