Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 115
  2. Recollection of Hell
     … As you keep that perception in mind and convince yourself of its truth, that’s when the mind begins to incline toward the deathless. It perceives the deathless as a desirable goal, and that perception can help open the way to an actual experience of the deathless. Yet even then, the mind has this tendency: It likes to keep fabricating, so it can create … 
  3. Facing Pain
     … No matter how much the mind keeps screaming at you that you’ve got to focus on the pain, you say, “No, I don’t have to. I don’t have to get involved.” Now, sometimes as you extricate yourself from getting involved in the pain, you begin to see the chatter of the mind that pulls you back toward the pain. As you … 
  4. An Auspicious Birth
     … That’s when the mind gets tangled up in desire for any of the five khandhas. It takes on an identity. It wants this kind of experience of form. It wants this kind of feeling, these kinds of perceptions, thought constructs, this kind of consciousness. We talk of the first kind of birth being auspicious when you’re born into a family that’s … 
  5. Positive Capability
     … Why? Why do we do this? It’s going to take a lot of figuring out because the mind is very subtle. As Ajaan Chah once said, one of the first things you learn when you watch the mind is how much it lies to itself. So you don’t just sit there with the lies and say, “Well, the lies are like this … 
  6. Me, Me, Me
     … Now I see that they don’t really make much sense.” When you see that you have the alternative that you don’t have to do them and you’re better off not doing them, you don’t have to tell the mind that things are inconstant, stressful, and not-self or whatever. The mind simply lets go. So we’re dissecting the sense … 
  7. The No Common Sense Zone
     … Our goal is the mind. We want the mind to settle down. What kind of breathing will help? You try things out. You try chest breathing, you try abdominal breathing, you try breathing all the way down to your toes. Which feels good? Which do you find easiest to settle down on? How about longer or shorter breathing? Faster or slower? Think of the … 
  8. Afraid of Pleasure
     … Or it’ll think up other duties for you: “Got to look at this, got to look at that.” Even here at the monastery there’s a lot of looking after the physical plant that has to go on, so it’s very easy for the mind to get tied up in that. In other words, if you don’t give the mind something … 
  9. Self-Doubt
     … A voice comes up in the mind: “Maybe you don’t have it within you to do this.” That’s a voice you cannot listen to., because the meditation is a necessary skill. There are a lot of skills in the world where you realize you don’t have a talent for it, and it’s not all that necessary, so you can let … 
  10. Looking for Trouble
     … If you’re determined to protect it, you start noticing the ways the mind flows out. As Ajaan Lee said, this is the real meaning of asava, which is a very mysterious term in the texts—translated as outflows, influxes, effluents, or fermentations. It comes down to this sense of how the mind flows out your eyes, your ears, your nose, your tongue, your … 
  11. The Questions of Suffering
     … Think, not in terms of the physical heart, but of your mental heart, the mind—in Buddhism, they treat the heart and the mind as basically the same thing: For the problems of the mind, people offer even more conflicting solutions. It’s very rare that they actually point back to that first issue: What is the suffering? How do you put an end … 
  12. How to Be Alone
     … There are also the skills of steadying the mind when the new mood you’re trying to create is still unstable. What can you do to make it more and more solid? And then there are the skills of releasing the mind, knowing how to free the mind from a relatively skillful mood to reach an even more skillful one. Even when you’ve … 
  13. Taking Responsibility
     … How can I get the mind to be more still? How can the mind be focused? How can it be settled down? These are useful questions to ask for the purpose of gaining tranquility. For the purpose of insight the questions are: How should fabrications be regarded? How should they be analyzed? You get some answers but then again you have to take those … 
  14. Protection in all Directions
     … There are certain actions in the mind that lead to suffering; there are certain actions in the mind that lead away from suffering. As you start out with these basic principles of what’s skillful, you find that in order to really strengthen your actions—especially skillful mental acts, but also your skillful bodily acts and your skillful verbal acts—you need to have … 
  15. Coping & Beyond Coping
     … We create that place by giving the mind something good to focus on, something nearby—the breath, the way you feel the body from inside. When we talk about the breath, it’s not the air coming in and out through the nose. It’s more the feeling of energy that flows through the body as you breathe in, as you breathe out. It … 
  16. Dethinking Thinking
     … The body has a sense of forward and back, but why does the mind have to carry that in? We tend to think of the mind as being like the eyes that face forward. But what happens if you think of the mind just as being a radiance going out in all directions, and all directions are equal? Then, of course, there are concepts … 
  17. Licking Yourself Clean
     … One of the reasons we recite those chants on goodwill, compassion, appreciation, and equanimity is to create a sense of wellbeing in the mind. Thoughts of goodwill are good thoughts to think. They feel good. They put the mind at ease. You don’t have to struggle with anybody. You don’t have to settle any old scores. It feels good to be thinking … 
  18. Catch Yourself Lying to Yourself
     … This earnestness is what translates into truth as a meditator, being earnest in watching yourself so that you can catch the mind lying to itself. You begin to realize all the layers that are going on in the mind—layers of discussion, layers of decision—and you can begin to pry them apart. That’s genuine discernment. We like to think that discernment is … 
  19. The Skills of a Hunter
     … Little thoughts’ll come into the mind. Anything that would come in saying, “This is boring. This is stupid. This is whatever,” you’ve got to treat as defilements. You can’t side with them. You’ve got to side with your desire to really know the mind, and to master the skills that are necessary for doing so. So be very clear about … 
  20. The Uses of Equanimity
     … to get the mind solid in the face of whatever comes up. But that solidity has to come from learning how to develop strengths: a sense of well-being, a sense of ease inside the body, an ease inside the mind, so as to assist in keeping you solid. The secret to patience or endurance is to focus not on the hard things you … 
  21. Duties
     … There’s an interesting sutta where a deva comes to see the Buddha and talks about how the mind is trembling, the mind is fearful and anxious because of its duties: duties that have already arisen and duties that have yet to arise. We don’t usually think of devas as having duties. They’re supposed to be up there in heaven just having … 
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