Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Dependable Mind"

Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Dependable Mind" 

 "Our basic problem in life is that the most important thing in our lives is the thing we know the least about: our own minds. As the Buddha said, all things come out of the mind — all our experiences, all the happiness and all the pain we experience, come from the mind. “All things have the mind as their forerunner. Things are made of the mind, determined by the mind” — and yet we don’t know our minds, so our lives are out of control. We don’t understand where things come from or how things happen in our lives. That’s why we have to meditate — to get to know our own minds.

The difficulty in meditation is that you can’t focus directly on the mind. It’s like focusing on the wind up in a sky with no clouds — you have no way of knowing which direction it’s going because there’s nothing against which it’s going to make contact. That’s why you need a meditation object like the breath or “buddho” or parts of the body. Whichever object you find easy to settle down with, that’s the one you take. Having an object gives the mind something to bounce off of — because when you decide you’re going to stay with something, you begin to see how erratic the mind is. It keeps jumping around. It goes here a little while, then it goes there for a little while, and then over there. You begin to realize how this most important element in life — the mind — is so totally out of control, totally undependable. That’s why the mind needs training. We need to strap it down to one object and make it stay there so that we can really get to know it and train it until we sense that we can depend on it.

We talk about taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, but they can be our refuge only when we bring them into the mind. And the mind can be dependable only when we’ve got the qualities of the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha in there: qualities like mindfulness, concentration, persistence, and dependability. So if you want to depend on the mind, make it something you *can* depend on.

The Buddha’s good news is that it’s possible to do this. At the time the Buddha was teaching, there were other teachers who said that there is nothing that you can do about the way life is, it’s all written in the stars. Others said that no matter what we do, any action leads to more suffering, so the only way to stop suffering is to stop acting. And still others said that life is totally chaotic, there’s no way you can make any sense out of it at all, so don’t try. Just try to have as much fun as you can while you can because everything falls apart at death. So there were all kinds of teachings, but they were all teachings lacking in hope. The Buddha’s teaching was the only one that offered any hope. He said, yes, there is a skill that you can develop in training the mind and, yes, it does lead to true happiness."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Dependable Mind" (Meditations1)

https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/Meditations1/Section0036.html