What is mind? Is it of the heart? The head? Some say both. But we can really best understand the mind by our emotions. When you become angry, you think and feel in anger. When you are sad, the entire world seems sad to you. Our emotions shape our world according to their orchestration.
The mind, says Buddha, has three specific attributes: (1) it is always running and quick; (2) it is never in the same place moment to moment; and (3) it is completely without form. In this way, it is a distraction, a faculty of control by the emotions over our sensibilities. We cannot see the world clearly by fault of the mind.
In a story of a group of monks attempting to identify mind in competition for the position of the monastry's head master, it was mistaken that the mind is the mirror to ourselves. Only the monastry chef, completely unconcerned with any aspiration for the position, conceived correctly that the mind is in fact the dust on the mirror that is ourselves.
Those who understand the Way can clean the mirror of mind, for only then can we see our reflection and who we really are. Until then, we are slaves to the puppetry of other forces and particularly our emotions. One reason is that we are cognizant of qualities of pleasure versus pain and naturally incline towards pleasure and away from pain. But when we look into ourselves deeply, looking past the dust of mind controlled by determining forces of pain and pleasure, we can see that these feelings are the effects of such causes.
We experience pain or pleasure by effect. Meditating and looking deeply disciplines us to identify pain before its effect, freeing us from the constraints of manipulating forces, freeing us from the role as the puppet.
Noticing our comforts and discomforts around whom we are with is a good way to observe how we react to different stimuli and are manipulated by the causes. Sitting with a group of similarly devoted meditators is recognizably different than sitting, for example, on a public subway train in the heart of Los Angeles. When we are surrounded by strangers, by the unknown, we become anxious and often even scared. We cannot predict what will happen to us, what someone may do to us.
This has intimate connections to our fear of death. But when we come to know ourselves, through wiping the dust off the mirror and seeing our true face, we no longer have to be afraid because we realize that death is not what we thought it was. We see into and past ourselves into the world, and not even death can play a contingent role to our contentment and service in life. When we are ready to die, nothing nor no one can kill us.◊
2 comments:
I like this post.
thank you
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