Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 113
  2. A Memorial to Your Life
     … But feelings of rapture are things you have to get beyond if you want the mind to be really still. So even though they’re one of the rewards of getting the mind to settle down, you can’t focus on them. You have to give your full attention to your breath. That’s what the intentness is all about: You want to do … 
  3. The Five Faculties Confirmed
     … And where do our actions come from? From the mind. So we realize we’ve got to train the mind. Training the mind will require seeing things in terms of the four noble truths. Now, the four noble truths are not intuitive. As the Buddha says, we suffer because of our clinging. Our knee-jerk reaction is usually that we’re suffering because of … 
  4. Skillfully Shaping Your Life
     … This is why training of the mind is so worthwhile. If the amount of pleasure and pain we felt in the world were entirely out of our hands, then there wouldn’t be much point in training the mind. But we do shape things. You can sit here for an hour and make yourself miserable. You can sit here for an hour and be … 
  5. Head, Heart, & Gut
     … A sense of well-being that you can develop, as you get the mind into concentration, can give you a place to stay where you have a sense of strength, where you can withstand the parts of the mind that get upset by having to give up this or give up that, and withstand parts of the mind that are lazy when you say … 
  6. Three Levels of Refuge
     … That means you have to train the mind, because the mind is what gives the orders for what you do and say and think. So the dangers come from within, but the potential for going beyond the dangers also comes from within. There’s a passage where the Buddha says the mind is bright, but it’s defiled by incoming or visiting defilements. The … 
  7. No One Size Fits All
     … Concentration is a matter of finding something the mind feels comfortable with, a place where it feels it can settle down and be at ease. So you have to explore which of the topics can be your home base. Again Ajaan Lee recommends the breath as a general home base or at the very least a good place to go, but it’s not … 
  8. The Desire for Things to Be Different
     … You find that you can’t stay here in this body, and something will appear to the mind and appeal to the mind, and all of a sudden you find yourself there—often without having investigated the surroundings too carefully or taken a good look at what you have to become in order to find that thing. Then there’s craving for non-becoming … 
  9. A Refuge from the Winds of the World
    The Thai translation for concentration is “to have the mind firmly established.” Right concentration, of course, means have it established firmly in the right way. When you think of concentration in that way, then it’s obvious that it’s a quality you want to have all the time. As Ajaan Suwat once noted, when you define concentration that way, it covers all aspects … 
  10. A Heart Bigger Than the World
     … He didn’t look at the world through rose-colored glasses, but he did see that the mind can be trained so that it doesn’t have to be affected by the difficulties and outright cruelties in the world. That’s why we’re here—to train the mind so that it’s larger than the world, to train the heart so that it … 
  11. Rooted in Desire
    When you listen to a Dhamma talk, give only one percent of your attention to the talk, ninety-nine percent to the mind with the breath, right here, right now. Think about the time of the Buddha: People were listening to the talks he gave and they gained awakening. Not simply by listening to the talk—they were looking at their minds. When the … 
  12. Feelings Not of the Flesh
     … You also get clearer on the things that come up in the mind that would pull you away. As the Buddha said, there’s no strong concentration without discernment. One of the things you’re going to learn how to discern is how not to fall for the thoughts that come wandering through the mind, telling you that “You’ve had enough just sitting … 
  13. Perception
     … So as you get more sensitive to how the mind labels things—and you can see this more clearly the more still the mind is—try to apply that sensitivity to the way you perceive things around you, the way you perceive the people around you, the way you perceive the situations around you, realizing that you do have choices in how you apply … 
  14. Changing Your Default Settings
     … But like a scale that’s been out of balance for a bit, the mind tends to go back and find its old balance. This reflects one of the Buddha’s teachings – that the things that make us really happy and miserable in life are not so much the events outside that can have a huge impact on us in one way or another … 
  15. Worth
     … You want to look at it as an opportunity to develop good qualities of the mind and heart: things like generosity and virtue, persistence, patience, discernment, goodwill, and equanimity. Renunciation, truthfulness, determination. These are all qualities that the heart needs. And they’re things that stick with you, in this life on into the next life. This is where you look for value: your … 
  16. Watching Over Time
     … Now, we can talk about* *balance in abstract terms, but when you’re dealing with the breath, the breath is a good way of actually monitoring the question of balance in the mind. There are a lot of teachings where the Buddha talks about balancing different qualities. He says that when the mind seems to have too much energy, you should try to use … 
  17. Today Is Better than Yesterday
     … When you think about ignorance in the mind, it’s not simply that you don’t know. It’s that there are parts of the mind that just don’t want to admit the truth, so they find reasons for covering things up. To fight these members, you need to conviction. That deals with the cynical members, telling them that, yes, the effort you … 
  18. Jhana: Responsible Happiness
     … And because a lot of the energy flow in the body is related to different issues in the mind, you’ll find that parts of the mind that tended to not have a voice now start having a voice as well. You allow them to get healed, too. All of this, just as you focus on the breath, is your medicine: steady awareness combined … 
  19. Sensual Passion
    In the Buddha’s description of concentration practice, he says that you’re aloof from sensuality, aloof from unskillful qualities in the mind. The word sensuality—kāma in Pali—is often misunderstood. Sometimes it’s translated as aloof from sensual pleasures. But the Buddha doesn’t have you search out a really difficult, painful place to practice. You try to find a place that … 
  20. To Purify the Heart
     … The breath is like a mirror for the mind. The way we breathe, the way we relate to the breath energy in the body, tells us a lot about the state of the mind right now. It’s possible to sit down and, within a few minutes, give yourself a headache, a backache, or get things all messed up inside. Or it’s possible … 
  21. Mindfulness of Death
     … A lot of things are going to come thronging into the mind at that time, and you have to be prepared to choose which things are really worth focusing on and which ones are not. Even though there’s not much strength left in the body, you’ll have to muster as much strength in the mind as you can, because you’ll be … 
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