The Slippery Mind

‘Buddha’ means ‘one who is awake’. But being awake is not easy to talk about. As soon as we start speaking, we complicate everything. We enter another field of understanding, which is the intellect.
Looking at the mind, dealing with the mind, is slippery business. We have at our disposal an array of tools and skilful means to liberate the mind, but they are competing with the incredible complexities of our ego mechanisms.

Ajahn Chah used to say that trying to catch the mind was like trying to catch a fish. If you go too quickly, it just slips through your hands. If you go too slowly, it gets away and you lose track of it. The mechanisms of the mind are so clever that it is difficult to see what is happening a lot of the time.

We can justify almost anything. We have the capacity to reason out many things, so a lot of our delusion can seem to be very reasonably explained. Our ego is very slippery. We can lie to ourselves quite innocently for a long time. This is why the practice of meditation is a matter of being still. We sit still and witness. As witness, we notice how quick, how conflicting, how changing, how undermining our thoughts and feelings can be.

The cause of suffering is clinging to things. So we should get rid of the cause, cut off its root and not allow it to cause suffering again. People have only one problem - the problem of clinging. Just because of this one thing people will kill each other. All problems, be they individual, family or social, arise from this one root. Nobody wins; they kill each other, but in the end no-one gets anything.

It is all pointless; I don’t know why people keep on killing each other.

This reflection by Ajahn Sundara is from the book, Seeds of Dhamma, (pdf) p. 46.