Out in the garden  early on a Saturday morning before the sun’s blaze gets me down, I am out there pulling weeds. Some are easily removed with a single tug, and others are quite desperately lodged that require considerable effort. By the end of my tour of duty in the battle of the weeds, I am quite tired, hot and sweaty. What a work out, I think to myself, and what an accomplishment, a garden landscape with out weeds. The following Saturday I look out side my window only to  discover another vast accumulation of the weed population. With dismay yet persistent resolve  my battle in the grand war against weeds starts once again.

During one of these Saturdays while I was trying to find my balance between communing with nature and the mad dash to finish this chore, I realized that the “pulling of weeds” is not unlike pulling out negative qualities from within myself. With each thought, utterance, or action we generate these fabrications within our mental self. Let us explore this a little further with a few examples. You are bitten by a tiny mosquito. Your nerve endings sense it, and inform you of what has happened. You immediately try to swat the bug, and then can scratch the affected area. With the itching, comes irritability, with this emotion comes anger. The thought of anger then brings forth perhaps an angry word or two. So in this way a fabrication is formed within yourself. Another example. Someone says something overtly careless about your appearance. Thoughts of insecurity, vanity, anger all emerge, leading to negative emotions, then words and sometimes even bad actions ( you hit that person). You have created yet another negative fabrication into your consciousness. And so life goes on as you accumulate infinite formulations into your consciousness, then into your subconsciousness.  These eventually will come back to haunt you in some fashion, after all you are building a foundation to support your psyche.

It takes a lifetime to generate all these conditioned determinations, and it may take an entire lifetime to get rid of them. We are so quick to react, we have no idea how many accumulate within a minute, an hour or within a day. The more negative the formulation, the harder it is to pull out of your Self. Through meditation and becoming Self aware you are able to let go of many ills that are plaguing you. As you let go, you let live. Instead of just Saturdays to pull out your weeds, perhaps daily pulling for just 10 minutes will help you not making this an endless or overwhelming chore. Hence the daily pulling out the fabrications within your mind becomes easier over a lifetime.  The more you pull out the more will spring forth to take the others’ place, such is the nature of weeds and mental fabrications. Nature abhors a vacuum. Yet the more efficient you get at the pulling of these mental  fabrications through meditation the easier they become to pull out, and at some point you get ahead of the battles of pulling your negative consciousness issues.

One might say putting a black tarp on the landscape helps prevent the weeds form. This is very true for the ordinary variety of weeds, yet in my vast experience of wasted Saturdays this is a temporary measure and there are always tougher, heartier weeds that break through the toughest of tarps. Despite the most disciplined minds you can still have very old mental and past fabrications spring up when you least expect it to torture you when you have to remove them through the tarp as they have ripped it up. You can use weed killer but that is still a temporary fix, since each weed has thousands of spores that will generate further weed-lets that can survive the toughest of weed killer agents.  There is no great solution to weed control except burning down the entire landscape region, but then you miss on the beauty of the garden. You can look at this as a total annihilation of all your mental fabrications and  negativity generating thoughts yet hope you are experienced in using fire to help you.

You can always hire someone to pull out the weeds, yet they will come back.  You just end up keep paying more and more over the course of time to a landscaper. On some occasions you need the landscaper to help you with valid and warranted advice on techniques. Hence you take classes or courses on meditation. In  the end these are your weeds, your mental volitions, your negative ideas, so take ownership of them and keep your garden and landscape weed free as best as possible with a clean positive attitude.  Daily and frequent meditation is the answer to maintain a glorious and splendid garden for your soul to live in.

How tough are your weeds?