Why 99% Of People Practice Fake Mindfulness (The Buddha’s Warning)

Why 99% of People Practice Fake Mindfulness – The Buddha's Warning In recent years, the world has been awash in a flood of books, articles, teachings, and courses that promote two theories about the practice of mindfulness – sati. The first theory is that the Buddha employed the term mindfulness to mean bare attention, a state of pure receptivity, non-reactive, non-judging, non-interfering toward physical and mental phenomena as they make contact with the six senses, counting the mind as the sixth. The second theory is that the cultivation of bare attention can, on its own, bring about the goal of Buddhist practice – freedom from suffering and stress. Even in non-Buddhist circles, these theories have become the standard interpretation of what mindfulness is and how it's best developed. Viewed in the light of the Buddha's teachings in the Pali Canon, though, these two theories are seriously misleading. At best, they present a small part of the path as the whole of the practice. At worst, they discredit many of the skills you need on the path and misrepresent what it actually means to taste awakening. The practice of mindfulness is most fruitful when informed by the Buddha's own definition of right mindfulness and his explanations of its role on the path. As he described the term, right mindfulness, samasati, is not bare attention. Instead, it's a faculty of active memory adept at calling to mind and keeping in mind instructions and intentions that apply to your present actions. Its role is to draw on right view about the nature of suffering and its end, and to work proactively in supervising the other factors of the path, such as right resolve, right speech, right action, and right livelihood, to give rise to right concentration. Then it builds on right concentration to bring about total release. In the following passage, the Buddha defines sati as the ability to remember, at the same time illustrating its function in meditation practice with the four satipatthanas. Or, establishings of mindfulness. And what is the faculty of mindfulness? There is the case where a monk, a disciple of the noble ones, is mindful, highly meticulous, remembering and able to call to mind even things that were done and said long ago. And here begins the satipatthana formula. He remains focused on the body in and of itself, ardent, alert, and mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. He remains focused on feelings in and of themselves, the mind in and of itself, mental qualities in and of themselves, ardent, alert, and mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. The most extensive discussion of the satipatthanas starts with instructions to be ever mindful of the breath. But, as the satipatthana formula shows, mindfulness isn't the only quality you need to bring to the breath. You must also be alert and ardent. The Pali word for alertness, sampajanya, is another term that's often misunderstood. It doesn't mean comprehending or being choicelessly aware of the present, as it's sometimes defined. Examples in the canon shows that sampajanya means being aware of what you're doing, as you're doing it, in the activities of the body and mind. After all, if you're going to gain insight into how you're causing suffering, your awareness of the present has to be focused on what you're actually doing. If you're just mindful of lessons from the past, or broadly receptive to everything happening in the present, you won't see cause and effect in action. This is why mindfulness always has to be paired with alertness as you meditate. Ardency, atapa, means being intent on what you're doing, trying your best to do it skillfully. This doesn't mean that you have to keep straining and sweating all the time, just that you're persistent in developing skillful habits and abandoning unskillful ones. That, in fact, is the role of right effort, the factor in the path that immediately precedes right mindfulness. Mindfulness fosters that effort by remembering what's skillful and not, and recalling your need to keep trying to be skillful. Mindfulness, alertness, and ardency get their guidance from what the Buddha called yoniso, manasikara, appropriate attention. Notice, that's appropriate attention, not bare attention. No act of attention is ever bare. The Buddha discovered that the way you attend to sensory contact is determined by your views about what's important, the questions you bring to each experience, the problems you want to solve. If there were no problems in life, you could open yourself up choicelessly to whatever came along. But the fact is, there is a big problem smack dab in the middle of everything you do. The suffering that comes from misunderstanding what suffering is, how it's caused, and how it can be ended. This is why the Buddha doesn't tell you to view each moment with a beginner's eyes. You've got to give priority to the problem of suffering and keep an informed understanding of the problem and its correct solution always in mind. Otherwise, inappropriate attention will get in the way, focusing on questions like, who am I? Do I have a self? Questions that deal