Four Thoughts That Turn the Mind

2025-09-08

There are four subjects of contemplation that are encouraged for new students, said to turn the mind toward the Dharma. They are:

Precious human rebirth

I still don't know how I feel about the rebirth aspect, but I can get behind everything else implied in this one, which I made a bit more explicit above. It is gratitude generally, for one, which is helpful to cultivate but hard to do. It not just that we are human, but also that we can think, that we have language and therefore access to these teachings which take that form. Around Thanksgiving I usually see this, from the Waking Up app I sometimes use for guided meditations, and I think it encompasses the idea pretty well:

To have your health, even just sort of.
To have friends, even only a few.
To have hobbies or interestes and the freedom to pursue them.
To have spent this day free from some terrifying encounter with chaos is to be lucky.
Just look around you and take a moment to feel how lucky you are.
You get another day to live on this earth.
Enjoy it.

Impermanence

This one has been on my mind a long time. My dad always says, "The only constant is change." I think it might be his favorite thing to say. Right now, in this very moment I am struck by the fact I am writing that in present tense, but someday soon he will be gone. It will be something my dad said, not says. That makes me sad. I'm very aware of it all the time. It's a heavy weight to carry. And it's one I think about in a lot of ways. There is "mono no aware" in Japanese, which comes through aesthetically in their culture in a lot of ways and is particularly symbolized in the ephemeral nature of the cherry blossom. It means the gentle sadness I feel right now, towards the impermanence of things. There is Gam Zeh Ya'avor (גם זה יעבור), which is more commonly known in English as "this too shall pass." I think there's a couple stories for that one but the one I remember is that a king (maybe Solomon) asked for a ring with the power to make a sad man happy and a happy man sad. In the form of an inscription with those words, he got it. In Shakespeare, the iconic Hamlet skull-holding monologue beginning with, "Alas poor Yorick! I knew him Horatio" is on this very topic. Perhaps my favorite are the, "So it goes" which follow every death in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, again connected to my father because he's the one that recommended it to me. I dare say those three words do it best.

Defects of samsara

This is the easiest one to bring to mind, isn't it? That the world is imperfect, existence is pain, things are unsatisfactory due to our craving. It's so easy to find fault, but usually people say that's wrong. Here, I think, it's not. Rather it is all too accurate, so much so that it bogs us down, and we don't get to the other thoughts implied by it. For instance, the previous two, how whatever terrible thing we're lamenting will pass as all phenomena do, and how precious it makes those special advantages of existing as reasoning human being in an existence so fraught with lesser states. Here I am struck by the interchangeability of "mind" and "being" in the previous sentence. And how that implies that there is always a capacity to change one's mind state.

Karma, cause and effect

I don't understand this one well. That is probably the source of some suffering for me. On the other hand, part of the point here seems to be that we cannot know. The web of causation is there, it's how things happen, but it's too vast to know. This one reminds me of the ending lyrics to the Jackson Browne song "For a Dancer." Really, one could argue that song's lyrics hit on all four, but I won't reproduce the whole thing. It's interesting to me that karma is often analogized to a seed, though.

Keep a fire for the human race
Let your prayers go drifting into space
You never know what will be coming down
Perhaps a better world is drawing near
Just as easy it could all disappear
Along with whatever meaning you might have found
Don't let the uncertainty turn you around
(The world keeps turning around and around)
Go on and make a joyful sound
Into a dancer you have grown
From a seed somebody else has thrown
Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own
And somewhere between the time you arrive and the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive, but you'll never know