The Teachings of Ajahn Suchart.
19 June 2025
“The mind and the body are never together, they are only connected by the consciousness of the mind.”
Than Ajahn: The mind and the body are never together, they are only connected by the consciousness of the mind. The mind sends the consciousness to the body and it attaches itself to the body. It gathers information from the body, for example when the body sees things, the mind sends the object it sees to the consciousness. So the mind and the body are actually two separate persons. The mind is not in the body.
When you meditate, you pull away from the consciousness, plug away from the connector, like unplugging the computer from the electrical outlet.
When you meditate, you pull the plug out and the mind doesn’t receive any information from the body, therefore whatever happens to the body when you are in meditation doesn’t bother you. But when you come out of your meditation, it is as if you plug the connector back to the body.
The purpose of meditation practice is to enlighten the mind that the mind is not the body, that they are two separate entities. The problem with the mind is that it thinks that it (the mind) is the body and it becomes attached to the body. Whatever happens to the body, it clings to it. The mind wants the body to last. However, the body doesn’t last and when the body has to die, it causes the mind to suffer. If the mind has wisdom, it knows that the body and the mind are like the driver and his car. When the car breaks down, the driver doesn’t break down with the car.
The driver simply gets out of the car and gets a new car.
Similarly, when the body dies, if the mind still needs a new body, it goes and takes a new rebirth. If the mind doesn’t want any more rebirths then it has to stop the desire to use the body.
Right now, the mind uses the body to make it happy.
The mind wants to see, to hear, to go here and there, and in order to do these activities, it needs to have a body. The mind depends on the body. It doesn’t want to lose the body because when there is no body, it cannot do the things it wants to do and it becomes unhappy.
If you understand that having a body means that you are carrying a burden, you wouldn’t want to have the body. It is a burden that you have to look after the body, to feed it, to take care of it, to protect it and then it still has to get sick, get old and die. So having a body hurts the mind more than helping the mind. If you see this with wisdom, then you will not want to use the body, you will get rid of your desire to use the body.
You want to find the happiness from meditation.
If you can have happiness through your meditation, then you don’t need to use the body to bring you happiness. You won’t have any desire to rely or be dependent on the body. When you don’t depend on the body, whatever happens to the body will not hurt you, it will not hurt the mind.
By Ajaan Suchart Abhijāto
Youtube: Dhamma in English
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