The Teachings of Ajahn Suchart.
17 January 2025
Q: Even when one gets old and the mind starts to deteriorate, the mind still can see the Four Noble Truths.
Than Ajahn: Yes, because the Four Noble Truths is not in the body, it’s in the mind. The mind sees things that appear in the mind. So when you get dukkha (stress), your stress is in the mind not in your body. If you have mindfulness, you’ll see, ‘Right now, I am stressful,’ then you start to investigate and you’ll find that the cause of your stress is your desire or your expectation.
You want something and when you can’t get what you want, you feel stressful. For instance, you don’t want to get sick so when you get sick, you feel stressful because you don’t want to get sick. You see this in your mind.
If you want to get rid of your stress, you can do it by using samādhi and wisdom. Samādhi is to stop your mind from craving; and wisdom is to tell your mind that to crave is to create stress so you have to stop craving for things. You see this automatically, right away, in your mind if you keep practising mindfulness.
Right now, your mind goes outside of your mind, you see things, you see people. So you don’t see what’s going on inside your mind.
But when you start to develop mindfulness, you start pulling your mind back inside so you start to see the inner activities or mental activities that you normally don’t see because you keep seeing the external activities.
The external activities come through the body. You need the body to see or to hear things and the body faculties deteriorate e.g. you are not able to see things clearly, your eyes get blurry, your ears can’t pick up sound clearly, your brain doesn’t function as good as when you are younger, your body can’t do things you used to do.
But the mind is different. Your mind doesn’t deteriorate with your body. So you can always see the inner activities of the mind if you use mindfulness to pull the mind away from the body.
When you meditate, you are pulling your mind away from the body, you bring it inside.
So when it starts to pull inside, you’ll start to see the four nāma-khandhas (saññā, vedanā, sankhāra, viññāṇa) and see how they work together then you understand that when you have stress, it’s because of your craving or desire. So you see this all inside your mind.
But first, you have to bring your mind back inside.
Right now you keep looking at other things outside so you don’t see the real cause of your problem which is inside your mind.
So no matter how old you are, you can see the Four Noble Truths if you have the tools.
And the tools are mindfulness and wisdom which you have to learn to develop.
“Dhamma in English, Feb 10, 2024.”
By Ajahn Suchart Abhijāto
YouTube: Dhamma in English.
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