With Each and Every Breath
A Guide to Meditation
by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

INSIGHT

As I noted in the Introduction, the basic strategy of the practice is to observe your actions—along with their motivations and results—and then to question them: Do they lead to suffering? If so, are they necessary? If not, how can you act in other ways that don’t lead to suffering? If they don’t lead to suffering, how can you master them as skills? This strategy applies not only to your words and deeds, but also to the acts of the mind: its thoughts and emotions.

And as I noted in the last section, when you develop jhana, you use this strategy of observing and questioning to abandon any distracting thoughts and to develop the factors of jhana in their place. It’s through this process that the practice of jhana develops your discernment and insight. When your jhana becomes more stable, you can develop that insight further by looking for a course of action that causes even less stress than jhana. Here again, the important point is to view the factors of jhana as activities and to ask the right questions about them.

Fabrication. The activities here are the three types of fabrications by which the mind shapes experience: bodily, verbal, and mental. If you compare the descriptions of jhana and breath meditation with the descriptions of fabrication in the Introduction, you’ll notice that jhana makes use of all three. The breath is bodily fabrication; the directed thought and evaluation of the first jhana are verbal fabrications; the perceptions that keep the mind in the various jhanas and formless attainments are mental fabrications, as are the feelings of pleasure and equanimity that come from staying in those states of concentration.

This is why jhana is so useful in giving rise to the insight that totally ends the unnecessary stress that the mind creates through its own fabrications. Jhana gives you a still vantage point for watching those fabrications in action.

You can do this in any of three ways:

while you’re in a particular stage of jhana;
when you move from one stage to another; or
when you come out of concentration and observe what fabrications the mind takes up as it engages with the world outside.
In any of these situations, you can observe that (1) fabrications are actually actions, arising and passing away; (2) they’re creating stress; (3) what they’re doing is unnecessary; and (4) the pleasure they give isn’t worth the stress they entail. Only when you see all four of these aspects can insight lead to release from unnecessary suffering and stress. And that’s when you see that the only stress weighing down the mind was the unnecessary sort. Once that stress is gone, nothing at all can weigh the mind down. It’s free.

To watch any of the jhanas as forms of mental action requires not seeing them as metaphysical principles—say, as a Ground of Being, a True Self, Cosmic Oneness, Primordial Emptiness, Encounter with God, or any other grand-sounding abstraction. The metaphysical trap is an easy one to fall into, especially if you’ve primed yourself to think in those terms. If, for instance, you’ve been thinking in metaphysical terms and then attain the oneness of the second jhana, it’s easy to assume that you’ve touched Cosmic Oneness or Interconnection. If you attain the sense of infinite knowing of the dimension of the infinitude of consciousness, it’s easy to assume that you’ve gained access to a level of awareness underlying all reality. You might interpret these experiences as contact with some sort of ground from which all things come and to which they all return. Or you might decide that the strengthened sense of “observer” in that state of mind is your True
Self. If you fall for any of these interpretations, though, you lose sight of the way in which your actions fashioned the experience to begin with. That way you miss the subtle levels of stress still present in those experiences. The exalted interpretations you assign to them blind you to the fabrications they still contain.

To get around this pitfall, you simply stick with the line of questioning introduced at the end of the last section: Look for any rise or fall in the level of stress within that experience. Then look for the activity of the mind that accompanies that rise and fall. When you see the activity in action, drop it.

This is called contemplating inconstancy and the stress in inconstancy. When you see the stress, ask yourself if anything inconstant and stressful is worth claiming as you or yours. When you realize that the answer is No, this is called contemplating not-self. You’re not taking a stance on whether or not there is a self. You’re simply asking whether you want to identify with the parts of the committee creating the stress.

Developing disenchantment. The purpose of these contemplations is to induce a sense of disenchantment and dispassion for the actions of fabrication. Because passion is what drives all three kinds of fabrication, dispassion ends any desire to keep engaging in them. When you don’t engage in them, they stop. The result is a total letting go.

The sense of disenchantment—which in most cases reaches maturity only after you’ve approached these contemplations from many angles—is the crucial turning point in this process. The Pali term for disenchantment, nibbida, corresponds to the feeling you have when you’ve eaten enough of a particular food and don’t want any more of it. This is not aversion. It’s simply a sense that what you used to enjoy eating no longer holds any interest for you. You’ve had enough.

You need to develop this sense of disenchantment toward the mind’s fabrications because they all follow the same pattern we’ve mentioned many times: They’re a form of eating. The food here may be either physical or mental, but the dynamic of feeding in every case is the same. You’re trying to fill a lack, to allay a hunger. Only when you can counteract the hunger with a sense of enough can you reach disenchantment. Only with disenchantment can you stop feeding and find the dimension where there’s no need to feed.

