After finished Ceremony

August 24, 2008. The Prison Of Life Part Three
What stands in the way of us realising our minds? The true nature of our mind is obscured like a thick cloud that covers the blue sky. That cloud is made up of our negative emotions, like our clinging greedy minds, our anger and aversion, our pride and arrogance, our jealousy and envy, and especially our ignorance of not realising our true nature. And this acts as a screen.
Do we realise how much we live our lives through our minds? Everything we see, everything we say, everything we do, is directed by our minds, our thoughts, our feelings, our memories, our concepts, our judgements.
We hardly see anything as it is. We see our opinion. It is very hard to see things nakedly without the many sheaths of our conceptual opinions and ideas about that thing. We come here and we look at this ceiling. Either we think it is magnificent art, or we think it is absolute kitsch. We think it is wonderful, or we think, "Oh my God, how could anybody have done this?"
It makes no difference; the ceiling is just a ceiling and the painting is just paint. How we react to it depends on our mental framework, our background, our education, our aesthetic taste.
Everything is like that. We never see things as they really are; we only see our version. Everything we experience, we experience through our mind. Everything we see, we hear, we taste, touch or feel, is interpreted through our mind. Yet we do not know the mind itself.
We say, "I think that, I feel that, in my opinion it is that." But what is a thought? What is a feeling? What is an opinion? We are always streaming outside through our senses, but we never turn that awareness, which sees and thinks and tastes and touches, inward onto the mind itself.