in terms of being an identity. Those questions, the Buddha said, lead you into a thicket of views and leave you stuck on the thorns. The questions that lead to freedom focus on comprehending suffering, letting go of the cause of suffering, and developing the path to the end of suffering. Your desire for answers to these questions is what makes you alert to your actions, your thoughts, words, and deeds, and ardent to perform them skillfully. Mindfulness, then, is what keeps the perspective of appropriate attention in mind. Modern psychological research has shown that attention comes in discrete moments. You can be attentive to something for only a very short period of time, and then, you have to remind yourself moment after moment to return to it if you want to keep on being attentive. In other words, continuous attention, the type that can see connections between cause and effect over time, has to be stitched together from short intervals. This is what mindfulness is for. It keeps the object of your attention and the purpose of your attention in mind. This is why an accurate understanding of mindfulness and its role on the path is not just a nitpicking matter for scholars to argue over. It has a genuine impact on how you practice. If you can't identify the differences among the qualities you bring to your meditation, they glom together, making it hard for real insight to arise. For example, one popular definition of mindfulness is that it is awakening, and that each moment of mindfulness is a momentary taste of awakening, but mindfulness is conditioned, and nibbana is not. Mistaking one of the factors on the path to awakening for awakening itself is like reaching the middle of a road and then falling asleep right there. You never get to the end of the road, and in the meantime, you'll get run over by aging, illness, and death. Other contemporary definitions of mindfulness may avoid the mistake of confusing mindfulness with awakening, but they still confuse it with qualities that sometimes are and sometimes aren't useful on the path. For instance, mindfulness is sometimes portrayed as affectionate attention or compassionate attention, but affection and compassion are not synonymous with mindfulness. They are separate things. If you bring them to your meditation, understand that they are acting in addition to mindfulness because skill in meditation requires seeing when qualities like compassion are helpful and when they're not. As the Buddha says, and as most of us have experienced in our own lives, affection can sometimes be a cause for suffering, so you have to watch out. Mindfulness has also been equated with appreciating the moment for all the little pleasures it can offer. The taste of a raisin, the feel of a cup of tea in your hands. In the Buddha's vocabulary, this appreciation is called contentment. Contentment is useful when you're experiencing physical hardship, but it's not always useful in the area of the mind. In fact, the Buddha once said that the secret to his awakening was that he didn't allow himself to rest content with whatever attainment he had reached. He kept reaching for something higher until there was nowhere higher to reach. So, contentment has to know its time and place. Mindfulness, if it's not confused with contentment, can help keep that fact in mind. Other popular definitions describe mindfulness as a type of non-reactivity or total acceptance. If you look for these terms in the Buddha's vocabulary, the closest you'll find are equanimity and patience. Equanimity means putting aside your preferences and accepting what you can't change. Patience is the ability not to get worked up over the things you don't like, to stick with difficult situations even when they don't resolve as quickly as you want them to. But in establishing mindfulness, you stay with unpleasant things, not simply to accept them, but also to observe and understand them. Once you have clearly seen that a particular quality, such as aversion or lust, is harmful for the mind, it doesn't pay to keep developing patience or equanimity around it. You have to make whatever effort is needed to get rid of it and to nourish skillful qualities in its place by bringing in other factors of the path. Right resolve and right effort. Mindfulness, after all, is part of a larger path mapped out by appropriate attention. You have to keep remembering to bring the larger map to bear on everything you do. For instance, you try to keep the breath in mind because you see that concentration, as a factor of the path, is something you need to develop, and mindfulness of the breath is a good way to do it. The breath is also a good standpoint from which you can directly observe what's happening in the mind, to see which mental qualities are giving good results and which ones aren't. Meditation employs lots of mental qualities and you have to be clear about what they are, where they're separate and what each one of them can do. That way, when things are out of balance, you can identify what's missing and can foster whatever's needed to make up the lack. If you're feeling flustered and irritated, try to bring in a little gentleness and contentment. When you're