Insight into becoming. Think back on the image of the mind’s committee. Each committee member corresponds to a different desire, a different sense of who you are based around that desire, and a different sense of the world in which you can search for what will fulfill that desire. Your sense of who you are here is composed of two things: the self that will experience the happiness of fulfilling that desire, and the self that has the powers to bring that desire to fulfillment. The first self is the self as consumer; the second, the self as producer. The self as consumer is what needs to be fed; the self as producer is what finds and fixes the food; and the world of experience connected to the desire is the area of experience where you look for food.

As I noted in the Introduction, each individual sense of self in a particular world of experience is described by the term becoming. Becoming is a type of being—the sense of what you are and what exists around you—based on doing. It’s not static being. It’s being in action. And as you’ve been meditating, you’ve had plenty of opportunity to see how the primary action underlying this being is a kind of feeding. Each sense of who you are has to be nourished, to take something from the world, in order to survive.

You notice this first with the distracting thoughts that get in the way of your concentration: The mind goes out to nibble on thoughts of lust, to gobble down thoughts of anger, to sip pleasant memories from the past, to chew on past regrets, or to wolf down worries about the future.

The basic strategy of concentration is first to see that you don’t have to identify with these different senses of who you are. That’s why we use the image of the committee: to help you realize that you won’t be starved of pleasure if you drop a few of these becomings. You’ve got better ones with which to feed. But then to keep yourself from sneaking out to chew on your old junk food, you have to nourish the more skillful members of the committee, the ones who are learning to work together to develop and maintain your concentration. This is one of the roles of the rapture, pleasure, and refined equanimity in concentration: to nourish the skillful members of your committee. When you practice concentration, you’re feeding them good, nourishing food.

As you get less and less inclined to feed in your old ways—as your taste in inner food grows more refined—you gradually come to a point where you can see that even the concentration is a kind of becoming. In other words, in jhana you identify with the skillful members of the committee who can provide the food of concentration (the self as producer), as well as with the meditator feeding off the pleasure and rapture provided by the meditation (the self as consumer). The object of meditation—either the form of the body or the dimensions of formlessness—is the world from which you feed.

As long as you hold to these identities and these worlds as having solid unity, it’s hard to go beyond them. It’s hard to let go of them. This is why the Buddha’s strategy is to sidestep this sense of solid unity by regarding the building blocks of identity as actions, for actions are easier to let go of than a solid sense of who you are.

The five aggregates. Because these actions are primarily related to feeding, the Buddha’s approach in developing insight is to take the types of fabrication involved in creating every becoming and gather them under a list of five activities that are basic to feeding on every level.

These activities are called khandhas. This is a Pali word that means “heap” or “mass.” The standard English translation, though, is “aggregate.” This translation apparently comes from a distinction popular in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe, between conglomerates of things that work together in an organic unity—called “systems”—and conglomerates that are just random collections of things, called “aggregates.” The purpose of translating khandha as “aggregate” was to convey the useful point that even though we tend to regard our sense of identity as having organic unity, it’s actually just a random collection of activities.

The five activities that surround eating on the most basic level are these:

A sense of form: both the form of the body that needs to be nourished (and that will be used to look for food), as well as the physical objects that will be used as food. When feeding takes place in the imagination, “form” applies to whatever form you assume for yourself in the imagination, and to whatever imaginary forms you take pleasure from.
Feeling: the painful feeling of hunger or lack that drives you to look for food; the pleasant feeling of satisfaction that comes when you’ve found something to eat; and the added pleasure when you actually eat it.
Perception: the ability to identify the type of hunger you feel, and to identify which of the things in your world of experience will satisfy that hunger. Perception also plays a central role in identifying what is and isn’t food. This is the way we first learn to exercise our perceptions as children. Our first reaction on encountering something is to put it into our mouth to see if it’s edible. If it is, we label it with the perception of “food.” If it’s not, we label it as “not food.”
Fabrication in this context refers primarily to verbal fabrications. These relate to feeding in the way we have to think about and evaluate strategies for finding food, for taking possession of it when we find it, and for fixing it if it’s not edible in its raw state. For example, if you want to enjoy a banana, you have to figure out how to remove the peel. If your first attempt doesn’t work, you have to evaluate why it didn’t and to figure out new strategies until you find one that works.
Consciousness: the act of being aware of all these activities.
These five activities are so basic to the way we engage with the world in order to feed that they form the raw material from which we create our various senses of self.

