Maintaining the Observer

　　 By

　　Thanissaro Bhikkhu

　　May 2003

　　In Thai they often say there are two steps to getting started in the meditation. One is to get your body into position: right leg on top of the left leg or left on top of the right depending on what you find more comfortable, your back straight, facing forward, your eyes closed, your hands in your lap. The next step is to get your mind in position. And that”s more difficult because the mind doesn”t usually want to stay in any one particular position. It”s always running around here, running around there, always quick like a cat to jump at anything that comes along. Ajaan Mun once talked about ”the mind”s song”. There are rhythms that go through the body, rhythms that seem to go through our awareness. And we start singing along with them without really realizing it, and then we”re off someplace else. When we put the mind in position we stop singing along. We just watch what”s going on. So you bring it to the breath. It”s a good place to get out of your head and down into the body. Give yourself a good comfortable place to stay and be aware of the breath coming in, aware of the breath going out. Notice how the breathing feels in different parts of the body, because the breathing is a whole-body process. If it”s not a whole-body process, it”s a sign that there”s a blockage someplace that you”ve got to work with.

　　But first get a good rhythm going in any one spot where it”s easy to watch the breath. It might be at the nose, the chest, the abdomen, the neck, the middle of the head - any place where all the different pressures of the breath coming in and going out and the pressures of your blood circulation feel right together. Focus there and allow the breath to find whatever rhythm feels good right there. If the mind wanders off, bring it right back. If it wanders off again, bring it back again. You”re trying to put it in position. That means finding a good, comfortable posture for the mind, and then trying to stay there. It”s the staying that makes all the difference. If you just get into position and then quickly jump away, you don”t get the benefits of being in position.

　　And there are lots of benefits. One, you”re giving the mind a place to rest, so that it can recover its strength from all that running around. And, secondly, when it”s in position it can watch, because if you ever want to watch something carefully you have to be very still. If you”re running around all the time everything is a blur. You snatch a little sight of something here, snatch a sight of something there, but you don”t see anything continuously-- which means you don”t really understand it.

　　So we”re trying to put the mind in a position where it can stay and watch. This position of the observer is a very important part of the meditation--the observer that doesn”t go singing along with the different rhythms or thoughts that come through the mind, but watches them as events. When you”re watching things as events, you can decide which things are worth following through with and which ones are not. Of course, you sometimes find yourself slipping off into your old habits of singing along with the mind, but you can catch yourself, stop, and come back to the breath, come back to this position of the observer.

　　Get more and more used to being here. This is where the mind can have a sense of being at home, where it can rest, and where it can watch the movements of the mind. Where are they running to

　　 Are they going to a place you want to go

　　 If not, then you just drop them, and whatever reality they seemed to have just will dissolve away. It”s because you give them a reality that they became solid and imposing and can have power over you. But if you learn simply to watch them as events, then you can gain th…

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