Trustworthy Mind with Noah Levine

October 19, 2020 One of the greatest dilemmas of my own Buddhist practice, is that on one hand it's so clear and obvious that we cannot trust our own minds.

I hope you know that.

I hope that is totally ******* clear to you.

So much so that the Buddha refers to people who don't meditate as “untrained worldlings”. “Untrained” means you haven't trained your mind to see clearly. The Buddha referred to this untrained mind as being like a, “wild monkey / the monkey mind”. A mind that's swinging to the future, the past, judging, comparing and resenting. These are all of the habits and tendencies of the untrained mind: An untrustworthy source of information.

On the other hand, the Dharma, Buddhism, teaches that you have to learn to trust your mind; You are fully responsible for your own happiness. And, you have to come to a place where you know for yourself what is true and what is not true. What of your thoughts are trustworthy and what your thoughts are delusional? But of course, the problem with delusion is that when we're in it, we don't know it; by definition we are stuck in a confused mind-state and we believe it.

So, we have this dilemma.

There's all of this Buddhist teaching saying, “You will wake up. You will see clearly. You will learn how to respond wisely.” So much so the Buddha said, “Don't believe me. I don't want you to have faith in me. I don't want you to believe what I have to say. I want you to know the Dhamma - the truth - for yourself. I'm offering you these Four Noble Truths, this Eightfold Path, this practice of mindfulness, renunciation, refuge in the sangha. I'm offering you this practical, applicable path so that you can know – for yourself – what is true, and what is the path that leads to the end of suffering. What is the truth of suffering? What is the cause of suffering? And the end of suffering."

In this dilemma, you can't really trust the untrained mind but ultimately, you're going to have to train your mind so much that it becomes trustworthy. I don’t know about you, but when I started meditating, I pretty much believed everything that I thought. Is that true for you?