Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 106
  2. Doubts
     … The Buddha gives you a similar method for sorting out the truths of the mind, for overcoming doubts about your own mind and the power of the mind to find happiness. After all, that is the big issue. The question about whether the world is eternal or not is not really the big issue. The big issue is: Can you find true happiness? And … 
  3. Investing Your Intention
     … because the mind works this way. The mind’s really good at hyping things. And we wouldn’t fall for external hype unless it were already a habit in the mind. It may sound like we’re bad-mouthing the pleasures of the world, but you have to make a choice: Do you really want peace of mind or do you want to keep … 
  4. Mindful & Grateful for Lessons in Freedom
     … We remember the different instructions that tell us what we can do with the breath and what we can do with the mind so that we can get the breath and the mind to stay together. We’re trying to develop a state of concentration. And from the concentration, we want to be able to see the mind clearly—to see particularly where it … 
  5. Concentration Work
     … If they’re more talented in the area of analyzing the mind, they’re encouraged in the direction of discernment. Ajaan Fuang, though, would turn tables on people. If they were already talented in concentration, he’d have them work more in learning how to think about and analyze the movements of the mind. If they were already talented in analyzing things, he’d … 
  6. How to Really Depend on Yourself
     … If something comes up in the mind and you’re not sure about how trustworthy it may be, just stay with your sense of awareness. Watch it pass while the awareness stays. And that way it would cause no danger. As you can see, there’s no one way of solving all the problems of the mind. You get the basic principles, but then … 
  7. Adult Education
     … You give the mind one thing to focus on, and very quickly you notice that it’s going to focus on other things instead. Which you might not have really noticed, unless you’d given yourself one thing, one task to stick to. So you learn things about the actions of the mind. As you get really sensitive to the actions of the mind … 
  8. Patience & Curiosity
     … To what extent can this breath be related to rapture or pleasure? How do you perceive the breath? How do you adjust the rhythm and texture of the breath so that you can breathe in and out sensitive to rapture and pleasure? He says to learn how to breathe in and out gladdening the mind, steadying the mind, releasing the mind. He provides those … 
  9. A Self Rightly Directed
     … You begin to see the varieties of things that can arise in the mind, skillful and unskillful, and you learn how to direct the mind in a skillful direction. That’s what it means to direct yourself rightly. So when thoughts come up in the mind that get in the way of the practice, you have to remember: They’re not the direction you … 
  10. A Mind Like Earth
     … But that kind of stress doesn’t have to weigh down the mind. It’s the stress that we add that really weighs the mind down. But you can’t see what you’re adding if you’re in the midst of adding it all the time. You have to step back into one part of the mind and look at the other parts … 
  11. In Search of What’s Skillful
     … the defilements that bubble up into the mind. There’s sensuality, there are views, and then there’s ignorance. When he abandoned that ignorance, he was able to let go of his views and attain full awakening. So in each case, no matter how amazing the knowledge was, he never stopped there. He kept asking: What’s the most skillful thing to do here … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. “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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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