Removing Defilements

Close your eyes. Let your mind settle with the breath. Keep with the breath all the way in, all the way out. As for any thoughts that would pull you away someplace else, you can just remove them. Let go of them. Of course, they’re going to come back. But you let go of them again. You have to be insistent. You have to be consistent. You have to show the mind that you mean business. You really do want to get the mind to settle down. As for anything else that gets in the way, just remove it.

Today we’re going to be doing the sima removal ceremony, and it’s going to seem long and tiring. But you have to remember, it’s a lot easier than removing your defilements. If we could just have a chant that would remove defilements, we all would have been freed a long time ago. You can remove an old sima—take the chant. You do it again, and again, and again until you’ve covered the whole territory, and that’s it. Your mind can be someplace else. You may think about other things, and you can still remove the territory.

But if you’re going to remove your defilements, you’ve got to be focused. You want to see that there are things in the mind that are causing it to suffer right here, right now. And you want to find them and get rid of them. So you have to get the mind really quiet. There’s a lot of noise in the mind. Your greed, your aversion, and delusion have lots of places to hide in the midst of the noise. But as the mind gets quiet, their hiding places get smaller and smaller, and it’s easier and easier to see them.

We can compare it with a forest and a plane. If you’re up in a plane, you can see things miles away because there’s nothing else to block your vision. If you’re standing inside a forest with trees all over the place, there are lots of hiding places. So make your mind smooth like a plane. Make the breath smooth like a plane flying smoothly through the air, so that you can see things clearly. And then you can develop the discernment that allows you to see that they’re really not worth the effort to continue engaging with.

For that, you need a good sense of well-being. All too often we go for our greed, aversion, and delusion because they give us food. It’s not very good food. It’s the kind of food that may taste good, but then it really burns your stomach, burns your intestines. If you had nothing else, that’s what you’d have to eat. But the Buddha is offering you better food: the food of concentration. When you’ve got that kind of food, you’re well fed. Then you look at the other food you’ve been eating all along, and you realize you don’t need that anymore. You can let go.

So. Work on getting the mind as smooth and as still as possible. Then whatever defilements come up, you can see them well in time. And you’ll be able to deal them when they’re still small. If you have a lot of hiding places in the mind, they can get pretty large before you realize that they’re there, and then they’re really entrenched. So keep the mind with the breath, and in this way you can start removing the things that are causing a lot of trouble.

This sima that we’re removing, we don’t really know that it’s there. We’re going to do the ceremony just in case somebody came through here one time on missionary work with the natives, left a sima behind, and didn’t tell anybody. So we’re doing it just in case it’s there. But with the defilements of the mind, they’re there. You can assume that they’re there, and they have a lot of power. So you need to get the mind smooth, still, and well-fed inside so that you have the strength to deal with them.