Taming the Mind to Raise its Quality : หน้า 15/91

TAMING THE MIND TO RAISE ITS QUALITY Meditation is a legacy passed down from the wisdom of the ancients. The ancients recognized the need to preserve the quality of the mind and placed more importance on this than on finding material prosperity which has benefit limited to this life time because however materially prosperous we are, we cannot take it with us when we have to leave this world. W hen Sir Isaac Newton discovered the centre of gravity in our physical body, little did he know that the same point is also the key point in the uplifting of the quality of the mind discovered over two thousand years earlier by the ancients of India. In those days of old, anyone who wanted to upgrade the quality of their minds would focus their attention inward at this point, training the mind to concentrate within instead of being caught up in the things of the world around him. Reduction of the quality of the mind occurs whenever man’s attention is caught up with the things around him. The longer the mind stays outside the body and the further it drifts away, the more suffering and troubles it will bring back to its owner. Some men are so concerned about their business or about their family, that their mind knows nothing but unrest. Only if they can manage to bring their mind back to their body from the outside world can they possibly escape from all their stress and anxiety. The starting point for Buddhism, as religion to help the suffering of living being is to offer a practice for us to train ourselves to allow the mind to return from outside our bodies back inside ourselves. This is why Buddhism has become so closely linked to the practice of meditation. There are many well-known methods of meditation of which the most common is the technique of following the breath. The focus for the mind in this case is something physical — the breath. This is the linking factor that gradually reduces the amount of time the mind spends drifting around outside the body until with practice the mind will spend more time inside the body than outside. The founding meditation master of the Dhammakaya Tradition discovered that the mind becomes peaceful whenever it rests at the centre of the body, and so the giving rise to the meditation principal of employing the gentlest of effort or the power of the imagination to allow the mind to come to a standstill at the centre of the body. Such internalizing the mind sets in motion a process of mental refinement.