Hi. Today I'll be talking about the top five reasons why everyone should practice meditation. And this is an accompaniment to my videos on how to meditate. Sort of as an encouragement for people who are unsure as to whether meditation is really of use to them. So, counting down, today I'll be giving the number five reason why everyone should practice meditation. And the number five reason why everyone should practice meditation is that meditation purifies the mind. Now, many people might not understand how this is a useful thing or what it means to have a pure mind. But actually, we understand in the meditative tradition that this is the real reason why we're practicing meditation. Because when the mind is purified it brings all the other benefits. So what does it mean to have a purified mind? Well, we understand that our minds are full of many different conflicting mind-states. Some of them bring us happiness, and some of them bring us suffering. And the ones that we call impure are the ones that bring us suffering. They either cause us to do bad deeds towards other people or do things that hurt ourselves. We understand these to be positive emotions which are unwholesome or things which lead to suffering. The positive emotions are emotions like greed, wanting. So we call them positive but actually they lead to addiction. And once we're addicted, then it gives rise to a great deal of suffering. So the meditation helps us to overcome positive emotions which are in the end actually negative. Like positive reactions to things. And it also helps us to overcome negative reactions such as anger, disliking, all sorts of hatred. Things which lead us to real and true mental suffering. It also leads us to overcome sort of neutral emotions where we don't judge something as good or bad, but we come to associate with it. We say that it's me or it's mine. We hold on to things as our possessions. We hold on to ideas and concepts, views, conceit. All sorts of ideas which lead us to hold ourselves higher than others, or put ourselves down, having low self-esteem and so on. These we would say are three general characteristics of unwholesome mind-states or things which we could call impure. Impurities in the mind. Now meditation helps us to overcome these at the moment when we're practicing, when we're making a clear thought. Because these things arise in relation to an experience. So when we see something we like it or we don't like it. Or maybe we create some kind of idea of self-righteousness, or self-esteem, or so on. Either positive or negative. At the moment when we're meditating, when we see something, we simply remind ourselves that it's seeing. That this is an experience of seeing. When we feel pain, we remind ourselves that this is pain. We simply create the clear thought as pain. And when we do this our minds are unable to go the next step as liking or disliking. Our minds have fixed on the ultimate reality of the experience as simply what it is. So it's not good, it's not bad, it's simply what it is. This is what it means to create a clear thought, and this is the first benefit, is that it purifies the mind. It helps us to get rid of anger. It helps us to get rid of addiction. And it helps us to get rid of all sorts of conceit and views and all sorts of unpleasant, unskillful, unwholesome mind-states. So that's the first reason why everyone should practice meditation. I'd like to thank you for joining me and please look forward to the rest of my videos in the future.