Search results for: "Delusion"
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- Four Virtues… When you look at things and listen to things, what do you bring into the mind? Often you bring in greed, anger, and delusion, because those are the things that direct your looking to begin with. If you let them direct your looking, they begin to take over. They bring in more and more of their friends. So when you look at something that …
- Selves with Skills… If you’re good at anger, good at greed, good at aversion, good at delusion, they’ll be part of the identity you take on. The Buddha wants to teach you that there are other ways of doing things. But the first thing he does is to have you build a better sense of becoming. He talks about what he calls the four bases …
- Lift Up Your Mind… But when you get down to the real problem, it’s not so much the things; it’s the mind’s tendency to like greed, to like anger, to like delusion. The objects are only secondary. So the primary issues are all the same. This is why Ajaan Mun’s principle was practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma. This is the Buddha …
- Defilements as Not-self… You latch on to greed, aversion, and delusion as yours, but as Ajaan Lee says, they come in and they possess you. Seeing them as somebody else is a useful exercise in not-self. These are identities you’ve identified with for a long time, and they’ve held power in your mind for a long time. How would you deal with them if …
- A Load of Straw… They don’t like other people’s greed, anger, and delusion, yet in the course of trying to straighten them out, they inflict them with their own greed, anger, and delusion. They simply compound the problem. So your only responsibility to the world is to focus on doing what’s skillful. That’s all you have to take care of. As for the working …
- Generosity First… You’re sitting here trying to understand your greed, anger, and delusion, trying to bring them under control — which means that you’re not the only person who’s going to benefit from the meditation. Other people will benefit — are benefiting — as well. As you become more mindful, more alert, more skillful in undercutting the hindrances in your mind, other people are less subject …
- The Desire to Be Free from Desire… As for unskillful qualities based on greed, aversion, and delusion, you see that if you follow them they take you in a direction you don’t want to go. So if they’re there, you want to abandon them. If they’re not there, you want to prevent them from arising. So desire is an important part of the path. And this faculty of …
- Concentration Teamwork… In others, you drift off into a fuzzy place that Ajaan Lee calls delusion concentration, where the mind is quiet but there’s very little alertness, very little mindfulness. So you’ve got to watch out for that. What’s happened is that you’ve dropped the directed thought and evaluation before the time came for that. This means you’ve got to go …
- Open Are the Doors to the Deathless… You can enjoy them and they don’t excite, greed, aversion, or delusion. Others are not okay. So you have to judge the pleasures against another standard, which is: What impact do they have on the mind? The same with pain: As he noted, some people have to practice a painful path, which can mean two things. One is that getting the mind still …
- Fear of the Truth… And yet greed, anger, and delusion, all the unskillful emotions, manage to break through the walls, to seep through the cracks. Like tree roots, they work their way through the walls, and then bring them down—these roots of what’s unskillful in the mind. So rather than expending a lot of energy in a useless way, try to devote your energy to building …
- Minding Your Own Business… At the very least, make sure there’s as little greed, anger, and delusion as possible in your intentions. The impact of your actions will have to be a good impact. Whether you’ve worked out all the channels through which that impact is going to go—and of course you can’t work through all those channels, you can’t anticipate them all …
- Large-hearted Equanimity… When I was in France, there were people who asked, “If the Buddha really had goodwill for the world, why didn’t he keep coming back?” The answer is that he wanted to teach by example, that by straightening out your mind so that you’re not giving in to greed, aversion, and delusion, you’re not causing any suffering to anybody. That’s …
- Something Good to Cling to… That’s how delusion concentration happens. Delusion concentration is when you’re still, but you’re not really quite sure where you are or what you’re focused on. You come out of it and you’re not really sure whether you were asleep or awake. It wasn’t quite asleep, but it wasn’t quite awake either. The mind was in a blur …
- Toughen & Tenderize the Mind… You also see your own defilements—where your greed, aversion, and delusion come in. The important thing is not to get discouraged; not to get depressed. This is where the other emotion that the Buddha recommends comes in, which is pasada, which is confidence—confidence that there’s a way out, that there’s a solution to the problem. Having this confidence allows you …
- Defilements… There’s greed, aversion, and delusion, and they work themselves out into all kinds of other things. There’s spite and malice and hypocrisy and envy. I can’t remember the whole list: about fifteen all together, what they call the upakkilesas. But you notice these things best if you have the mind in concentration and you try to maintain that sense of center …
- Sticking with an Intention… If a thought of greed, anger, or delusion comes in, you’ll be able to sense it and to see what it does because you’re more sensitive to what’s going on here. Insights may come up, but you don’t have to memorize them. Ajaan Fuang once said that if an insight is really valuable you don’t have to take note …
- The Cool Fire of Jhana… As he says, unlike the hot fires of your greed, aversion, and delusion, or passion, aversion, and delusion, it doesn’t wear out your nerves. It’s actually good for the body, good for the mind, and it brings light into areas of the mind that have long been dark. You can read your mind because the flame is steady. Of course, it’s …
- Caring Without Clinging… They can happen—it’s not like you’re trying to prevent them from happening—but you want to make sure you don’t get caught up in the delusion that comes along with these things: the idea that when you’re happy, everything in the world is going to go fine. Actually, you know there are problems in the world. Or the delusion …
- Values of the Noble Ones… They encourage greed, they encourage anger, they encourage delusion. That’s true not only here but everywhere. Whereas people who are trying to get rid of their greed, aversion, and delusion are going against the stream. So you’ve got to have some inner strength. This is why we take refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha. The word for refuge in …
- Fangs in the Static… Let’s look inside and see what’s actually there.” In other words, you’re training the mind how not to fool itself, or not to be fooled by its greed, aversion, and delusion. You learn how to see the tricks of greed, aversion, and delusion—how they make you think that something’s going to be really good when it’s not, or …
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