The Energy You Put Out
January 16, 2011

Okay, close your eyes. Breathe in and notice how the breath feels. Breathe out, notice how the breath feels. Stay with the breath all the way in, all the way out.

As for any other thoughts, just let them go. Try to keep your mind focused on this one thing: the feeling of the breath coming in and going out of the body. You can feel it anywhere. It might be in the nose, might be in the rising and falling of the chest—anywhere there’s a sensation in the body lets you know: now you’re breathing in, now you’re breathing out. It doesn’t have to be the air coming in and out of the lungs, just the feeling of energy moving in the body as you breathe in and breathe out.

And try to stay there as quietly as possible. As for any other thoughts that come into the mind, let them go. You don’t have to get involved with them; you don’t have to get entangled with them.

Because once you get entangled with a thought, your mind becomes like a radio station. It sends out radio waves. If it’s a thought of greed, you’re sending out greed waves. If it’s a thought of anger, you’re sending out anger waves. And then those things bounce back at you.

You look at something and it looks like it’s worthy of greed, or looks like it’s worthy of anger, but all you’re really seeing is your own energy bouncing back at you.

So the question is, what kind of energy do you want to put out there? What things do you want to experience in the world?—because you’re determining how you’re going to experience the world by the energy you put into it. So you want to put a quiet energy in, a still energy, so you can really see what’s going on.

It’s like driving down the road on a dark night. If you drive down the road during the day, you see everything that the sun lights up, but at night it’s only the light of your own headlights bouncing back at you, and you see a very different world, a much more restricted world.

It’s the same way with most of our minds. We send out a particular kind of energy and that’s all we see bouncing back at us.

So try to create a still mind so that you can see things more clearly, so that you’re not interfering with the waves that are actually coming at you.

In this way, when the mind is still, you can see things for what they are. Things that used to incite your anger, you realize don’t really deserve being angry about. Things that would incite your lust or your jealousy, you realize they’re not worth it. You see things more clearly because you’re not interfering with what the world is putting out.

When you see things more clearly, you can act in a more appropriate way. What you say and what you do then is really in line with the way things are, not just in line with the confused energy that you’re putting out.

So try to train the mind so that it can be still like this.

This doesn’t mean you never have to think. If you see if something requires thought, you’re free to think it. But you want to make sure you detect any greed or aversion or anger or jealousy or anything that’s going to mess up that thought and make it unskillful, make it inappropriate.

So if you want to see the world for what it actually is, you have to get your mind really, really quiet and then begin to see what’s good out there and what’s bad out there.

You begin to see your own mind a lot better as well. Your mind is a lot clearer.

When you start putting out negative energy, you’ll know, because you’re not putting it out all the time. If you’re putting it out all the time, it becomes part of the normal way of things.

So make the negative energy the abnormal energy, the things that you rarely put out, and make sure the quiet energy is what’s the dominant and the more normal way that your mind thinks.

This way, you begin to see the power of your mind to change the world around you. If you want the world to change to a be better place, you’ve got to start making the mind a better place, so that it sends out a better form of energy.

You can do that by focusing on the breath and just staying very still right here.

That’s the first step in getting the mind under control.