Rev. Danny Fisher

Today’s quote is yet another from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, whom I first quoted and wrote a short biography for in this post. This is it — Snow Lion Publications’ Dalai Lama Quote of the Week this week:

When we focus our attention on the passage of breath, we break the usually continuous flow of thoughts of attachment, hostility and so forth, whatever they might be. This causes such thoughts to subside for the moment. Thus, by occupying the mind with our breath, we cleanse it of all positive and negative conceptual thoughts and thus remain in a neutral state of mind unspecified as either constructive or destructive. This is the meaning of the line in the root text, “Thoroughly clean out your state of awareness.” This unspecified or neutral state of mind, cleaned out of all positive and negative conceptual thoughts, is the most conducive one to work with. Because an unspecified state of mind like this is unburdened and supple, it is relatively easy to generate it into a constructive state.