Mirrors
November 01, 2023

We close our eyes as we meditate so that we can see clearly what’s going on in the body, inside the mind. Because this is where all the issues come from. It’s because of greed, aversion, delusion, and fear that people can do a lot of unskillful things. The problem is their fears are directed at the wrong places. What we should be fearful of is our greed, aversion, and delusion.

So turn around and look inside. What’s going on inside? We know so much about the world outside, but the mind inside is hard to explore. Because the mind doesn’t like to reflect on itself, its attention goes outside. So you have to turn around.

This is why the Buddha used the image of a mirror so much in his teachings. You look in a mirror to see what blemishes there are on your face. If you see any blemishes, you do what you can to remove them. In the same way, he said, you look at your actions. And your actions, here, can mean bodily actions, verbal actions, and, most importantly, the actions in your mind. See if they’re blemished.

Part of the problem is that we’re coming from delusion. So there are a lot of things we can’t see inside the mind. Sometimes it’s because we’re simply not looking, and sometimes we’re actually hiding things from ourselves.

So we meditate to look. That’s what mindfulness and concentration are for. The well-being of concentration is to put you in a good mood, so that you’re more and more willing to see the things that you don’t want to see. After all, that’s a lot of what our ignorance is. We have these habits we’ve picked up, and we just go with them. We don’t step back from them. If we saw them in other people, we wouldn’t like them. But somehow being inside makes them different. At least that’s what we think.

So meditation gives you a good, comfortable place to stay with the breath so that you can step outside of your mind and take a good look.

The Buddha says that most Dhamma practice comes from looking at yourself. If you look at other people and you see that they have some defilements, the important thing is to turn the mirror around to yourself. Do you have those same defilements? If you do, this is what it looks like. So be more careful about what you do and say and think.

And be willing to admit when you’ve made mistakes. After all, that’s the attitude the Buddha has—that greed, aversion, and delusion are mistakes. There’s nothing inherently evil about us. It’s just that we have a lot of confused notions about what will bring about true happiness. So look at them as mistakes. And mistakes can be used as a topic to study, so you can learn from them. And then you can turn around and not repeat those mistakes.

That’s a lot of what letting go is—seeing that we were holding onto things. The word “holding on” here, makes it sound like the mind has a hand with which it grasps things. It’s not the case. It’s simply it has these habits that it goes back to again and again and again. We can learn to see that the habit is unnecessary and that it’s causing suffering. Then it’s a lot easier to stop doing it. That’s what it means to let go.

So look at what you’re doing. And give most of your attention to your actions and the results of your actions. Use other people as mirrors. If you see someone doing good, okay this is something human beings can do. Are you doing it? You see people doing things that are not so good—well, again, this is what it looks like from the outside. If you have these habits in yourself, you might want to change them.

When you know how to look, then you’re going to see. And when you see, then you can act on that knowledge. That’s how we get past the delusion that hides things from us and makes us do things that are not in our best interest. When we get past that delusion, then the mind is more and more its own friend.