What should one do if the mind continues to resist being tamed, if I feel like no progress is being made?
Continue meditating.
Just be patient and don't get frustrated.
But if you do, then note frustration and note everything that is going on.
You are living out there in this world with all these temptations and all these distractions and so on.
So it is when you are not meditating regularly or when you are too much out there in the world and have not learned yet to seclude your mind, then
you might not be able to feel that the mind starts to be tamed or that it has been tamed already.
Sometimes you don't even notice because it's progressing little by little
And you don't even notice that your mind changed and that your mind has become more silent and more still and that you can direct your thoughts much better than you could before.
But you are not aware of it.
It can of course be that you don't... that you can't tame your mind really.
And then the most efficient solution were to come on retreat, to get a good foundation, and then go home and continue practicing.
And in the meantime, as I said earlier, note everything that is arising.
And then you might be able to see the changes in your mind.
Well said.
But I would like to add one thing.
Okay.
Kind of, what do you say, not quite devil's advocate, but kind of smarmy.
Because, okay,
What should I do if the mind continues to resist being tamed?
Well, I want to ask you questions in return.
How does it feel to have your mind resist being tamed?
Does that make you want to cling to the mind?
Or does that make you feel like the mind is a good thing?
And as Polignani said, does that make you frustrated?
And of course, that would be one answer, is to acknowledge the frustration.
But the real question, yeah, so frustrating, the real question is, what does that mean about the mind?
In that case, is the mind stable or unstable?
Is it satisfying or unsatisfying?
Is it controllable or uncontrollable?
Because we read about the very core of the Buddha's teachings.
Some people don't even, but I think this is a person who has been involved.
He's named Gothic Buddhist, so you know something about Buddhism.
But when we actually experience these things, impermanence, suffering, non-self, we still fall back into the trap of thinking something's wrong.
Because the truth is that that in and of itself is an incredible progress, to see that the mind cannot be tamed, to see that you can't tie the mind down and expect it to sit still and say, sit down and expect your mind to at any point be under your control.
This is the danger involved in being complacent about tranquility meditation.
Because even if you enter into tranquility meditation, which the Buddha recommended, which is a great thing, if you stop there, if you become complacent about it,
you'll still fall into a great amount of suffering and stress when it changes, when it disappears.
You will still be liable to fall back into a state of impermanence or a state of instability of mind.
The mind can still become distracted again.
I have this story that I used to tell all the time about this monk who had magical powers.
He could fly through the air.
And he was looked after by this king because the king had a great esteem for him.
And one day the king, one time the king had to go away to fight the war.
And so he gave his queen to be in charge of looking after the monk.
And so the monk would come on alms round and whereas before the king would give him food, now the queen would give him food and he would fly in through the palace window.
stand there and take the food.
Now one time the queen had taken a shower or a bath and she was lying with her robe and she said, I'll lie down and wait for the monk to come and she fell asleep.
And when the monk came in, he made a noise coming in through the window or touching the floor or else he cleared his throat or something.
And she woke up and stood up and the robe fell off.
And he saw this beautiful queen totally naked.
And he totally lost his taba, as they say in Thai.
He lost his tranquility.
and lost his magical powers as well so he turned around when he took the food he turned around to fly out through the window and he found that he couldn't fly anymore and he's like up up and not away and so he walked out the door and totally lost everything and the story goes on eventually the king the queen explained to the king how to how to solve the problem she said give give me to him give me to him as my as his wife and so the king called this ascetic and said okay you can have my queen and take her away
And they went away and the queen really made a fool out of him.
Said, okay, so we'll have to go and get a house.
The king has given us this house to live in.
And she said, oh, go back to the palace and fetch me my slippers.
And so he went back, all the way back to the palace.
Fetch your slippers.
Now go and fetch me my purse or go and fetch me this pillow or go and fetch me that or go and fetch me this.
Back and forth and back and forth.
He had totally lost his mind.
And so when he came back, finally she grabbed him by the beard, because he was a bearded ascetic, and said, look at you, you're an ascetic.
And she woke him up and made him realize what a fool he was being.
But the only point, the reason why I tell that story often or I used to tell it is to remind us how there is no stability of mind.
You can't find, even this powerful state that allows you to read people's minds, fly through the air and so on, it's not permanent.
And so, in a roundabout way, I think that is an important part of the answer that your realization, your insight into the nature of the mind as being difficult to tame is an important vipassana insight.
And then the last question we can ask is what then does that
do to your mind?
Or how does that make you react or act in the future?
Will that make you more keen to control the mind in the future?
Are you going to be more keen to, okay, let's try again and
tie the mind down.
No, you're more likely to be disinterested, nibida as the Buddha said, to be dispassionate about it or even averse to getting involved with it at all.
And you'll find that when the mind does go crazy, when the mind starts thinking about many things, you'll be far less inclined to follow after it or even to become upset about it.
to try to control the mind, because the controlling of the mind is out of ignorance.
We try to control our lives, we try to control ourselves, we try to control our minds out of ignorance of the fact that these things are impermanent, unsatisfying and uncontrollable.
I would say this is a common question that people ask because of a misconception of, or really an inability to see our own defilements and the nature of our own mind.
So what you're seeing is actually what you should be seeing.
The problem is at that moment you don't realize it, and so there arises frustration, and then on top of that there arises worry and doubt about whether you're practicing correctly or whether this practice is actually any good or so on.
But in fact that's really, you know, that's why the Buddha was so clear about this and so explicit about the fact, about these qualities of reality as being impermanent, unsatisfying, uncontrollable.
So, yeah, despite the constant fight, I've become more mindful about a few more things than I was.
Even gain outside of meditation by paying more attention to what I'm doing or thinking, which is another important point.
Another thing that you'll realize is that you have to be careful, because whereas you can't control the mind, you do create the mind through habits.
At every moment, you have a choice you can make, and if you choose the same thing,
again and again and again, it will develop a habit in the mind.
And that's what you've done.
That's why the mind is out of control.
So instead of trying to force it to be tamed, you have to change your habits.
You have to start acting in a different way, one that doesn't develop that.
definitely, 100%, you have gained from that experience.
There's no question that someone who can come up with this sort of question has already gained something, has already gained the benefit, and it's helped them to let go.
It's helped them to say, I don't need to control things.
What I need to do is be careful and not let my mind develop in that way again.
Okay.