Now, in the practice of developing jhana based on the breath, they’re also the raw material from which we’ve learned to create states of concentration. “Form” corresponds to the breath. “Feeling” corresponds to the feelings of pleasure and equanimity derived from focusing on the breath. “Perception” corresponds to the ways we label the breath, the formless dimensions, and the pleasures we derive from staying focused on these themes. “Fabrication” corresponds to the thoughts and evaluations that compose the first jhana, and also the thoughts and evaluations by which we ask questions about all the various stages in our concentration. “Consciousness” is the act of being aware of all these activities.

This is why concentration is such a good laboratory for examining the mind’s habits for creating suffering. It contains all the elements that go into the identities we build around the act of feeding. And it contains them in a controlled context—a clear and stable state of becoming—where you can watch those elements in action and see them clearly for what they are.

When the mind is in a solid enough position to look at even the refined pleasures of concentration in terms of these activities, there’s no need to focus on all five of them. Simply focus on any one that seems easiest for you to observe in action. If you’re not sure of where to start, try starting with perception, because perception is most central to your ability to stay focused in concentration, and it’s the aggregate you’re going to need to work hardest to change. As long as the perception, “worth the effort,” stays fixed on the act of feeding on jhana, disenchantment will not be total. Only when the perception, “not worth the effort,” gets your full approval will disenchantment have a chance.

Still, this is a matter of personal temperament. If another aggregate seems easier to focus on, by all means start there, for once the perception of “not worth the effort” gets firmly established with regard to that aggregate, it will spread to encompass all the other aggregates because all five of them are so intimately connected.

When examining the activities that create states of concentration, you have to remember to ask the right questions about them. If you approach the concentration in hopes that it will answer such questions as “Who am I?” or “What is the underlying reality of the world?”, you simply continue the processes of becoming. If you come across an especially impressive state of stillness or peace, your committee members who want to feed on metaphysical absolutes will take that as their food—and will be mighty proud of it. This blinds you to the fact that they’re still just feeding, and that your questions are simply refined versions of the questions of hunger.

However, if you remember to see the stillness and peace of concentration as coming from the activities of the aggregates, you’ll realize that no matter how well you feed on them, you’ll never be free of reoccurring hunger. You’ll never be free of having to keep working for your food. After all, these activities are not constant. When they fall away, they produce a split second of concern: “What’s next?” And in that split second, your committee members are desperate, for the question is a question of hunger. They want an answer right now. So these activities can never provide a stable, reliable, or lasting food. Even when they fabricate a peace that feels cosmic, they still involve stress.

When you pursue these contemplations until they reach a point of disenchantment, the mind inclines toward something outside of space and time, something that wouldn’t be subject to the drawbacks of these activities. At this point, it wants nothing to do with any of the committee members of the mind, even the ones observing and directing its concentration, or the underlying ones that keep asking and demanding an answer to the questions of hunger: “What’s next? Where next? What to do next?” The mind sees that even the choice of staying in place or moving forward to another state of concentration— even though it’s a choice between two relatively skillful alternatives—is a choice between nothing but two stressful alternatives, for both are fabrications. At this point it’s poised for something that doesn’t involve either alternative, something that involves no fabrication. When it sees the opening in that poise, it lets go and experiences the deathless. That’s the first stage in experiencing release.

In this way, the mind dis-identifies with all becomings without even thinking about “self” or “worlds.” It looks simply at actions as actions. It sees them as stressful, unnecessary, and not worth the effort. That’s what enables it to let go.

RELEASE

There are many dangers in trying to describe release, for people can then easily try to clone the description without actually going through the steps leading to genuine release— another case of squeezing and painting the mango to make it ripe.

However, it is useful to describe some of the lessons learned from the first taste of release.

One is that the Buddha was right: There really is a deathless dimension, outside of space and time. And it really is free of suffering and stress.

On returning from that dimension into the dimensions of space and time, you realize that your experience of space and time didn’t begin just with this birth. It’s been going on much longer. You may not be able to remember the particulars of previous lifetimes, but you do know that they’ve been happening for a long, long time.

Because you reached that dimension by abandoning the activities of fabrication, you know that it was through the activities of fabrication that you have been engaged in space and time all along. In other words, you’re not just a passive observer of space and time. Your actions play a crucial role in shaping your experience of space and time. Your actions are thus of foremost importance. Because you see that unskillful actions simply make it more difficult to access the deathless, you never want to break the five precepts ever again.

Because none of the aggregates were involved in the experience of the deathless, and yet there was still an awareness of that dimension, you see that the act of identifying with the aggregates is a choice that places limitations on you. You’ll never again agree with the view that they constitute what you are.