lazy, rev up your sense of the dangers of being unskillful and complacent. It's not just a matter of piling on more and more mindfulness. You've got to add other qualities as well. First, you're mindful enough to stitch things together, to keep the basic issues of your meditation in mind and to observe things over time. Then you try to be alert to see whatever else your ardency should stir into the pot. This process is a lot like cooking. When you don't like the taste of the soup you're making, you're not stuck with the single option of adding more and more salt. You can add onion, garlic, oregano, whatever you sense is needed. Remember that you've got a whole spice shelf to work with and that the spices should be clearly labeled. If they're all labeled salt, you won't know which salt to use. And remember that your cooking has a purpose. Right mindfulness is supposed to lead to right concentration. We're often told that mindfulness and concentration are two separate forms of meditation or even two separate paths to awakening. But the Buddha never made a clear division between the two. In his teachings, mindfulness and concentration are interwoven. Mindfulness shades into concentration. Concentration in turn forms the basis for even better mindfulness. The four establishings of mindfulness are also the themes of concentration. And the highest level of concentration is where mindfulness becomes pure. As Ajaan Lee, my teacher's teacher, once noted, mindfulness combined with ardency turns into the concentration factor called vitaka or directed thought, where you keep your thoughts consistently focused on one object, such as the breath. Alertness combined with ardency turns into another concentration factor, vikara or evaluation. In this case, you evaluate what's going on with the breath. Is it comfortable? If it is, stick with it. If it's not, what can you do to make it more comfortable? Try making it a little bit longer, a little bit shorter, deeper, shallower, faster, slower. See what happens. When you found a way of breathing that nourishes a sense of fullness and refreshment, you can spread that fullness throughout the body. Learn how to relate to the breath in a way that nourishes a good energy flow throughout the body. When your sense of the body is refreshed, the mind can easily settle down in the present. You may have picked up the idea that you should never fiddle with the breath, that you should just take it as it comes. Yet meditation isn't a passive process of being non-judgmentally present with whatever arises and not adjusting it at all. Mindfulness keeps reminding you to stick with the breath in the present, but it also reminds you that there's a path to develop for good results in the future and that adjusting the breath to help settle the mind is a skillful part of that path. This is why evaluation, judging the best way to maximize the pleasure of the breath, is essential to the practice. In other words, you don't abandon your powers of judgment as you develop mindfulness. Rather, you train them to be less judgmental and more judicious so that they yield tangible results. When the breath becomes really full and refreshing throughout the body, you can drop the evaluation and simply be one with the breath This sense of oneness is also sometimes called mindfulness in a literal sense. Mindfulness, a sense of oneness pervading the entire range of your awareness. You're at one with whatever you focus on, at one with whatever you do. There's no separate you at all. This is a type of mindfulness that's easy to confuse with awakening because it can seem so liberating. But in the Buddha's vocabulary, it's neither mindfulness nor awakening. He calls it by a technical name, Chittaso Ekadibhava, unification of awareness. In the nine levels of concentration attainments, this is a factor that's present from the second level, the second jhana, up to the sixth, the infinitude of consciousness. It's abandoned on the seventh level, when the mind needs to drop the oneness to reach the dimension of nothingness. So oneness isn't even the ultimate in concentration, much less awakening, which means that there's still more work for your mindfulness, alertness, and ardency to do. Mindfulness reminds you that no matter how wonderful this sense of oneness is, you still haven't solved the problem of suffering. Alertness tries to focus on what the mind is still doing in that state of oneness, what subterranean choices you're making to keep that sense of oneness going, and what subtle levels of stress those choices are causing, while ardency tries to find a way to drop even those subtle choices to be rid of that stress. So even this sense of oneness is a means to a higher end. You bring the mind to a solid state of oneness in order to drop your habitual ways of dividing up experience into me versus not me. But you don't stop there. You then take that oneness and keep subjecting it to all the factors of the path. That's when the activities underlying the oneness become clearly distinct. Ajaan Lee uses the image of ore in a rock. Staying with the sense of oneness is like resting content with the knowledge that there's tin, silver, and gold