Don't Kill Your Monkey Mind. Befriend It.

The mind, hard to control, Flighty--alighting where it wishes-- One does well to tame. The disciplined mind brings happiness. --The Dhammapada verse 35

I realized this morning that, for me, the First Precept…

I refrain from taking life.

…applies to the monkey mind.

What’s the monkey mind? It’s that aspect of your mind that likes to chatter “bada-bada yada-yada” all day. It likes to travel through the branches and vines of your mind, leaping from one to the other while chattering loudly. It says things like:

* I want the bright, shiny thing…

* Don’t step on that crack!…

* You forgot something…

* Look how fat that person is…

* What a dumb thing he said…

* She should watch herself…

* I’m an idiot…

* You’re an idiot…

* What going to happen to me?…

* I don’t ever want this moment to change…

Most of the time, it glides along, chattering one thing and then another. Sometimes, it gets stuck on one.

What a pest!

True. But some pests can be trained. The Buddha often spoke of taming the mind. Taming and training a horse or a dog starts with the two of you getting to know each other, gaining trust in each other, and becoming friends, with one of you being dominant. You want that to be you.

I’ll admit to not fully understanding each of the stages the Buddha described in his cycle of Dependent Origination, but somewhere in that process, in the earliest years of human life, the ego dominates the monkey mind, and together, they dominate you. At least, that’s how I see it.

Developing a practice that includes awareness meditation eventually allows us to get past the monkey mind and make contact with the pure, unclouded mind. The more we do that, the more we can rest in that state and observe the monkey mind with dispassion. From that perspective, it’s almost cute—like a puppy stealing our socks.

Becoming dominant over the monkey mind takes time and effort. We learn to recognize when it expresses the ego’s grasping nature, which is pretty much all the time. As dog trainers often say, it begins with training ourselves. When we ignore the monkey mind’s ego-driven chatter—just let it go without paying much attention—it will calm and take more direction from our purer, nondual, more compassionate Buddha Nature.

As long as we exist in human form, we won’t obliterate the monkey mind or the ego, but they can become friends along the path. That’s what I’ve learned over the past year as my writing became my bodhicitta—my deep desire to liberate all from needless suffering. If I didn’t have any ego at all or any monkey mind thinking of ways to write better and more clearly, and ways to spread the dharma to more people, I would not be motivated to do much.

In this post, I shared advice on the subject that I received from scholar Thupten Jinpa, and in this one, similar advice from a compassionate dharma friend. It’s a subject I’ve wrestled with.

In the last week or so, as I’ve neared completion of the manuscript for my book in progress, I’ve been awakening before the alarm—my monkey mind active with ideas about improving it before it becomes final and spreading its (I hope) healing message once it’s published in a few months. I realized this morning 1) how unusual it is for my monkey mind to be so active, 2) how it has been active in the same way lately as I emerge from sleep, and 3) how it is helping me manifest my bodhicitta.

Can I be certain that it’s my tamed and trained mind working with me and not my ego-controlled monkey pulling me toward obsession? Of course, I can’t. We can never be 100% sure of anything, but I’m confident that my book is what I can offer the world, and wanting it to be a true gift is not a bad thing.

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Related blog posts at https://melpine.substack.com/p/thupten-jinpa-on-self-and-ego and https://melpine.substack.com/p/ego-bodhicitta-and-the-middle-way