11/15/2025
Wonderful comment by Thai Theravaden Buddhist teacher Ajan Chah. The key point is to become intimately familiar with the natural state or ground of your being. This contentless awareness is unmoving and unchanging. It is your true home, neither coming nor going. Always here, always now. Grounded in this timeless Reality, the ‘visitors’ he mentions hold no allure. They simply pass through, without being invited for dinner and a game of cards!
As I see it, the mind is like a single point, the center of the universe, and mental states are like visitors who come to stay at this point for short or long periods of time. Get to know these visitors well. Become familiar with the vivid pictures they paint, the alluring stories they tell, to entice you to follow them.
But do not give up your seat-it is the only chair around. If you continue to occupy it unceasingly, greeting each guest as it comes, firmly establishing yourself in awareness, transforming your mind into the one who knows, the one who is awake, the visitors will eventually stop coming back.
If you give them real attention, how many times can these visitors return? Speak with them here, and you will know every one of them well. Then your mind will at last be at peace.
- Ajahn Chah, A Still Forest Pool
