Mind Conditions the Mind

　　by Ajahn Sumedho

　　As you try to understand how to live your life, consider that how you actually live in a place has its effect on your mind. Like a monk”s cell or room, if seen as just a place to crash out, then it becomes merely that. As you develop it into a place for mindfulness, you set up that which supports and encourages your practice.

　　So you begin to see that how you think and what you do, affects the space around you, either for the good or for the bad. One”s isolated view is that somehow you are an independent creature that is living life for yourself, without it being influenced or affected by anything or affecting or influencing any- This is the total alienation view. We can see why in a society where samanas or holy people live, that society has a quality to it that is lacking in a country where there isn”t any encouragement or interest in the holy life. Many of you have been to India, and you can see that in spite of the poverty and the many kinds of depressing sights in India, one thing that”s always impressive, is the fact that spiritual life is highly regarded there. Because of that, India has a quality to it. In spite of the poverty and corruption, I personally would rather live in India than in a country that didn”t allow religion of any sort, even if it was well organised and clean and efficient. I think that one really appreciates that which is uplifting the spirit, the inclination towards the pine. Then as you lift yourselves up from just the instinctual survival mechanisms of the body you find that strong aspiration towards the higher. We reach up to the light or to the sun, symbols of enlightenment, out from the amorphous dark, the nameless terror; away from hell toward heaven; aspiring from the bad to the good. So we determine to develop a life of virtue. This is uplifting the spirit.

　　In the Ovada Patimokkha, the Buddha says "Do good, refrain from doing evil, purify the mind." Do good is the first - thats the rising up, isn”t it

　　 In our lives, there”s the active side - right speech, right action, right livelihood. To really perfect those three, the moral part of our path, is always a matter of rising up. You don”t sink down to do good, you rise up to it. There is a lot of inertia, and just not wanting to be bothered and scepticism and cynicism and laziness and doubt and despair, all this pulls us downward. And so the way out is not to reject or just fight them out of fear or aversion - that pulls us down - but to understand the whole process of rising up.

　　Now if you contemplate the Buddha-rupa on the shrine, then you can see that that is actually a symbol of rising up. Its a figure of a human being who has an erect posture; the eyes are open, but they are not gazing at anything they are not seeking anything, they are not trying to find something to look at - but the eyes are open. So using the energy that one can generate within the body to bring it up, to a balanced posture. In Thailand, the word for going crazy is "thinking too much". And when you look at symbols of modern man such as Rodin”s The Thinker, sitting with his head on his hand, looking utterly depressed - he”s thinking too much.

　　When we think too much we can go crazy, we get depressed, we just get pulled into a kind of whirlpool vortex of thoughts, that always pull us downwards. Even though we might feel elated for a while, it always ends up in pulling us downwards, because thought itself is just like that: if you think too much you can”t really do anything anymore, you have to stop thinking about it to do it. "Should I do the dishes

　　 or shouldn”t I do the dishes

　　 Do I feel like doing them

　　 Is doing the dishes really me

　　 Should men do the dishes and not women or women do the dishes and not men or should b…

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