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　　When the mind is outside of the body, it”s the world. When it”s inside the body, it”s Dhamma. If it”s the world, it has to be as hot as fire. If it”s Dhamma, it”s as cooling as water.

　　Skillfulness on the sensual plane is goodness on the conventional, social level. It has to involve people and things outside. Transcendent skillfulness is goodness above and beyond the social level: you learn to depend on yourself, and can handle your problems on your own.

　　The mind of an ordinary person can go forward and back, and so it”s not dependable. Sometimes, after winning, it turns around and loses. It wins today and loses tomorrow. As for the mind of a noble disciple, when it wins it doesn”t then lose. It goes forward and doesn”t slide back. It keeps forging straight ahead.

　　When the mind is undependable, when it doesn”t have firm principles, it”s a Communist mind, i.e., one without any religion. A mind with a religion has to have principles so that it can depend on itself. It”s a mind that can be its own person.

　　When the mind isn”t its own person, it doesn”t have complete authority. It can”t give orders or exercise complete control over anything. For instance, if you order the body to come and listen to a Dhamma talk, it won”t be willing to come. If you order it to sit in concentration, it won”t be willing to sit. Like being a parent: only if you”re the child”s parent 100% will you have full authority over it. If you”re just 50% its parent, and it”s 50% your child, you can”t exercise full control with any confidence. So the mind is like a parent; the body, like a child. That”s why we have to train the mind to be its own person, so that we can have full control over the body. When the mind has full control, we can overcome any pains that arise from the body and any defilements that arise from the mind. That”s when you can say that you”re really your own person.

　　Each of us is like a long-playing record. When we do good, that goodness gets recorded within us. When we do bad, that badness gets recorded within us -- just like a record that”s been used to record good and bad sounds. Whatever type of kamma we do, it stays within us -- it doesn”t go off anywhere else. So ask yourself whether you want to keep goodness or badness within you.

　　The mind is neither good nor bad, but it”s what knows good and knows bad. It”s what does good and does bad. And it”s what lets go of good and lets go of what”s bad.

　　The body is something that wears down and disintegrates into nothing. The mind is something that doesn”t disintegrate, doesn”t die. So we”re like a rice grain, with one part that takes birth and another that doesn”t take birth. The part that doesn”t take birth is the plain rice flour. The part that takes birth is the white spot on its tip. If we don”t want that rice grain to take birth as a plant, all we have to do is demolish the little white spot, and it won”t be able to sprout. The same with us: the body is like the plain rice flour; the mind, the little white spot that sprouts. If the mind contains defilements -- its attachments to good and bad -- without demolishing them, it will cause us to sprout in new planes of being and birth. This is why we”re taught to let go of our attachments to good and bad, to put them both down. When the mind has nothing more to sprout, it can then gain release from birth and death.

　　When the mind leaves the body at death, it vanishes in the same way that an extinguished candle flame doesn”t have a shape for our physical eyes to see. But that doesn”t mean that flame fire has disappeared from the world. It simply gets diffused into its property, like the fire of electricity in a copper wire. If we simply look at the wire we won”t see any fire in it. But if we t…

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