The mind has a habit of loading itself down with all sorts of unnecessary garbage. It’s like a phrase they have in Thai, “the old woman loading herself down with straw.” The story goes that she thought that someday she might find herself in need of some straw, so everywhere she went she carried a huge load of straw on her back. Of course she was always bent over and at the same time could never pick up anything that was any better. When she got home that’s all she had: this b

When you come to practice the Dhamma, there are a lot of times when you experience culture shock. It’s not a question of going from a Western culture to an Asian culture. It’s going from a culture of ordinary people with defilements — Asian or Western — to the culture of the Noble Ones. Their culture involves a radically different set of values, a different etiquette, a different purpose.

July 5, 2003 The Dhamma strips things down to their essentials, with the realization that if you try to take on too many things all at once, you end up not doing anything very well. This is what the principle of renunciation is all about: realizing that some problems are more important than others, and some solutions more important than others as well. Some forms of happiness last longer than others do. So we have to look at ourselves with the realization that we have only so

July, 2003 Many ancient tribes marked the line between childhood and adulthood by sending the person off into the wilds to be alone. Some of the tribes called it a vision quest. The person could be alone for days to see what kind of vision would come up from within the mind, from within the heart, independent of the training he or she had received as a child. That was supposed to mark the person’s entry into adulthood, to give a sense of what the adulthood would be all about.