The Mind Isn’t Wet

Ajaan Fuang tells a story of when he was out in the forest. He set up his umbrella tent one night. When you set up a tent like that, you have to check the sky, make sure there’s no sign of any approaching storms. He didn’t see any storms coming up, so he hung his umbrella from a line between two trees. Well, around midnight a storm *did *come up. I don’t know what you know about umbrella tents, but an umbrella tent just an umbrella with a mosquito net for walls. He had nothing much to protect him. So he put all of his robes, except for his under-robe, into his bowl to keep them dry. Then he sat there in the wind and the rain, and his meditation theme was, *The body may be wet, but the mind isn’t wet. *He got into a good state of concentration that night. He came out after the storm had passed. Next morning, he went out on his alms round, and the people in the little village nearby were surprised that his robes were dry.

It’s a good point to know though: When there’s any danger to your robes, put them in the bowl.

But the really important thing about the story was the meditation theme. After all, being cold and wet is a physical property. The mind is a mental property. If the mind is suffering from physical properties, it’s taking on those physical properties when it doesn’t have to. It’s the nature of the body that it’s going to be subject to heat, subject to cold, subject to dry weather, subject to wet weather. But that’s not the nature of the mind. The mind is a knowing element. It knows these things but it doesn’t have to take them on.

Our problem is that we take them on, and how we talk to ourselves is what’s driving us crazy.

So get the mind to be more quiet. See what’s actually there without all the talking. It’s like Ven. Sāriputta’s observation that when you’re being hit by sticks and stones, remind yourself that the fact that you have a body means that you’re subject to these things, but the mind itself doesn’t have to take them on. The things of the mind are separate. It can be focused on the breath or on just awareness itself. Heat will be there, it’s part of having a body, but you don’t have to take it on. You don’t have to make yourself suffer from it.

This is the Buddha’s insight: We make ourselves suffer. The suffering that weighs down the mind is what we *add. *The pains of the world outside, the injustice of the world outside, those belong to the world. We take them on, we claim them, bring them inside through our conversations, through our perceptions. We weigh ourselves down, and that’s what makes us suffer. If we didn’t do that, we wouldn’t be suffering even though we live in the world.

Think about arahants. They live in the same world that you do but they don’t suffer. They’ve learned how to separate things out like this.

So focus on the breath so that you can focus on your awareness, and see how many things that ordinarily would make you suffer fall away, fall away. Take on issues only when you really have to. Otherwise, let them go. There are so many issues in the world. If we tried to solve all of them before we got the mind to settle down, we’d die first. Nothing would get settled. But if you settle *this *issue—the suffering the mind creates for itself—then no other issues can weigh it down.