kareniel
commented
7 years ago Example:
Deck: Restraint of the senses
One of the cards:
This doesn’t mean that you go around with blinders on your eyes or plugs in your ears; it simply means that you’re skillful in how you look at things, skillful in how you listen. If you know that something tends to arouse lust or anger, learn to look at it in a way that counteracts the lust or anger. In other words, if something seems attractive, you look for its unattractive side. If something seems unattractive, you look for its attractive side. As Ajahn Lee, one of the foremost teachers of the Thai forest ascetic tradition, says, be a person with two eyes, not just one.
It’s not that you shouldn’t look at the body; it’s just that you should look more carefully. Look at the parts that aren’t attractive. This balances the one-sided view that simply focuses on a few attractive details here and there and tends to blot out everything else in order to give rise to lust. After all, it’s not the body that’s productive of lust. The mind produces lust. Many times the mind wants to feel lust and so it goes out looking for something to incite the lust. It grabs hold of whatever little details it can find, even when those details are surrounded by all sorts of unclean things.
So keep watch on what comes out of the mind and what comes in. For lay people, this means being careful about the friends you associate with, the magazines you read, the TV you watch, the music you listen to. After a while you find that this is not a case of restricting yourself so much as it is learning to see things more carefully, more fully. Now you’re seeing both sides of things that used to seem solely attractive or solely unattractive.
This takes some effort. You have to be more energetic in watching how you look and listen. But the benefit is that the mind is in much better shape to meditate because you’re not filling it up with all kinds of stuff that’s going to harm it, weaken it or get in the way. So many times when you sit down to meditate, if you’ve been careless about what’s been coming in and out of your mind, you find it’s like cleaning out a shed after a year of neglect. There’s so much garbage in there that you spend almost the whole hour cleaning it out and then realize you have only five minutes for any real stillness at the end. So keep the mind clean from the beginning, all the time. Don’t let any garbage in the door or in the windows. That way you find you have a much nicer place to settle in when you create your meditation home.
Source: Thanissaro Bhikkhu, "Creating a Good Ground for Meditation", http://www.lionsroar.com/creating-a-good-ground-for-meditation/
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