Ordinary Worldly Mind

Let us take a look at the mind of an ordinary worldly person. What we find is a grasshopper mind, a butterfly mind, chasing its fancies and impulses of the moment, the prey of stimuli and its own emotional reaction to them—a reaction that is largely a purely conditioned and blind one. A chain of linked associations, fears, memories, fantasies, regrets, stream constantly through the mind, triggered off by momentary contact with the outside world through the senses. It is a blind, never-ceasing, never-satisfied search for satisfaction, bewildered, aimless, suffering. This is not reality, but a waking dream, a sequence of concepts and fantasies. The world is split up into recognizable identified forms, each of which has its name, and on the basis of these names—conceptual images of the reality around—the mind spins its web of thought in which it entangles itself. Objects change, but their “name” remains the same, and the mind, left clinging to empty names and images, loses touch with reality, trying to find in the products of its own imagination the satisfaction and security for which it thirsts. No wonder the mind has been called an “idol-factory,” and no wonder that the Buddha described such a mind as a restless monkey swinging from branch to branch in the quest for satisfying fruit through the endless jungle of conditioned events. The futility, unreality, and frustration inherent in such a mode of existence is startlingly self-apparent once one begins to see it clearly.
—Bhikkhu Mangalo