Read Online Into the Heart of Life by Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo - Free Book Online Page B

appearance, always trying to look young and attractive, to wear the right kind of clothes and give people the right kind of impression. We think, “This is who I am.”
    If we go somewhere else, we leave our house behind. We don’t carry it with us; we are not snails. But our mind we carry with us everywhere; we live within our minds. Everything we see is projected to us through our five senses organs which impinge on our consciousness and then are interpreted by the mind. The mind itself is considered as the sixth sense: one which is constantly churning up memories, thoughts, ideas, opinions, judgments, likes, and dislikes. We live inside our mind. Where else do we live? If we go to Europe, if we go to Africa, if we go to Asia, we take our mind with us. Whether we are in the middle of Sydney or up the mountain in a cave, we bring our mind with us. This is where we live, we live in our mind.
    But how many of us take the trouble to decorate our minds? When we consider the amount of input—television, movies, magazines, newspapers, and all the cacophony with which we live constantly—this junk is being poured into our mind every waking minute, and we never empty it out. It’s like a great big garbage pit in there. Think of it. All this trash is constantly being shoveled into our minds and we never get rid of it: it’s all in there. Sometimes I think it would be interesting to have a loud-speaker attached to our minds so everyone would hear what we are constantly thinking. Wouldn’t we all want to learn to meditate quickly, quickly? We’d all want to learn how to control our wild mind and deal with all the junk in there.
    Now, would you invite the Dalai Lama into your home if it was full of junk and garbage and hadn’t ever been cleared out? You wouldn’t. You would clean it first. You would make it nice and have everything beautifully arranged, open all the doors and windows to let fresh air in and then you would invite His Holiness into your house.
    So how can we invite wisdom into a mind which is just a cesspool? Seriously. First, we have to do a bit of cleaning up. We have to open up the doors and windows to let some fresh air in. Initially, that’s what this whole question of meditation and learning how to be present in the moment and such practices are all about. They’re about learning how to cleanse the mind, because even if we just cleaned the windows a bit, we could see out. Now, we see everything through our confused, turbulent minds full of the poisons of ill-will, greed, delusion and so on. No wonder we’re confused. As I keep saying, we want to be happy, so why do we keep doing things which create the opposite? Why? We want to be happy, we want to make others happy, we put effort into it, so how is it that we’re not all radiantly blissful?
    There is a state of mind beyond suffering, a state of mind which is free. Even in our own way, as ordinary people, we can begin to incorporate some of these qualities—like generosity and compassion—into our life. It’s not as impossible as it might sound. But first, to see how we create our own suffering, we have to understand that opening to such qualities is necessary, and we have to understand why it’s necessary. Our suffering doesn’t depend on what is happening “out there.” It really depends on our own mind, the state of our own mind, and our reactions to what is happening out there.
    People who are mentally disturbed spend a lot of time thinking about themselves; they’re obsessed with their own happiness and their own suffering and they spend much time, as many of us do, on wondering, “How can I be happy?” But the irony of the situation is that, if we think less about how we can make ourselves happy, and more about how we can make others happy, somehow we end up being happy ourselves. People who are genuinely concerned with others have a much happier and more peaceful state of mind than those who are continually trying to manufacture their