Meditation Instruction's by Ven Ajan Brakmavanso
"Need to Exercise to Make Your Body Stronger, But You Need to Keep your Mind Still and Calm to Make Your Mind Stronger and Sharp" - Ven Achan Cha
Training this Mind
-------------------------
TRAINING THIS MIND... actually there's nothing much to this mind. It's simply radiant
in and of itself. It's naturally peaceful. Why the mind doesn't feel peaceful right
now is because it gets lost in its own moods. There's nothing to mind itself. It simply
abides in its natural state, that's all. That sometimes the mind feels peaceful and other
times not peaceful is because it has been tricked by these moods. The untrained mind
lacks wisdom. It's foolish. Moods come and trick it into feeling pleasure one minute and
suffering the next. Happiness then sadness. But the natural state of a persons' mind isn't
one of happiness or sadness. This experience of happiness and sadness is not the actual
mind itself, but just these moods which have tricked it. The mind gets lost, carried away
by these moods with no idea what's happening. And as a result, we experience pleasure
and pain accordingly, because the mind has not been trained yet. It still isn't very clever.
And we go on thinking that it's our mind which is suffering or our mind which is happy,
when actually it's just lost in its various moods.
The point is that really this mind of ours is naturally peaceful. It's still and calm like
a leaf that is not being blown about by the wind. But if the wind blows then it utters.
It does that because of the wind. And so with the mind it's because of these moods
getting caught up with thoughts. If the mind didn't get lost in these moods it wouldn't
utter about. If it understood the nature of thoughts it would just stay still. This is called
the natural state of the mind. And why we have come to practice now is to see the mind
in this original state. We think that the mind itself is actually pleasurable or peaceful. But
really the mind has not created any real pleasure or pain. These thoughts have come and
tricked it and it has got caught up in them. So we really have to come and train our minds
in order to grow in wisdom. So that we understand the true nature of thoughts rather than
just following them blindly.
The mind is naturally peaceful. It's in order to understand just this much that we have
come together to do this by practice of meditation.