The mind; enemy or friend

An old and famous saying is that the mind can be our enemy or friend. What does a mind as enemy means? To fully understand this, we need to take one step back and talk about the mind first. It is said that the mind is the receiver of the senses. If the mind isn’t controlled the senses basically dictate what we do. It would mean we react more on instinct and do what our senses are telling us to do. In this case the mind is an enemy because it controls us and prevents us from doing the things that are good. If we cannot eat too much sugar for example, but we cannot resist the cake that someone is bringing, this is not a good position for us. Or if we cannot resist the liquor while we need to do an important thing, or if we cannot stop flirting with others while we are married etc.. Those are big examples and in real life it can be much more subtle, but all those examples would not be positive for us if we cannot control the mind.

The mind as a friend would mean the opposite as is described above. It would mean that although our senses, and thus our mind, are tempted to do a certain thing, we ourselves have the control. The examples above are big, but we can make this also much smaller. In meditation we learn to observe our thoughts. By doing this we become aware of a thought and by becoming aware of a thought we can do something with it. If we would be unaware there is not much we can do, since we aren’t aware of it. When we are aware we can observe it and also direct our attention to this moment; for example, by directing it to our breathing or to our body. Meditation teaches us to be more aware so that we are more in control. The result should be that our false ego with become less big, since we can also be aware when our ego, which thinks in terms as ‘I’ and ‘me’, is being active and this also we can let go again after being aware of it. As a consequence we should be able to control our strong emotions, lie anger and hatred also much better and thus our mind becomes our friend.