2021-02-12 Mindfulness of Breathing (31) Wondrous Mind

Insight Meditation Center11min

Gil Fronsdal

00:06

The topic for this week is what in Pali is called "citta saṅkhāra." It's often translated as "mental formations," "mental dispositions," or "mental constructs." For this week, I have been using the expression "mental activities." It's the activities of the mind that are planning, creating, imagining, actively thinking about things. So a simple perception of something, like seeing a wall across the room, wouldn't necessarily be called an activity. It is an activity, but it's not one of the formations or constructions that we make.

Gil Fronsdal

01:12

There are a number of things that are fascinating about this idea of mental formations, mental constructions, 'saṅkhāras'. One is that many things that we take to be inherent, just the way things are, turn out to be an activity of the mind. To give you one example: boredom. When we're bored, it can feel like the thing that we're doing is boring. The event, the situation is boring. It is boring.

Gil Fronsdal

01:49

But, in fact, it's the mind's activity that creates the feeling, the sense of boredom. It's maybe even a subliminal judgment or evaluation. It's holding oneself apart from experience. It can be resistance. It can be a loss of intimacy with experience. There are all these things going on in the mind that construct, that activate this feeling, the idea of boredom.

Gil Fronsdal

02:21

The idea that we're constructing it, forming it, making it in the mind gives us a very different orientation to boredom than if the situation is boredom. Because if the situation is boredom, the situation is to blame. So we better just get away, or change it.

Gil Fronsdal

02:42

But if we're responsible because it's an activity of the mind, then we can practice with it. One of the things we learn through meditation is how to practice with these mental formations, these mental activities. So we're not caught in them and not pulled around by the nose by them. We learn how to settle them, become more expansive of them, or more free of them even when they're there.

Gil Fronsdal

03:07

So with boredom, one would turn the attention around 180 degrees from the situation that's boring – whatever it might be, internal or external – and have the attention really look at the boredom itself. Look it right in the eye and say, "Boredom, I see you." And feel it, be with it, and experience it.

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