Maintain a concerted gaze on your mind.

Maintain a concerted gaze on your mind. That doesn’t mean staring at it unblinkingly like a madman. It means constantly tracking your feelings. Do it a lot; concentrate a lot; develop it a lot: this is called progress. You don’t know what I mean by this gazing at the mind, this kind of effort and development. I’m talking about knowing the present state of your mind. If lust or ill-will or whatever arise in your mind, then you have to know all about it. In practice, the mind is like a child crawling about and the sense of knowing is like the parent. The child crawls around in the way that children do and the parent lets it wander, but, all the same, they keep a constant eye on it. If the child looks like its going to fall in a pit, down a well or wander into danger in the jungle, the parent knows. This type of awareness is called ‘the one who knows, the one who is clearly aware, the radiant one’.

Ajahn Chah

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