Taming your wildly active mind
http://www.tricycle.com/issues/2_676/dailydharma/4415-1.html
Ancient Pali texts liken meditation to the process of taming a wild
elephant. The procedure in those days was to tie a newly captured animal
to a post with a good strong rope. When you do this, the elephant is not
happy. He screams and tramples, and pulls against the rope for days.
Finally it sinks through his skull that he cant get away, and he settles
down. At this point you can begin to feed him and to handle him with
some degree of safety. Eventually you can dispense with the rope and
post altogether, and train your elephant for various tasks. Now youve
got a tamed elephant that can be put to useful work. In this analogy the
wild elephant is your wildly active mind, the rope is mindfulness, and
the post is our object of meditation, our breathing. The tamed elephant
who emerges from this process is a well-trained, concentrated mind that
can then be used for the exceedingly tough job of piercing the layers of
illusion that obscure reality. Meditation tames the mind.
-Henepola Gunaratana, /Mindfulness in Plain English/
from /Everyday Mind,/ edited by Jean Smith, a /Tricycle/ book
