Live Session Summary, Sunday, October 20, 2024: It was good to be with you today for our Live session. The focus of the session was the Buddha’s saying that ‘nothing can do you more good than a trained mind… and nothing can do you more harm than an untrained mind.’
Here are some of the main themes, poems, and quotes from today’s Live session:
We explored 1) why it is of great importance to train our mind; 2) the suffering we can experience when the mind is untrained; and 3) what it means to train our mind and how we train the mind.
I shared the understanding in the Buddha’s teachings that training the mind—particularly, bringing a kind and non-judging awareness to our moment-to-moment experience—is the doorway to peace, calm, well-being, happiness, and the deepest freedom.
When we open wholeheartedly to our experience—'the good, the bad, and the ugly,’ the joys and the sorrows—we can gain insight into the truth of impermanence, that everything is continually changing and that nothing can be held onto as ‘I’ of ‘mine’. In seeing this clearly, we create the conditions for letting go, for ending clinging and the suffering that arises from clinging.
The Buddha taught mindfulness as the direct path to seeing things as they truly are, rather than through the lens of our desires, aversions, and habitual thinking—and it is seeing clearly that frees the heart and mind. It’s the seeing that frees us.
The Buddha said that ‘nothing can do you more harm than an untrained mind, not even your worst enemy,’ because there is no end to the suffering that can arise from being swept up in painful states, such as greed, hatred, cruelty, and the unconscious behaviors that arise from not bringing awareness to our thoughts and actions.
When the mind is untrained we go wherever our impulses, our reactions, desires and dislikes take us—we’re pulled along by the winds of life, blown this way and that by pleasant experiences—'I want that’—and unpleasant experiences—'I don’t like that; I want to get away from that…’
The suffering in our world comes, fundamentally, from the untrained mind, from our inability to open to and process our emotions, mind states, and thoughts—particularly anger, fear, and greed, so we act them out in the world. The 17th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal said, ‘All of humanities misfortunes come from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone.‘
How do we train the mind? We train the mind by being present to our experience here and now. We open fully to what is present—sounds, sensations, thoughts, feelings, emotions; sadness, anger, joy, calm; pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral feelings. We bring a kind and non-judging awareness to what is present, without judging, clinging, or pushing away, letting it all come and go in its own time.
When the mind moves into thought—plans for the future, worries about what might happen, thinking about something we said or did, or being lost in thought, we gently bring our attention back to the body, to our breathing, to what we’re aware of here and now. And we train not to make it a problem when mind moves into thought, into past or future, we see it as a natural tendency of the mind.
When we learn to stay with our direct experience, letting it come, letting it be, letting it go, we do not add stories and narratives that take us into the past and future and create unnecessary suffering. For example, if we are feeling sad about a loss, we can stay with our direct experience—the feelings, thoughts, emotions, and be aware of our thoughts—without getting swept up in mental stories of ‘it’s always going to be like this,’ ‘I’ll never be happy again,’ etc.
The Buddha said, ‘In the seen, let there just be the seen; in the heard, just the heard…’; and in the common aphorism, ‘Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.’
I shared these quotes and poems:
• Story of the rider and the horse: The horse is galloping along at top speed and someone shouts out to the rider, ‘Where are you going?’ and the rider shouts back, ‘Don’t ask me, ask the horse!’ Much of the time we are pulled along by our habitual mind—by our unconscious urges, impulses, and habits of mind.
• Lines from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets, beginning ‘I said to my soul be still and wait without hope // For hope would be hope for the wrong thing…’
• Poem ‘Untitled’ by Gregory Orr; ‘Fluent’ by John O’ Donohue; lines from ‘Peace’ by Dorothy Hunt—‘Peace is this moment without judgment. // This moment in the heart-space where everything that is is welcome.’
• William James, ‘The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.’
It was good to be with you all today. I wish you a peaceful week ahead and look forward to seeing you on Sunday, November 10 at 9am eastern for our next live session. Warmly, Hugh 🙏🏻 💜 🌻