Because you realize that the deathless dimension was always available, but that you missed it because of your own stupidity, the first taste of release is humbling. It’s not a source of pride.

But above all, you realize that the activities of engaging in space and time are inherently stressful. The only true happiness lies in gaining total release. There is no activity more worthwhile than that.

It’s important not to mistake a mundane breakthrough for genuine release, for that can make you heedless and complacent in your practice. One of the touchstones for testing the truth of your release is whether it feels grounding or disorienting. If it’s disorienting, it’s not the real thing, for the deathless is the safest, most secure dimension there is.

Another touchstone for testing the truth of your release is whether you understood what you did to get there, for that’s what provides insight into the role of fabrication and mental action in shaping all experience. If your mind senses a great unburdening but without understanding how it happened, it’s not release. It’s just a mundane breakthrough. So don’t be heedless.

However, even people who have attained their first taste of genuine release can grow heedless, as the safety of their attainment can lower their sense of urgency in the practice. They can start getting complacent. So whether your sense that you’ve tasted release is genuine or not, the advice is always the same: Don’t be heedless. There’s more work to do.

Additional readings:
On jhana: See the section, “Jhana”, in Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo, Keeping the Breath in Mind, “Method 2.” There are also excellent discussions of jhana in Ajaan Lee’s book, The Path to Peace & Freedom for the Mind, under the heading, “Right Concentration” and under the headings of “Virtue,” “Concentration,” and “Discernment” at the end of the book.
See also the article, “Jhana Not by the Numbers,” and the talk, “Oneness” in Meditations4.
For a thorough discussion of the Buddha’s sixteen-step instructions for using the breath as a focal point for developing tranquility and insight, see Right Mindfulness.
For a more advanced discussion of the role of becoming, both in the practice of jhana and in the development of insight, see The Paradox of Becoming.
On insight: “One Tool Among Many”; “The Integrity of Emptiness”; “All About Change”
On the aggregates: “Five Piles of Bricks”; “De-perception” .
On the relationship between feeding and stress: “The Weight of Mountains.”
For a more advanced discussion of this topic, see Chapter Two in The Shape of Suffering.
For further discussions on how to ask the questions of discernment: Somewhat more technical than “Questions of Skill,” mentioned at the end of the Introduction, is “The Arrows of Thinking.” Skill in Questions offers a full treatment of this topic, with many examples from the Pali Canon. If the size of the book puts you off, you can read just the discussions in each chapter and leave the readings for another time.
For an anthology of passages from the Pali Canon covering the basic qualities that the Buddha said were most important for the practice, see The Wings to Awakening. Some people find the Introduction to this book a little steep, but you can start with Part Three, which is less intimidating, and then return to the earlier parts of the book when you want a more extensive overview. Into the Stream contains passages from the Pali Canon on the first stage of awakening. On release as the essence of the practice: “The Essence of the Dhamma” On the meaning of the word nirvana: “The Image of Nirvana”; “A Verb for Nirvana.” The Mind like Fire Unbound offers a full treatment of this topic, along with a discussion of the topic of clinging.
For some inspiring accounts of higher stages of the practice, see Ajaan MahaBoowa Ñanasampanno – Straight from the Heart, in particular the talks, “At the End of One’s Rope,” “The Radiant Mind is Unawareness,” and “An Heir to the Dhamma.” Also inspiring: “From Ignorance to Emptiness” and “To Be an Inner Millionaire,” both in another book of Ajaan MahaBoowa’s talks, Things as They Are.
Inspiring in a more calming way are these talks in Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo,Inner Strength: “Beyond Right & Wrong”; and “Point Zero.”

Relevant talks:
2009/1/30: The Four Jhanas
2011/8/21: The Poison Blowfish
2011/9/4: Proactive with Pain
2011/3/10: The Swinging Balance
2011/2/11: Heedful of Death
2011/1/27: Balance & Release
2010/10/6: Broad, Tall, & Deep
2010/10/7: Levels of Truth
2011/11/11: Feeding on Feeding
2011/12/29: Full Attention
2012/1/2: Generating Energy
2012/1/11: Strengthening Discernment
2012/1/26: Sensuality
2012/6/22: Equanimity Isn’t Everything
2012/7/28: The Essence of the Dhamma
2012/8/6: Freedom through Painful Practice

Talks on the Buddha’s sixteen-step instructions in breath meditation:
2002/11: The Steps of Breath Meditation
2007/7/16: Lessons in Happiness
2008/2/11: On the Path of the Breath
2010/10/2: The Breath All the Way
2011/8/29: Exploring Fabrication
2012/2/3: Breath, Tranquility, & Insight