I've written and spoken about the Dhamma,
The Buddhist teachings,
As the study of nature.
And in our practice we are studying the Dhamma,
Or studying nature,
Through the experience of our own embodiment,
Both body and mind.
Now the body and mind,
Like all aspects of nature,
Act according to causes and conditions.
And as you may have noticed in your practice,
Sometimes when we sit down to meditate,
We ask the mind to do one thing,
And it seemingly does the opposite.
We request that the mind repeats the metaphrases,
Or pays attention to the breath,
And instead the mind wanders off into thinking and planning,
Seemingly beyond our control.
The reason for this is a result of previous causes and conditions that are enacting and expressing themselves within the mind.
So there's a wonderful analogy that I received from one of my first Dhamma teachers about training the mind.
And the analogy he used is that training the mind is like training a young puppy.
If you've ever had the experience of training a puppy,
Both to joys and frustrations,
We can begin to more clearly understand what it means to work with the mind.
A puppy is a puppy,
And it doesn't know any better.
And so when we first bring the puppy home,
We want to train the puppy to learn to go to the door,
Or to go outside to go to the bathroom.
But what does the puppy do?
It goes to the bathroom on the floor inside the house.
This is because the puppy doesn't know any better.
A puppy is a puppy.
It's an aspect of nature,
And this is its condition.
And because the puppy is so cute,
Although we may be frustrated,
We understand with wisdom and patience that this is simply a puppy,
And it doesn't know any better.
And so we take the puppy and we place it outside.
And then the puppy comes back in and once again goes to the bathroom on the floor of the house.
Again,
With patience and understanding,
We take the cute puppy outside.
And eventually the puppy begins to understand and becomes reconditioned that to go to the bathroom means to go outside,
Not to go inside the house.
And so in a similar way,
The mind is an aspect of nature.
And at this point,
If the mind has not been trained,
It doesn't know any better than to wander off into thinking,
Into planning,
Into worry.
And there's a very good reason that the mind does this,
As we'll begin to soon see later on in our discussions.
But for now,
It's important to understand that we are training an aspect of nature.
And just as we need patience,
Compassion,
And understanding to train a puppy to do what we want it to do,
We need that same approach when training the mind.
So no matter what the mind does,
If it wanders away when you want it to stay,
We must approach that with patience and bring the puppy mind back with compassion to the breath or to the metaphrases and gradually over time,
The mind will respond to this treatment and it will listen to us.
The mind will sit when we ask it to sit.
