Shadows Clouding the Mind

When we look after the mind continually with meditation, it will gradually become more and more calm.

When it’s calm, it will begin to develop radiance along with its calm. And once it’s calm, then when we contemplate anything we can penetrate into the workings of cause and effect so as to understand in line with the truths that appear both within us and without.

But if the mind is clouded and confused, its thoughts are all worthless. Right becomes wrong, and wrong becomes progressively even more wrong.

Thus we are taught to train the mind so that it will be quiet, calm, and radiant, able to see its shadows, just as when water is limpid and clear: We look down into the water and can see clearly whatever plants or animals there are. But if the water is muddy, we can’t see anything when we look down into it. No matter what’s there in the water–plants, animals, or whatever–we can’t see them at all.

The same holds true with the mind. If it’s clouded, then we can’t see the harm of whatever–big or small–is hidden within it, even though that harm has been bad for the mind all along. This is because the mind isn’t radiant. For this reason, a mind clouded with muddy preoccupations can’t investigate to the point of seeing anything, which is why we have to train the mind to make it radiant, and then it will see its shadows.

These shadows lie buried in the mind. In other words, they’re the various conditions that come out of the mind. They’re called shadows—and we’re forever deluded into being attached to these shadows that come from the thoughts constantly forming and coming out of the mind at all times. They catch us off guard, so that we think ‘this’ is us, ‘that’ is us, anything at all is us, even though they are simply shadows and not the real thing.

Our belief or delusion, though, turns them into the ‘real thing.’ As a result, we end up troubled and anxious.

This reflection by Venerable Ācariya Mahā Boowa Ñāṇasampanno is from the Thai Forest Ajaans book Straight from the Heart: Thirteen Talks on the Practice of Meditation, “Investigating Pain,” translated from the Thai by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu.