Transcending the Craving Mind

Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'm going to talk about transcending the craving mind. So this human mind that we have is always wanting more and it tends to get caught up in believing that if we can just acquire this next thing, then we'll have it all together and we'll finally be happy. Maybe you've noticed this tendency inside of yourself. And maybe you've also noticed that this cycle never stops, right? Once you get what you thought would make you happy, the mind just starts wanting the next thing, and you're never satisfied for too long.

So in order to find a more fulfilling and meaningful way to live, you really need to find a way to transcend the constant cycles of craving. And the first step to doing that is just understanding the craving mind. So the reason our mind is always wanting more, has to do with evolution. In the last 200,000 years of human evolution, our ancestors who lived mostly as hunter-gatherers. Their life was really difficult and dangerous and resources were scarce.

So they needed every survival advantage that they could possibly get. So the mind would always be saying, you need more food, you need better weapons, more water, better shelter, better clothing. More, more, more. So back then, this was a really advantageous way to think for survival. But these days we live in a really different world, but the mind that we inherited still operates in much the same way as it was in the caveman days.

It's still telling us that we need more. And no matter how much we ever get, it never seems like enough. So if we can think about the craving pattern in the mind as being like a little bit of an outdated piece of software, that's still running inside you, then we can understand that the mind's just operating as it was, just as a survival machine. I think this is something we need to understand because it can really get us caught up. When we think that our comforts and luxuries and pledges are sometimes, or somehow rather going to add up to long term happiness.

It's just not a reality. It's not the way that the mind works. So in order to make room for lasting fulfillment in our lives, we really need to relate to the craving mind in a new way. You need to learn how to recognize craving thoughts and feelings when they arise. And just see them as part of the conditioning of the mind, rather than something we have to act upon.

Then once we can do that, we can find a true sense of inner freedom. It's not that we need to get rid of our cravings. They're probably always going to arise, but if we can just recognize them for what they are and not buy into them, then that's the way that we can transcend the craving mind and find contentment in our lives. So as always, thank you for your practice and your presence here with us. And now let's settle in for today's meditation.