Clean Your Mind

Close your eyes and take a couple of good, long, deep, in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breathing in the body. Focus your attention there and then ask yourself if it’s comfortable. If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you can change. Make it shorter, more shallow, heavier, lighter, faster, slower. Try to pay full attention to how it feels right now. The more sensitive you are to how it feels, the more comfortable it’ll become. You need to get to know your mind really well—know what’s going on inside.

This morning there were some raccoon tracks up on the top of the hill. A raccoon must have come around last night. The reason we know it was last night is because we keep the place swept every day. Anything that comes in—whether it’s a snake or a raccoon or whatever—we can see the tracks. We know that something has happened.

It’s the same with your mind. You’ve got to clean out your mind every day if you want to see what’s going on. Otherwise, greed, aversion, and delusion come in and they leave their tracks, but you don’t recognize them because there are tracks all over the place. You can’t tell what’s what because everything is all on top of one another. Greed comes, aversion comes, and then more greed, more aversion. And you don’t notice it because it just seems like the normal way of the mind. It’s only when you clean things out that you can see—oh, greed has come. Passion has come—aversion, anger, jealousy.

So keep your mind clean every day. We clean our homes every day. We clean our bodies. We brush our teeth every day. You have to remember that your mind is much more valuable than any of these things. So it should be kept really, really clean, so that you can know what’s going on.

As the Buddha said, we suffer because of ignorance. What is our ignorance? It’s not that we don’t know about things outside. We know lots of things outside. We now carry little screens around in our pockets that give us all kinds of information. But they can’t tell us what’s going on in our minds right now. That’s where the important ignorance is. It’s because you don’t know your mind that when you do, say, and think things that you hope will give rise to happiness, they often give rise to the opposite.

So try to bring some knowledge here. The best way to bring some knowledge is to keep things clean. In the old texts, they talk about how the rewards of keeping a monastery clean are that you gain in discernment. Well, it’s right here. It’s not just some magical thing. The more you sweep around the monastery, the discernment just comes on its own, because as you sweep, you learn to observe. And as you learn to observe, you get more and more sensitive to what’s going on.

Of course, raccoons could leave tracks even on a clean place, and you wouldn’t recognize them because you don’t know what a raccoon track is. This is why we learn about the Dhamma. But once we’ve learned about the Dhamma, then the big job is to keep our minds clean so that we can recognize what animals have come through the mind.

They say that Ven. Sariputta, who was the Buddha’s chief disciple in terms of his wisdom, was also very clean. He’d be putting on his robe and he’d see a few leaves scattered here and there. He’d use his foot to brush the leaves away. He was that interested in keeping things clean. That outside habit becomes an inside habit, as you keep your mind clean. Then you can see what’s coming through.

It’s only when you see these things that you can do something about them. When anger comes, you can learn how to develop goodwill. When greed comes, you can learn how to reflect on how the things you need to do in order to get what you want sometimes involve breaking the precepts. Well, it’s not worth it. The things that you gain will waste away, but then you’ve still got the karma of what you’ve done.

So as you sweep through your mind, reflect. Notice what’s come through the mind since the last time you swept through it. Then try to be there when it comes through again. That’s when you can do something about it. The ignorance that causes suffering can get less and less. And you get to know your mind better and better. When you know it really well, that’s when you know that it can create happiness for you that’s not going to change into anything else.