in your rock. If that's all you do, you'll never get any use from those metals. But if you heat the rock to their different melting points, they'll separate out on their own. Only then will you benefit from them. Liberating insight comes from testing and experimenting. This is how we learn about the world to begin with. If we weren't active creatures, we'd have no understanding of the world at all. Things would pass by, pass by, and we wouldn't know how they were connected because we'd have no way of influencing them to see which effects came from changing which causes. It's because we act in the world that we can understand it. The same holds true with the mind. You can't just sit there hoping that a single mental quality, mindfulness, acceptance, contentment, oneness, will do all the work. If you want to learn about the potentials of the mind, you have to be willing to play with sensations in the body, with qualities in the mind. That's when you come to understand cause and effect. But apprehending cause and effect requires all your powers of intelligence. This doesn't mean book intelligence. It means your ability to notice what you're doing, to read the results of what you've done, and to figure out ingenious ways of doing things that cause less and less suffering and stress. Call it street smarts for the noble path. Mindfulness allows you to see these connections because it keeps reminding you to stay with these issues, to stay with the causes until you see their effects. But mindfulness alone can't do all the work. You can't improve the soup simply by dumping more pepper into it. You add other ingredients as they're needed, untangling the present. 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 let 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. In contrast, the Buddha then depicts appropriate attention as the ability to identify that this is suffering. The Pali word dukkha here covers stress and pain as well. This is the origination of suffering. This is the cessation of suffering. And this is the path of practice leading to the cessation of suffering. These are the four categories that Buddha, in his first discourse, called the four noble truths. The ability to frame the issue of suffering in line with these categories is what enables you ultimately to put an end to the problem of suffering once and for all. This is why they are appropriate. The most obvious lesson to be drawn from this way of distinguishing inappropriate from appropriate attention is that inappropriate attention frames the issues of the mind in terms of abstract categories, whereas appropriate attention frames them in terms of things that can be directly pointed to in immediate experience as this thou, this, this, this. Ideas of identity and existence are basic to abstract thinking, and many philosophers have maintained that they lie at the basis of any spiritual quest. The Buddha, however, noted that the thought, I am the thinker, lies at the root of all the categories and labels of conceptual proliferation, the type of thinking that can turn and attack the person employing it. These categories are notoriously hard to pin down, often dissolving into arbitrary semantics. Do I exist? It depends on what you mean by exist. Do I have a self? It depends on what you mean by self. Many thinking driven by definitions like these often falls prey to the hidden motives or agendas behind the definitions, which means that it's unreliable. However, suffering is something directly knowable, pre-verbal, private, but universal. In framing the issues of the mind around suffering, the Buddha bases his teachings on an intention totally trustworthy, the desire for his listeners to put an end to all their suffering, and focuses on something not dependent on definitions. In fact, he never offers a formal definition of the term suffering at all. Instead, he illustrates it with examples, such as the suffering of birth, aging, illness, and death, and then points out the functional element that all forms of mental suffering share, clinging to the five aggregates of form, feeling, perception, mental fabrication, and consciousness. The clinging is not the same as the pain of the suffering, but it's the aspect of suffering most useful to focus on for the purpose of bringing the suffering to an end. Although there is a passage where the Buddha defines clinging as desire passion, he never describes precisely what desire passion is. When devoting what is apparently the oldest part of the canon, the Athakavagga, to the topic of clinging, he fills the discussion with puns and wordplay, a style that discourages systematic attempts at set definitions and the conceptual proliferation they can foster. What this means is that if you want to refine your understanding of clinging, desire, passion, and suffering, you can't cling to words or texts. You have to look deeper into your present experience. In pointing repeatedly to direct experience, however, the Buddha doesn't discourage all thought and concepts. The ability to distinguish the four categories of appropriate attention requires thought and analysis. The type of thought that questions past understandings and