ON THE MIND GOING OUT AFTER THINGS
“Luang Puu Dune had an interesting way of explaining the four noble truths. Sending the mind outside, he said, was the cause of suffering. Suffering was the result of sending the mind outside. The mind seeing the mind is the path, and the result of the mind seeing itself was the cessation of suffering. His explanation fits in with a theme that you see again and again in the teachings of the forest ajaans: that the mind is not simply sitting there on the receiving end. It's sending things out, flowing out. Or, as Ajaan Lee used to say, "We go leaking out through our eyes and ears, our nose, our tongue, our body, our mind," because we don't see the mind. We don't see what it's doing. We're focusing on other things.
That's basically what craving is—the mind going out after something else and not being very aware of itself. That's why there's ignorance in the craving. Then it lands on something. But then when it lands on something, the relationship is very complex. To stay, it has to cling. In other words, it has to keep going back, back, back there. And there's going to be suffering in going back. So there's going to be the desire and irritation mixed together. This is why the Buddha says that to comprehend suffering, you have to abandon not only passion for it, but also your aversion and your delusion around it. That's what it means to comprehend. You understand it to the point where there's no more passion, no more aversion, no more delusion, because you see what you're doing.
With craving, you're going after things that are going to disappoint. And even if you land on them, no matter how well you land, it's always unstable. It's like a cat jumping around the room from one piece of furniture to the next, and suddenly finding itself on a lamp, and the lamp is wobbly, and it's got to hold on tight. If it's not careful, if it tries to jump from the lamp to something else, it might fall. So we've got to learn how to watch the mind, to see both the craving as it shoots out for something, and the clinging as it lands and tries to stay there…”
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Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Excerpt from “Craving & Clinging”
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