The Mind Well-trained
January 14, 2024
Close your eyes. Take a couple of good, long in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breathing in the body. Place your attention there, then stay with the breath—all the way in, all the way out. And again with the next breath and then the next. Try to get the mind to settle down here to be with one thing. There’s a tendency, of course, to be with one thing for a while and then run off to another thing someplace else. Here we’re trying to train it in new habits, because as the Buddha says, the mind well trained brings happiness. If the mind is not trained, it can create all kinds of trouble. It’ll latch on to ideas, latch onto emotions, and do a lot of harm. You want to be able to get some control of your thinking, so that you can think the thoughts that are really good to think, and let go of the thoughts that are not.
This requires that you be really mindful, that you keep this in mind: that you want to train your mind. Secondly, you have to be alert to watch what the mind is actually doing, and if you see that if it’s doing what you want it to do, then maintain that. If it’s not, you can change. The effort that you put in there—the desire to get this right—is called *ardency. *That’s the third quality you want to develop in the mind. These are the qualities that train you.
It’s like training an elephant. You may have never seen an elephant being trained, but it’s a very complicated process, because they’re taking a very big and very wild animal and making it very tame. A big animal like that can do a lot of damage, but the trainers are training it to do good. Elephants, when they’re well trained, know human language, know what work they have to do, and the work gets done.
In the same way, you want your mind to be able to do the work it needs to do. After all, there’s a lot that needs to be done inside. We have a lot of greed, a lot of aversion, a lot of anger, a lot of delusion, jealousy—all kinds of unskillful qualities in mind. We can’t let them take over, but they’re very clever, very slick at taking over, so we have to be very careful, very watchful. You’ve got to give the mind a better place to be, because it usually goes for these things because it’s hungry. It needs a little bit of pleasure; it needs a little bit of well-being—what it sees as well-being—so it goes for whatever promises that. Sometimes we say it’s our lust that makes us happy, or our anger that makes us happy, but it’s happy only for the short term. We now want happiness that’s long-term.
This is going to require some discipline. We don’t like the word discipline because it sounds as if a harsh taskmaster is trying to beat us up. What it really means, though, is that you see that you have some desires that are more important than others, more skillful than others, and you want to make sure that they stay foremost. Your desire for happiness that lasts, a happiness that doesn’t harm you, doesn’t harm anybody: That should have primary place in your mind, so you’ll have to discipline everything else in the mind to make sure that that overriding desire does stay in charge.
Discipline not so much a matter of having to abide with unpleasant rules, but more a matter of having a sense of priorities as to what’s important in life, what’s not important in mind, and training your mind so that it can accomplish what really is important. It doesn’t waste its time running around after things that can cause trouble for itself and for people around you. In this way, your mind gets well trained, and the work that needs to be done gets done. Then you can rest. Those elephants in Thailand: They work only part of the year, and then they rest part of the year, too, as a reward for having done good work. The mind gets to rest, too, when it’s done good work, like the elephant that can rest along the way.
Get the mind into a good state of concentration like this. Focus on the breath so that the breath feels good coming in, feels good going out. As you stay here, then when you act, you’re coming from a place of well-being, and that makes it a lot easier to say No to the parts of the mind that you know are going to lead you to something unpleasant or to doing something unskilful. You get better and better at perceiving which parts of the mind promise things that seem good but don’t really deliver. That’s part of the training, too.
When your mind is well trained, it’ll bring you happiness, and that happiness spreads around. The happiness of the Dhamma is not like the happiness of the world. The happiness of the world depends on material gain, on status, on praise, and on sensual pleasures, but those are the sorts of things that, when one person gains, other people have to lose. That kind of happiness creates divisions in the world. As we can see, when people gain more and more wealth, they have to build higher and higher walls and hire more and more security guards to protect themselves and their wealth.
But when your happiness depends on being generous, being virtuous, training your mind, that kind of happiness spreads around, and everybody wins. Nobody is going to be jealous of your happiness; nobody is going to try to take it away. So, train your mind in that direction, as that’s the direction that’s really safe.
