Seeing the Mind Move
January 03, 2014

Find your breath. If you lost it in the morning, now’s your chance to find it.

Then try to hang on. Ask yourself, “Why did you drop it in the meantime? What kind of things pull your away?” You see this most clearly when you try very diligently to stay with the breath.

This is why it’s important that you don’t let your mind just wander around noting this, noting that. You have to stick with one thing. That’s when you begin to see, when the mind moves from that one thing, why does it go? What are its intentions?

Otherwise, if you just take it for granted that the mind wanders around and you’re just going to be with whatever it focuses on, you never see the motive force for why it’s moving. But when you resist it, then you understand.

It’s like putting a dam across a stream. As you go through the process of building the dam, you find out a lot more about the currents of the river than you would have simply by watching the currents flow past, flow past.

This is why concentration is such an important part of the practice: having one center that you stick to. It doesn’t mean that you’re not aware of other things, but this is your frame of reference. Try to relate everything else to this.

It’s when you have that singleness of object and singleness of intent that you begin to see, “Okay, there are other intents coming in and why are they going in other directions? What’s pushing you off?” There are times when you can resist the push and times you just go right along with it. What was the difference?

This is how concentration gives rise to discernment. You begin to see the movements of your mind and a lot of the subtle movements that you normally just let pass, let pass.

So here’s the time to really get to know your own mind by giving yourself one thing to stick with: You want to stick with the breath throughout the day as much as you can. Make it a comfortable place to be. Have a sense of the breath filling the whole body so that it’s easier to stay here.

But be very careful not to get pushed off. If you sense yourself having been pushed off, then just get right back. Try to get quicker and quicker about sensing when the impulse to go comes into the mind.

Sometimes it’ll come before you actually move. It’ll just kind of plant a little thought, like a little seed, and then it pretends that nothing is happening. But then after a while it begins to grow and then it gets reinforced and all of a sudden you find yourself gone without having really thought about it.

So try to get to see these stages and learn how to prevent then as best you can. You’re going to learn an awful lot about the mind.