misunderstandings and ponders what's happening in the present. The type of analysis that can ferret out connections between actions and their results and can evaluate them as to whether they're helpful or not. There are desires, for instance, that act as a cause of suffering and other desires that can form part of the path leading to its end. Although the Buddha gives a general outline to tell which kind of desire functions in which way, you have to learn how to watch your own desires carefully and honestly to tell which kind of desire they are. As you keep analyzing the present under the framework of these four categories, you're tracing the Buddha's steps as he approached awakening. Having focused on clinging as the functional handle on suffering, he looked for the conditions that formed its basis and found them in three types of craving or thirst. Sensual craving, craving for states of being, and craving to destroy states of being. Then he identified the cessation of suffering as total dispassion for, cessation of, and release from those forms of craving and he identified the mental qualities and practices that would lead to that cessation. Right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration, all of which, in potential form, can be found in the present moment. So instead of simply throwing the present moment at you as a monolithic whole, the Buddha points your attention to four significant things you might find there. This is because there's a pattern to the changes we experience from moment to moment. Change is never so random or radical that knowledge gained from the past is useless in the present. Concepts still serve an important purpose, even though they may lack the freshness of the immediate here and now. When you stick your finger into fire, it's bound to burn. If you spit into the wind, it's bound to come back at you. Lessons like these are good to keep in mind. Although the patterns underlying suffering may be more tangled than those underlying fire and wind, still they are patterns. They can be learned and mastered, and the four categories of appropriate attention are crucial for getting a handle on those patterns and directing them to suffering's end. In practical terms, distinguishing among categories is worthwhile only if you have to treat each of the different categories in a different way. A doctor who formulates a theory of sixteen types of headaches only to treat them all with aspirin, for example, is wasting her time. But one who, noting that different types of headaches respond to different types of medications, devises an accurate test to differentiate among the headaches, makes a genuine contribution to medical science. The same principle applies to the categories of appropriate attention. As the Buddha stated in his first account of his awakening, once he had identified each of the four categories, he saw that each had to be treated in a different way. Suffering had to be comprehended, its cause abandoned, its cessation realized, and the path to its cessation fully developed. What this means is that as a meditator, you can't treat everything in the present moment in the same way. You can't simply stay non-reactive or simply accept everything that comes. If moments of stillness and ease arise in the mind, you can't just note them and let them pass. You should develop them to jana, the full body pleasure and rapture of right concentration that forms the heart of the path. When mental suffering arises, you can't just let it go. You should focus whatever powers of concentration and discernment you have to try to comprehend the clinging that lies at its heart. The Buddha expands on this point in the discourses where he shows how appropriate attention should be applied to various aspects of the present, applied to the five aggregates of form, feeling, and so forth. Appropriate attention means viewing them in such a way as to induce a sense of dispassion that will help alleviate clinging. Applied to perceptions of beauty or irritation, it means viewing them in such a way as to keep them from fostering such obstacles to right concentration as sensual desire or ill-will. Applied to feelings of serenity or the potential for rapture, it means viewing them in such a way that helps develop them into factors for awakening. Even within a particular category, there is no one approach that works in all cases. In one of his discourses, Buddha observes that some unskillful mental states wither away if you simply watch them with equanimity, while others require an active effort to take them apart. In another discourse, he expands on this observation by recommending five ways of dealing with distracting thoughts, replacing them with more skillful thoughts, focusing on their drawbacks, consciously ignoring them, relaxing the tension that goes into maintaining them, and forcefully suppressing them. In neither discourse, though, does he give hard and fast rules for telling which type of You have to find out for yourself by sharpening your discernment through trial and error as to what works and what doesn't, in any given situation. The same principle applies to skillful mental states. The Buddha's final summary of