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Being Nobody, Going Nowhere - by Ayya Khema, 2005

The main takeaways:

Your thoughts are not you

• You don't invite thoughts in your mind, they just arise
• The thoughts of your mind are not necessarily true, reliable, important or representative of you

Usefulness of meditation

• Meditation = observe and drop all thoughts
• Daily life = observe and drop all unprofitable thoughts
• So why is it useful recognize and label thoughts?
  • So you can let go of unwholesome thoughts or subsitute them
  • So if a thought or emotion is unprofitable to you, hit the breaks - drop or substitute

Impermanence, Unsatisfactoriness, Non-self

Other interesing ideas

Taking care of our mind, just as we take care of our body - meditation

• We take baths and clean our body, we exercise and stretch to train our body, we sleep to rest our body.
• Meditation is a way to take care of and train our mind

Ego = Me delusion

• When you say "you", where do "you" exits?
• Where is the "you" within your body?
• Can you point to a part of your brain, where "you" resides?

Your thoughts are not you

• Why should we trust the mind and the thoughts that arise in the mind?
• They are not our thoughts, we didn't invite them into our mind, they just arise and vanish naturally.
• Impermanence and non-ownership. Just like our body.
• The thoughts of our mind are not always reliable, trustable, pleasant.
• The thoughts of our mind are not necessarily true, important or representative of you.

Meditation

• The mind wants to be entertained.
• Thoughts and emotions come and go like waves.
• Don't react and instead just observe how the mind works.

So why is it useful recognize and label thoughts?

• So you can let go of unwholesome thoughts or subsitute them
• Sadness
  • realize that it will not bring any kind of benefit for anyone, drop or substitute
• Anger
  • is useless, whenever you're angry at someone try to remember something nice they did
  • Everybody has some goodness in them
  • Of remember that only unhappy people act in a nasty way, so they are suffering, have compassion

Life is suffering

• not in a dramatic, but in the sense that we always want more or want things to stay the same, or we want to change things
• there is always a next wish, a next problem - unsatisfactoriness
• nobody has a perfect situation. we can't wait for a perfect situation, because it will never happen
• so in this sense suffering is sufferring is the only universal truth an if affects all beings

Mindfullness = like breaks on a car

• dirving without breaks is dangerous
• living without mindfullness is dangerous
• if an emotion is unprofitable, hit the breaks