Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 107
  2. Life in the Buddha’s Hospital
     … The events in the mind are the important issues. Those are the things causing your own illness. Do you want to cure your own illness or to aggravate it? Keep this question in mind as you practice. As we live together and practice together, we see each other a lot, but try to make that fact have the least possible impact on the mind … 
  3. Freedom from Beliefs
     … freedom from suffering, freedom from all the limitations we place on ourselves, whether those limitations are dressed up as the bad side of the mind or the good side of the mind. You’ve got to watch out for them, especially the ones that seem good. You’ve got to learn how to question them. What attitudes do you have to put aside immediately … 
  4. Change Your Perceptions
     … So we work to overcome sensual desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and anxiety, and uncertainty or doubt, to bring the mind into concentration. And we get the mind into concentration by changing our perceptions. When the mind is in concentration, then you can apply the four noble truths. Ask the questions of the four noble truths: “Where is the suffering right now … 
  5. Social Anxiety
     … If the zeros get put after, you’ve got lots of issues, but if the zeros get put first, no matter how many zeros you have, they don’t add anything, don’t burden the mind at all. It’s the same way with the mind: You make it zero and then you put the zeros first. Then when you deal with other people … 
  6. Analyzing the Breath
     … If you try to lock the mind into the body, it’s like locking a child into his room: He’s going to try to figure out some way to get out the window, or start doing something in the room he knows his parents don’t like, just to spite them. The mind is like that: If you lock it in with an … 
  7. Cooking with Kamma
     … But that, he says, isn’t the suffering that weighs the mind down. The suffering that weighs the mind down comes from craving and clinging. Craving and clinging he defines in different ways. There’s delight and there’s passion, which can take all kinds of forms. So what form are they taking in your mind right now, telling you that a certain unpleasant … 
  8. Planting a Tree
    Training the mind is like growing a tree. You’re responsible for the water and the fertilizer, but the growing is something that the tree does. If you try to speed it up by pulling on the tree, what usually happens is that you pull it out of the ground. Its roots get disconnected. The tree dies. You have to focus on your duty … 
  9. The Wisdom of Incongruity
     … Of course, when we’re getting the mind to settle down, we’re trying to stop that: to get things focused, to get things centered. In the beginning, we actually have to use that ability to think around things from various angles to help get the mind settled in on the breath in a comfortable way. If the mind has a tendency to think … 
  10. Right Resolve & Right Concentration
     … When you’ve got the mind in right concentration, you’re working with the breath, which is usually the part of you that gets hijacked by your greed, aversion, and delusion. These emotions can start getting you to breathe in unskillful ways—you can even have panic attacks—that just squeeze the mind, squeeze your nerves as they say in Thai, to the point … 
  11. Fabricated Path, Unfabricated Goal
     … You’re here to focus on the breath, creating a mind state that allows you to see what’s going on in the mind. And whether it reaches jhana at this particular time or not, that’s not the issue. The issue is: Can you get the mind still enough to start seeing what’s going on? And comprehending what’s going on? And … 
  12. Four Bases of Success
     … Think about the good that can come when the mind is well trained. As the Buddha said, it’s the essence of any skill that’s going to give rise to happiness: You’ve got to train the mind. Otherwise, if the mind isn’t trained it can make a mess of things, even when they’re going well. It’s like having a … 
  13. The Skill of Letting Go
     … Phenomena are led by the mind, created by the mind, dominated by the mind. So you want to look inside. The next three steps have to do with not just the fact of fabrication but also the value of fabrication. First you want to see, “What is the allure of this thing that I’m attached to? What do I find attractive?” Say, with … 
  14. Virtuous Beginnings
     … You begin to see exactly where the things are that set the mind off. You gain insight into the mind. Because after all, the eye is not the problem, the ear is not the problem. It’s what the mind does with the information that gets fed into it. You start asking yourself, “Why does the mind have to take things which are perfectly … 
  15. The Community of the Wise
     … Things that have hung around in the mind so long, we think that they’re actually a permanent part of the mind, that they’re innate, that they come with us when we’re born. But they’re not. All our attitudes are things that are constructed, things that have been put together, habits that have developed over time. We want to be able … 
  16. Don’t Stop with Acceptance
     … Otherwise, when something comes up in the mind, the question is: what to do with it? For instance, with pain: The pain itself doesn’t necessarily have to make inroads on the mind. In fact, that’s what we’re training ourselves to do: to allow the experience of pain to be there, but not allow it to “invade” the mind and “remain.” Those … 
  17. The Allure of Self
     … In this case, if you hold on to your old narratives, you’re preventing the mind from settling down, finding some peace, finding some quiet in the mind. You’re preventing the mind from gaining some insight, some discernment. And when the mind doesn’t have any concentration or discernment, there’s no way it’s going to have an experience of the deathless … 
  18. Work on Your Mind
    In Thai, they have a phrase, “tam jai,” which literally means “to work on your mind.” They use it usually when you’ve suffered a loss or a setback, and you calm the mind down so that you’re not too upset, so that you can actually think straight, figure out what to do next, and not let the loss or the setback get … 
  19. Meaning & Becoming
     … We can learn how to use our processes of the mind, the mind’s ability to create all kinds of things, and we can create the path out. The Buddha found this path. Many people have followed his instructions and they found the path, too. It’s open to everybody. The Buddha didn’t teach it only for Indians or only for members of … 
  20. A Conglomeration of Germs
     … The problem is in the mind: in the intentions that drive the perceptions. We use the body as a tool to understand the mind, to train the mind. So, you look after it as you would look after any tool. But at the same time, you have to realize that, as with any tool, you can use it well or you can use it … 
  21. You Can’t Clone Awakening
     … Sitting here with the breath, all of a sudden you find yourself off on an island in the Atlantic someplace, or sorting through the mind’s old movies. And you wonder how you got there. Well, the mind does have this tendency to cover things up, especially when you’ve made up your mind to do one thing and then another part of the … 
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