Look after your mind

“If you look after your mind and make it happy, then you always have this happiness with you all the time. It does not leave you.”

If you look after things that you cannot look after, you will be disappointed, sad, and sorry. If you look after things that you can look after, then you will be fulfilled, satisfied, and happy.

There are things that you can look after, and there are things that you cannot look after. The things that you cannot look after, or keep as long as you want, are your wealth, your status, your fame, and your happiness that you acquire through your body. These things are all temporary. They do not last forever.

You can have wealth; you can also lose wealth. You can have status; you can also lose status. You can have fame, and you also can lose fame. You can have happiness through your body; you can also lose it. The Buddha said you should not go after these things or look after them because they are not permanent. They are not stable; they are all subject to change. They come and go, arise and cease. If you go after these things, when they disappear, you will become very unhappy, very sad.

But there is one thing that you can look after and keep with you all the time and that is your mind, your heart, or your spirit. These are all the same thing. I refer to the thing that is different from your body. We use different terminology to refer to this non-physical aspect of ourselves. Sometimes we call it the mind, sometimes the heart. Some religions call it the spirit or the soul. This is the same thing as far as I am concerned. It is the thing that we belong to. We come from this thing. This thing, the mind, will always be with us, all the time, regardless of whatever may happen to all the other things.

Your wealth can come and go. Your status can come and go. Your fame can come and go. Your happiness through your body can come and go, but your spirit never comes and goes. Your mind never comes and goes; it is always here with you. So, if you look after your mind and make it happy, then you always have this happiness with you all the time. It does not leave you. It stays with the mind all the time. The problem is that we are not looking after the mind. We are not generating or creating happiness of the mind because we go after other kinds of happiness.

We go after wealth, status, fame, and happiness through our indulgence of our contact with sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile objects. We’ve never had the real kind of happiness because we’ve never generated it, never created it. We go after the false kind of happiness, the temporary kind of happiness. We do not go after the permanent kind of happiness.

Only the Buddha had the wisdom to see this truth, to realize the real and false kinds of happiness. When he realized it, he abandoned the false kind of happiness and went after the real kind of happiness. He left all his wealth, fame, and status behind, as well as the happiness that he could have through the body. He gave it all up. He became a monk and went into seclusion, lived in the forest away from all the false kinds of happiness and tried to create, develop, and maintain the real kind of happiness.

The real kind of happiness arises within the mind that is peaceful and calm, the mind that is free from delusion, the mind that is free from greed, hatred, and delusion, the mind that is free from desire. The three kinds of desire that agitate the mind are: sensual desire, the desire for sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile objects, and the desire to be and desire not to be, such as the desire to be rich, to be famous, or to have high status.

These are the desires that we have to get rid of, eliminate, and abandon, in order to bring the mind to peace and calm, to be happy. This is the work that we must do if we want to have the real kind of happiness. We must abandon our false kinds of happiness. We should stop looking for wealth, status, fame, and happiness through our body. We should go look after the real kind of happiness…”

By Ajaan Suchart Abhijāto