Resistance to Disease
November 06, 2023

The Buddha saw that our minds are diseased. Greed, aversion, and delusion are there in the mind ready to show themselves at any time. It’s not the things outside make us greedy or make us aversive. Oftentimes the impetus comes from within. It’s because we have these germs inside us that we’re able to pick up the germs from outside.

Some people say that we were born with pure minds and our social conditioning makes us impure. But where does social conditioning come from? It comes from other people. And if we didn’t have the germs for these diseases inside, we wouldn’t pick them up from outside. So we have to work on them inside.

Think of this as building your resistance to outside incitements. So you work with the breath. You work with the way you talk to yourself. This is really important—what you tell yourself is important—what you tell yourself should and should not be done. This determines an awful lot of what you’re going to pick up from outside. It also determines how much you’re going to be aggravating the potentials for greed, aversion, and delusion inside.

So when we meditate, we get practice in talking to ourselves about something useful: staying with the breath; making the breath comfortable. Once the breath is comfortable, how do you maintain that sense of comfort? When you’re able to maintain it, how do you let it spread? What perceptions do you hold in mind? What images you have in the mind of how the breath can flow through the body—how that sense of ease can flow through the body?

The Buddha’s image is of a bathman. Back in those days, they didn’t have bars of soap. They would have a bathman who would fix soap powder for you and then mix it with water into a kind of dough that you’d rub across your body. When the bathman mixes the dough, he has to make sure that all the dough gets moistened and there’s no moisture left over. So it has to be perfectly mixed.

In the same way, you try to mix your sense of well-being with all the sensations of the body. Think of everything being permeable, so that good sensations can penetrate them.

When you develop this sense of well-being inside, then it’s a lot easier to resist the germs of defilement, both inside and outside the mind. So, build up your resistance, because diseases are all around us and inside us, as well. We want to make sure that we don’t succumb to them, we don’t aggravate them. At some point, we’ll get to the point where there’s no more potential inside the mind. But as long as there is a potential, we have to be careful.