Untangling the Present

　　The Role of Appropriate Attention

　　If the ways of the mind were simple, its problems would be simple and easy to solve. The Buddha, in showing how to put an end to its problems, could have kept his instructions simple and short—a single blanket approach to whatever happens in the present, a noble one‐fold path: just mindfulness, just concentration, or just non‐reactivity. Or he might not have bothered to teach much at all, knowing that people could easily solve their problems on their own. “Trust,” he might have said, “your innate nature, your innate understanding,” and left it at that. But that”s not how the mind works, and that”s not how he taught.

　　Even just a few minutes spent observing the ways of the mind can show how complex and convoluted they are. And this means that its problems are complex as well. In particular, the problem of suffering: As the Buddha noted, the causes of suffering are knotted and tangled like a bird”s nest, like the thread in a tangled skein. As anyone who has solved a complex problem knows, the trick to finding its solution lies in how you frame the issue: identifying the problem and sorting out the pattern of factors related to it. Seeing the pattern, you can decide which factors to focus on as crucial to its solution, and which ones you have to ignore so as not to get distracted and led down blind alleys. Framing the issue also means deciding how to approach each of the crucial factors so that instead of maintaining or exacerbating the problem, they aid with its solution. What this boils down to is, when faced with a problem, knowing which questions are helpful to ask about it, and which questions aren”t.

　　To continue the Buddha”s analogy, the ability to solve complex problems is like knowing how to untangle a tangled knot. You need a basic understanding of how tangles work so that you can learn through experience—testing and observing—which strands in the tangle should be pulled in which way, and which strands should be left alone.

　　If, for example, you”re a doctor in an emergency room faced with a patient complaining of chest pains, you have many quick decisions to make. You have to decide which tests to conduct, which questions to ask the patient, and which physical symptoms to look for, before you can diagnose the pains as a sign of indigestion, an incipient heart attack, or something else entirely. You also have to decide which questions not to ask, so as not to get waylaid by extraneous information. If you focus on the wrong symptoms, the patient might die—or might spend a needless night in the intensive care unit, depriving a patient with a genuine heart attack of a bed. Once you”ve made your diagnosis, you have to decide which course of treatment to follow and how to keep tabs on that treatment to see if it”s really working. If you frame the symptoms in the wrong light, you can do more harm than good. If you frame them in the right light, you can save lives.

　　The same principle applies in solving the problem of suffering, which is why the Buddha gave prime importance to the ability to frame the issue of suffering in the proper way. He called this ability yoniso manasikara—appropriate attention—and taught that no other inner quality was more helpful for untangling suffering and gaining release.

　　In giving his most detailed explanation of appropriate attention, he starts with examples of inappropriate attention, which center on questions of identity and existence: “Do I exist

　　” “Do I not

　　” “What am I

　　” “Did I exist in the past

　　” “Will I exist in the future

　　” These questions are inappropriate because they lead to “a wilderness of views, a thicket of views” such as “I have a self,” or “I have no self,” all of which lead to entanglement, and none to the end of suffering…

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