Cleaning the Window

We've never really accepted boredom as a conscious state. As soon as it comes into the mind we start looking for something interesting, some-thing pleasant. But in meditation we're allowing boredom to be. We're allowing ourselves to be fully consciously bored, fully depressed, fed up, jealous, angry, disgusted. All the nasty unpleasant experiences of life that we have repressed out of consciousness and never really looked at, never really accepted, we begin to accept into conscious-ness not as personality problems any more, but just out of compassion. Out of kindness and wisdom we allow things to take their natural course to cessation, rather that just keep them going round in the same old cycles of habit. If we have no way of letting things take their natural course, then we're always controlling, always caught in some dreary habit of mind. When we're jaded and depressed we're unable to appreciate the beauty of things, because we never really see them as they truly are. [ ... ]

When we get used to looking through a dirty window everything seems grey, grimy and ugly. Meditation is a way of cleaning the window, purifying the mind, allowing things to come up into consciousness and letting them go. Then with the wisdom faculty [...] we observe how things really are. It's not just attaching to beauty, to purity of mind, but actually understand-ing. It is wisely reflecting on the way nature operates, so that we are no longer deluded by it into creating habits for our life through ignorance.

--Ajahn Sumedho