Someone asked whether the way to prevent unwholesome states (akusala) from taking over the body is simply to maintain mindfulness at all times. Here is how the teacher answered.

Unwholesome States Arrive as a Package

When akusala takes hold, it doesn't come piece by piece — it arrives as a full set: body, feeling, mind, and mental factors all together. The body is compelled to act; feeling is forced into suffering — a state of having to endure something difficult to bear; thought is overridden with borrowed thinking; and the mental factors supply the emotional charge behind it all. Without that emotional charge, thought alone couldn't force us into anger, hatred, or craving — but once the emotion is there, the body's behavior follows suit.

The Remedy: Let the Wholesome Take Its Place

The way to keep akusala out is to let kusala — the wholesome — take hold instead, or else a neutral state. Whichever force becomes "master of the house" takes over the whole household, body and mind together, along with everything we own. The way wholesome states gain that hold is through mindfulness (sati) — wherever kusala arises, sati is always present with it.

Repeated determination (the practice of settling the mind on something wholesome) can feel like two things pulling at once — that's the unwholesome and wholesome sides contesting for control, trading places so quickly it seems simultaneous. The answer is to keep determining continuously, without letting go. Whichever side sustains itself longer gradually gains proportion, until it wins outright.

Mindfulness and the Cluster of Beautiful Mental Factors That Arise With It

Constant mindfulness is indeed the right answer, but it takes regular practice to build. Sati has the character of a bright, clear sphere — a wholesome mental factor. Wherever sati arises, the rest of the wholesome factors rise together with it: awareness returns, followed by faith in what is right and good, a sense of shame and moral dread toward wrongdoing, freedom from greed and aversion, and an even, balanced heart.

Six more pairs follow — nineteen wholesome mental factors in all — including lightness of body and mind, softness and pliancy, calm, fitness for work, and uprightness of both body and mind. Together these are called the "beautiful mental factors" (sobhana cetasika), the tools of the wholesome side. The moment we settle the mind on any one quality — softness, ease, or evenness — all nineteen arise together at once.

Six Further Factors That Only Arise Through Deliberate Cultivation

Counting further brings the total to twenty-five. The remaining six — right speech, right action, and right livelihood (the three abstinences), along with compassion, sympathetic joy, and wisdom — don't arise automatically; they only appear when deliberately cultivated. Wisdom, for instance, doesn't arise unless we actually apply and practice it. These factors are tools, and like any tool, the more we practice using them, the more skillful we become — the way practicing handwriting, drawing, or a sport builds skill over time.

He noted, by way of comparison, that Buddhists tend to train mindfulness above all, which is why their sati tends to be steady, while people of other faiths — Islam, for instance — tend to train the faculty of faith most of all, through firm belief in God, which strengthens their faith enough to draw in merit of its own kind.

The Opposite Side: The Tools of the Unwholesome

Without training in the wholesome tools, one falls back on the tools of the unwholesome instead — greed, aversion, and delusion; the hindrances, including sloth-and-torpor and doubt; conceit; wrong view — and above all, the absence of shame and moral dread toward wrongdoing, both of which are rooted in delusion.