Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 105
  2. Frustrated Desires
     … Ask yourself, when something comes up in the mind: What would a skillful meditator do with this? Try to use your ingenuity for getting around old habits, old patterns in the mind, so that you learn the right lessons from the practice of concentration. In other words, you learn that you can develop the mindfulness, you can develop the alertness, that makes your concentration … 
  3. Kamma & Rebirth—A Handful of Leaves
     … The mind can change so quickly, he said, that he couldn’t even think of a good analogy for how quickly the mind can change direction. So he taught just the features of the world and the features of kamma that are worth knowing for the sake of developing heedfulness so that you can work on developing more skillful qualities. Like we’re doing … 
  4. Ingenuity
    There’s more to the mind than you can ever find in a book. This is why, when you meditate, you often are going to run into things that you never read about, which is why one of the important skills in meditation is, one, to be observant, and two, to use your ingenuity. There’s no way that the ways of the mind … 
  5. Question Your Defilements
     … You don’t get the sense of ease and refreshment and spaciousness that comes when the mind is not pushed around in those ways, when it can see what’s actually going on inside. This is one of the trickier parts of the hindrances: When they arise in the mind, we tend to side with them without even thinking. Lust arises: “Yeah, that object … 
  6. Pleasure from the Body
     … This is one very important way of gladdening the mind in the practice because to stick with the practice you do need a sense of pleasure. It has to be impressive. Otherwise, the mind is going to start sending out its feelers to think about other pleasures that it’s missing right now: all the places you could be going, all the things you … 
  7. “May I Be Happy”
     … It all comes down to developing good qualities of the mind. You notice that certain ways of thinking are skillful. They take burdens off the mind. They help nourish the mind. So encourage those ways of thinking, because if you don’t, you’ll develop other habits in the mind. It may seem artificial to focus on these habits, but then the construction of … 
  8. Right View
     … You want to see that every time there’s real suffering in the mind, it’s accompanied by craving—any one of three kinds of craving to be specific: craving for sensuality, craving for becoming, craving for non-becoming. Craving for sensuality is easy enough to explain: the desire to have sensual desires. That’s one of the most interesting parts of the analysis … 
  9. A Strong Sense of Self
     … Look to your mind because the mind is the source of all your actions. This is why we meditate. Those are some preparatory thoughts for getting the mind to settle down here in the present moment, because when the mind settles in the present moment, it can watch itself clearly, see what it’s doing, and catch itself in time if it’s about … 
  10. Cheating the System
     … And what should be done is that we should try to comprehend it, and even further to comprehend the suffering that comes from pain in the mind. When the Buddha talks about suffering—dukkha, which can also be translated as stress—there are basically two kinds. There’s stress in the three characteristics, which is a given in the world. As long as things … 
  11. Centered
     … But when you get the mind centered like this, you can see the little pattern of tension as it comes together with the thought, and you can zap the pattern of tension, and the thought will dissolve. The more quickly you can do that, the more you see the early stages of how the mind constructs a thought—and you’re less likely to … 
  12. Faith in the Practice
     … that the issue is not the body; it’s the mind. You can say that ahead of time, but what makes a difference is when your actually see the movement of the mind: What is the movement of the mind that wants to go to lust, say, or to pride around the body? That first little thought that sets you off say in a … 
  13. Breathing Easy
     … The first thing you’ve got to understand is that every desire in the mind aims at happiness. That’s what they all have in common, and that can become their basis for discussion, their basis for negotiation. The differences center around what’s the best way to go about happiness, and what kind of happiness you want. Some desires go for the immediate … 
  14. Not What You Are, What You Do
     … So instead of being a process of lobotomizing the mind so that you don’t think, meditation is actually training in learning how to think in more skillful ways, how to act in more skillful ways — with knowledge, with an understanding of actions and their results. In particular, it’s training in learning how to distinguish the types of activities in the mind that … 
  15. Mindfulness as a Goad
    To get the mind into concentration, we have to develop our mindfulness. Sometimes you hear mindfulness being defined as simply being aware of whatever is happening, but that’s not the Buddha’s definition. His definition was that it’s a faculty of the memory, your ability to call things to mind and keep them in mind. For instance, when you’re working with … 
  16. Clinging & Feeding
     … It’s because we cling to them that the mind suffers. The aggregates may have stress simply in the fact they arise and pass away, but that doesn’t really afflict the mind unless the mind clings to them. So we have to understand what this clinging is and how we can get past it. First off, it’s good to notice that the … 
  17. Alertness: What Are You Doing?
     … Then the mindfulness and ardency come in. Ardency tells you, if you made a mistake, “I don’t want to make that mistake again.” Mindfulness helps you remember what you did. And then you go talk it over with someone else who’s more advanced on the path so that you can get some ideas of what some other alternatives might be. Then you … 
  18. The Pain of Conviction
     … You’d think that the mind would immediately want to incline to a state like this and do everything it could to protect it and maintain it. But the mind has lots of other agendas as well. So expect that there are going to be some fallow times. You sit down to meditate and the breath just doesn’t seem to get comfortable, doesn … 
  19. In Line with the Dhamma
     … They’ve learned all the tricks that the mind plays on itself and they use them to make us happy to be lied to. If we really looked at our lives, we’d find it really discouraging. We’ve spent so much effort, so much time, with so little to show for it. So we like hanging around people who have the same delusions … 
  20. When Things Seem Dark
     … Things come into the mind and they seem to possess the mind. But you learn how to just be aware of them. If you can’t get rid of them yet, just know that “They’re there but they don’t have to be there forever, and I don’t have to give in to them.” Even though they make big, scary faces at … 
  21. To Make Suffering Crumble
     … For instance, when you’re driving yourself crazy talking about certain things in your mind, focus less on the content of what the mind is saying, and more on the process of how the mind talks to itself, and how it uses perceptions to stab itself, and how it doesn’t really have to—or, how it focuses on certain feelings in the body … 
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