his teachings, The Wings to Awakening, lists seven ways of conceiving the path to the end of suffering. In terms of four establishings of mindfulness, four bases for success, four right exertions, five strengths, five faculties, seven factors for awakening, and the noble eightfold path. And again, it's up to you to learn, through trial and error, which way of conceiving the path is most useful at any particular time in your practice. This means that applying appropriate attention to skillful and unskillful mental states is not a one-shot affair. The tasks connected with each of the four categories of appropriate attention all have to be tested through trial and error, and mastered as skills. To borrow an analogy from the canon, full awakening is not a matter of picking up a The insight of awakening comes in the course of practicing on a straw man, until you're able to shoot long distances, to fire accurate shots in rapid succession, and to pierce great masses. As the Buddha noted in his first discourse, he didn't claim to be awakened until he had fully mastered the tasks appropriate to all four categories. In fully developing the factors of the path, he fully comprehended the five clinging aggregates to the point of abandoning all passion and craving for them. That was when he fully realized the end of suffering. With that, the categories of appropriate attention had done their work in solving the problem of suffering. But even then, they still had their uses. As the Buddha noted, even a fully awakened Arhant would still apply them to experience to provide a pleasant dwelling for the mind in the here and now. In all of these cases, appropriate attention means seeing things in terms of their function, what they can do, while the act of appropriate attention is itself a type of doing, adopted for what it can do for the mind. And the test for appropriate attention is that it actually works in helping to put an end to suffering. When we contrast this with the Buddha's examples of inappropriate attention, we see that attention is inappropriate when it frames things in terms of being and identity, and appropriate when framing them in terms of actions and their results. In fact, appropriate attention looks at being itself as an action, with each act of being or assuming an identity to be evaluated by the pleasure or pain it produces. When we look at ourselves with appropriate attention, we focus not on what we are, but on what we're doing, and in particular on whether what we're doing is unskillful, leading to suffering, or skillful, leading to its end. This point is important to bear in mind when we reflect on the two criticisms often leveled against the four categories of appropriate attention. The first criticism is that they provide a limited view of the fullness and variety of life, that they don't encompass the virtually infinite number of skillful ways of approaching experience. When formulating a theory of being, you could argue that the more variety it can contain, the better. But when choosing a doctor, you wouldn't want one who insists on exploring an infinite variety of approaches to your disease. You want one who focuses on the approaches most likely to work. The same holds true with appropriate attention. The four categories, with their attendant tasks, are meant not to encompass reality, but to focus your attention at the right factors for curing the most basic problem in experience. The Buddha limits his discussion to these four categories, because he doesn't want you to get distracted from the problem at hand. The second criticism is that the four categories are dualistic and thus inferior to a non-dualistic view of the world. Again, when formulating a theory of being, you could argue that a non-dualistic theory would be superior to a dualistic one, on the grounds that a non-dual concept of being is more encompassing than a dualistic one, yielding a more unified theory. But appropriate attention is not a theory of being. It's a guide to what to do in the present moment. Because the present moment is so tangled and complex, the multiple categories offered by appropriate attention are a strength rather than a weakness. Instead of limiting you to one way of understanding and approaching events in the present, they provide you with a more discerning understanding and a wide variety of options for dealing with the tangles and complexities of suffering. When offering options for solving a problem, no particular number of options is, on principle, superior to any other. What matters is that the options are enough to be adequate for the problem, but not so many as to obscure its solution and become a tangle themselves. In other words, the options are to be judged, not against abstract principles, but by what they enable you to do. And although the Buddha describes his path to the end of suffering as the one form of doing that ultimately puts an end to doing, as long as you're still doing something in the present moment, appropriate attention ensures that what you're doing stays on the path. And once the path is developed to the point where it can untangle the problem of suffering, everything else gets untangled as well.