The mind itself actually goes out and is actively looking for conditions, it creates conditions. It’s not an innocent victim. When you understand this point, you see that everything you experience has an element of intentional input right here and now.

"The Buddha never taught bare attention. He taught appropriate attention. This is an important distinction to bear in mind. If we think that the heart of the meditation is just simply bare attention, it causes all kinds of misunderstandings – such as the idea that meditation is simply a process of watching whatever comes up and not doing anything about it. Or even deeper, there’s the idea that if all you need to do is bare attention, why bother reading the Buddha’s other teachings at all? Just try to be as passive as possible. You don’t need to study. Just practice passive awareness and that will take care of all your problems.

Sometimes people say that bare attention is the unconditioned, that a moment of bare attention is a moment of awakening. If you believe that, you close all of the paths to awakening. Because if you don’t see the difference between the path and the goal, you’re never going to get the goal. You have to work on the path and then you have to let it go at some point, but if you don’t do the work on the path, you never get there.

We’re not trying to revert to some pre-existing state that the mind was in before it started getting subjected to all these nasty conditions that make us suffer. The mind itself actually goes out and is actively looking for conditions, it creates conditions. It’s not an innocent victim. When you understand this point, that gets you on the path to appropriate attention. You see that everything you experience has an element of intentional input right here and now. Part of what you experience comes from the past, but a major part comes from what you’re doing now.

You have to see that sometimes what you do is skillful and sometimes it’s not. That’s the basic frame work for appropriate attention. It’s the framework that gave rise to Buddha’s teaching on the four noble truths. There are skillful mind states and unskillful mind states. States that make you suffer are the unskillful ones. States that lead you away from suffering are the skillful ones. You’ve got to look at experience in those terms. And how do you recognize them? How do you tell skillful mind states from unskillful ones? You look at them in terms of what they do."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Bare Attention"

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