58. Not all that clear

Someone said: “I’ve read the passage in your biography where it says that, while you were wandering, you came to a good understanding about the issue of the mind concocting defilements and defilements concocting the mind. What does that mean?”

Luang Pu answered,

“‘The mind concocting defilements’ refers to the mind’s forcing thoughts, words, and deeds to make external things come into being, making them good, making them bad, giving rise to the results of kamma, and then latching onto those things, thinking, ‘That’s me. That’s my self. That’s mine. That’s theirs.’

“‘Defilements concocting the mind’ refers to external things coming in to force the mind in line with their power, so that it fastens on to the idea that it has a self, assuming things that keep deviating from the truth.”