Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think. Suffering follows an evil thought as the wheels of a cart follow the oxen that draws it. Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think. Joy follows a pure thought like a shadow that never leaves. — The Dhammapada
I had always heard, “we are what we eat,” but my Buddhist friend essentially says “we are what we think.”
Have an evil thought and suffering follows. Have a pure thought and joy follows.
Of course there are more than two kinds of thoughts so I played a game during my morning meditation trying to identify different thoughts and then trying to figure out what follows. It was a fascinating exercise.
It would be nice to never have an evil thought, and even nicer to only have pure thoughts, but life doesn’t work that way for me, and I doubt if it works for anyone.
Perhaps our goal should be to have as few and as short evil thoughts as possible, and to work at having more and longer pure thoughts in a day.
I think an even more important goal is to be extremely careful in keeping our evil thoughts to ourselves, and to spread our pure thoughts as widely as possible.
There are too many people spreading their evil thoughts around these days. We could use a few more pure thinkers out there to balance things out.
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