Search results for: "Delusion"
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- The Acrobat… If you cut out the greed, anger, and delusion in your mind, you’re inflicting other people with less greed, anger, and delusion. That’s good for them right there. You maintain your balance and you don’t knock other people off of theirs. Sometimes you provide a basis for them to find their balance. This is the Buddha’s description of mindfulness practice …
- Factions in the Mind… Ordinarily, when the factions of greed, anger, and delusion take over the mind, they kick out the mindfulness and alertness; they don’t want anybody around watching. It’s like politicians when they’re discussing a corrupt deal: They don’t want journalists in the room; they don’t want anybody to see or hear what they’re doing. You notice this when part …
- Persistence… Anything that comes out of the mind based on greed, aversion, or delusion is going to be unskillful. Anything based on absence of greed, aversion, or delusion will be skillful. That means with your effort you have to notice when something comes up in the mind, where is it coming from? Then you have to decide what to do. The realization that you have …
- The Carrot & the Stick… The stick here is reminding yourself what happens to you when you allow greed, anger, and delusion to take over the mind. Just look at the crazy things that people do. You can look at the newspapers; you can look at people you’ve known. People do really destructive things to themselves simply because they allow greed to get a toehold in their minds …
- Analyzing Anger… anger, lust, greed, delusion. Delusion’s the hardest to see because it’s kind of muddy. You work first with your desires and your angers because you can see them a lot more clearly. You want to see what sparks them. Sometimes with lust it’s just a little tiny thing that you wouldn’t expect. But there it is: an assumption that has …
- Becoming Consummate… So if you’re clear on the fact that if you speak out of greed or anger or delusion, it’s going to cause trouble, then you just don’t speak. If, when you act out of greed or anger or delusion it’s going to cause trouble, you don’t act. Which means that you may have to wait for a while, but …
- Kindfulness… We’re working to overcome greed, anger, and delusion in the mind. We’re learning to make ourselves more self-reliant—which means that other people will be less subject to our greed, anger, and delusion, and we’ll have to lean on them less. As we develop mindfulness, concentration, discernment, compassion, these things can’t help but spill over into the way we …
- Fabricating against Defilement… This knowledge comes at the very end of the path after you’ve gotten rid of greed, anger, and delusion, so that you can see these things as they actually arise. If greed, anger, and delusion are still arising, you can’t see things as they’ve come to be, because you’ve already jumped in and have gotten involved in creating a state …
- The Four Precepts… When you don’t act on greed, anger, and delusion, other people are not subject to your greed, anger, and delusion. So they benefit as well. As you work on the practice, you find that your ability to develop a happiness inside that places less and less and less of a burden on other people gets more and more refined. So ultimately you find …
- Subduing Greed & Distress… You get into what Ajaan Lee calls delusion concentration, where the mind is still, and things are pleasant, but you’re not really sure where you’re focused. In the heaviest cases, when you come out you’re not even sure if were really awake or asleep or what was going on. The problem is that you lose a sense of what you’re …
- Dedicating Goodness, Spreading Goodwill… And as for the people you choose to give to, the Buddha says the most skillful recipients to look for are people who are free of greed, aversion, and delusion, or people who are practicing trying to get rid of greed, aversion, and delusion, because they’ll probably make the best use of the gift. And as for the recipients, the Buddha said that …
- Behind the Scenes… the way greed, aversion, and delusion go into the creation of a mind state, and how they disguise themselves as something else. And there’s the question: How is it that we’re both the creator of these mind states and the observer of the mind states, and yet we fall for them? How is it that we cover things up? It’s like …
- Verbal Fabrication… We like our delusion, all our opinions about things that have nothing to do with putting an end to suffering. A lot of that the Buddha would class as ignorance: a thicket of views. Yet we like our thicket of views, so you have to examine why. And sometimes the* why* is not as obvious as you might think. The Buddha talks about pinpointing …
- The Elephant Hunter… Sometimes you act on good intentions and it turns out there’s some delusion involved in what you think is good. When you see that the results are not good, you have to turn around and look back at your intention to see where the delusion was. You take responsibility. This is what the Buddha is asking you to do all the way along …
- In Training… Even though acting on greed, aversion, and delusion is not pleasant in and of itself, still it can lead to other sensual pleasures in the short-run, other kinds of pleasures that last for at least a little while. The same with skillful actions: Sometimes they’re difficult. The fact that you’re acting on a skillful intention is pleasant in and of itself …
- Questioning Your Way to Certainty… The same with aversion and delusion: You know for yourself here and now when these things are present and when they’re absent. You also know what you’ve done to bring them on and you know what you’ve done to get rid of them. So, seeing the Dhamma here and now is a question of noticing your actions and the result of …
- What’s Worth Doing?… This is not delusion. Some people will tell you that when you’re thinking, it’s delusion; when the mind is not thinking it’s not deluded. Well, when the mind is not thinking it can be extremely deluded. But if it’s thinking rightly, it can keep itself on the path. So starting with the teachings to Rahula on the question of deciding …
- Living Forward, Understanding Backward… to strengthen the skillful intentions in the mind, the intentions that are not wound up in greed, aversion, or delusion. Greed and aversion are fairly easy to see. Delusion is hard—because after all, when you’re deluded, you don’t know you’re deluded. You don’t really know the truth. The only way around that is to keep your past mistakes in …
- The Good We Already Have… sometimes the mind thinks in skillful ways, sometimes it gets overcome by greed, anger, and delusion, and goes off in unskillful ways. Back and forth like this, and nothing really positive has much of a chance to grow. And so we meditate – the Pali word is bhavana, which means to develop, to increase. That’s what we’re doing: We’re increasing the good …
- How Right Mindfulness Leads to Right Concentration… Well, why think about it at all? We don’t know how much time we have, but we do have this time right now, so why don’t we make good use of it? You realize that that thinking, if it’s involved with greed, aversion, delusion, lust, or fear, is a waste of time. So you bring the mind back. If that thought …
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