Lift Your Mind

In Thai, they say that when you come to the meditation, you lift your mind to the object—to lift it above its ordinary concerns about who did what to whom, what the weather’s like, what the past and the future are like. Lift your mind above those things. The Buddha gives the image of climbing up a tower, looking at the people below. You see what they’re doing, but you’re not involved with their conflicts. You’re not involved with their battles. You’re lifting your mind above those things.

This doesn’t apply only to other people. It also applies to moods in the mind. You’ve got to lift your mind above your moods. That way, you can see that they spin around, but you don’t have to spin around with them.

You think of the issues of the world. There’s gain and there’s loss. There’s status, loss of status. Praise, criticism. Pleasure, pain. That’s pretty much all the world has to offer. And none of those things are reliable. You gain, then you lose. Then you gain again and lose again. The same with other people.

As the world spins around like this, it’s not spinning innocently. It spins like the gears on a machine. If you get caught in the gears, they can smash you. So you have to lift yourself above them. They can turn around, but you don’t have to get caught up in them and turn around with them.

Then you can see the use of whatever good or bad is coming your way. Even bad things have their use sometimes. When there’s loss, you find out who your true friends are. When there’s criticism, you can ask yourself, is the criticism true? If it’s true, then you’ve learned something about yourself you may not have been noticing. If it’s not true, you’ve learned something about the people who criticize you. So either way you gain.

When you think in these ways, then you don’t have to go up and down with the ups and downs of the world. You don’t have to spin around as they spin around. If you spin around after the things of the world, you begin to lose your sense of direction. But as you lift yourself above those things, then you maintain your sense of what’s right, what’s wrong. And that way you can benefit from these things without being burdened by them, without being harmed by them.

So lift your mind as you go through the day. Whenever you find it sunk in a complaining mood, just lift it above the complaints. You’ve got a better thing to focus on; you can focus on your breath, what the breath energy can do for you in the present moment. So lift your mind there.