Search results for: "The Mind"

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  2. A Healthy Body Image
     … That allows the mind to settle in and be able to watch itself clearly. As for the healthy negative image: That’s when you realize that everybody’s body is made up of the same stuff. There’s a liver, there’s a spleen, there are kidneys. There are intestines and all that crap in the intestines—literally. And the stuff in the stomach … 
  3. An Environment for Practice
     … Some of them are there for training the mind; others are there for creating calm, peace, and harmony in the community; still others are there so that the community inspires respect. If monks are squabbling or competing with one another to get fancy things, it doesn’t inspire any support for the community. And not only does the individual monk who’s breaking the … 
  4. Appropriate Attention
    The nature of the mind is that it doesn’t sit around just doing nothing. It’s not simply a passive receiver of outside stimuli. It’s out there looking for things. It’s constantly active because it knows there are dangers all around. And so the question always in the back of the mind is, “What next? What next? What do I do … 
  5. Discernment Through Right Effort
     … There’s the effort to prevent unskillful things from arising in the mind, and if unskillful things have arisen in the mind, you try to abandon them. As for skillful things, if they’re not there yet, you try to give rise to them. When they are there, you try to maintain them and bring them to the culmination of their development. Those are … 
  6. Fully Absorbed
     … Part of the mind will say, “Well, this is dumb,” and you have to say, “No, this is not dumb. This is a skill.” And it’ll argue; it’ll say, “I’ve got to think of things, analyze things.” Not yet. The first step is to develop this. Because as this state of the mind is developed, insights will come. Now, there are … 
  7. The World Offers No Shelter
     … It teaches us to develop qualities in the mind that have a lasting value. They start with the qualities of the path: virtue, concentration, and discernment—and even before that, with the bases of merit: generosity, virtue, developing goodwill. Even though these things are not permanent, they can take you to a place that does not get swept away. In the meantime, they provide … 
  8. Friends with The Breath
     … If you were to draw a map of where the mind goes in the course of not even a day, just 30 minutes, it would be all over the place. We’re not very much aware of the different forces moving in, what they call the currents of the mind in the forest tradition. But you sense the currents once you’ve got an … 
  9. The Treasure of Equanimity
     … The act of giving a gift broadens the mind, makes the mind more expansive, as you take into consideration the needs of other people and try to help those needs. And finally discernment: the ability to see what’s skillful and what’s not, to see what is your business and what’s not your business. This is where equanimity and discernment come very … 
  10. The Advantages of Many Selves
    We talk a lot about the committee of the mind, all the many different “you’s” inside there. When you realize you have to train them all, it gets kind of discouraging sometimes. There seem to be so many of them. But it’s good to see that they’re also our opportunity. If there were just one you, and the one you was … 
  11. Between Right & Wrong
     … As the mind settles down, give it a chance to rest. When it’s rested, then you can ask it: What still is causing a sense of burdensomeness or of stress? Anything that weighs the mind down, or as one of the forest ajaans said, anything that puts a squeeze on the mind: Is there anything still there? Look for it. The more assiduous … 
  12. Learning How to Learn
     … Then, when any questions come out of the meditation, we’re talking about the mind. We’re not talking about Buddhism or Christianity or any particular religion. We just talk about issues that arise in the mind. That way,” he said, “we can understand each other.” So focus on the breath. As my teacher said, it’s common property, so common that we hardly … 
  13. Levels of the Breath
     … As you learn to fabricate in more subtle ways, more solid ways, more unchanging and unified ways, the mind can settle down more and more solidly, securely. Some people, when they get to this stage, think that the mind isn’t doing anything at all: no self, no actor, nothing. But actually it’s doing just one consistent thing. When there’s that one … 
  14. Heedful, Ardent, & Resolute
     … You notice there are things that have come up in the mind that are unskilful, so you learn to let go of them and then you do what you can to prevent them from arising again. As for skillful things in the mind that haven’t arisen, you try to give rise to them. When they’re there, you try to maintain them and … 
  15. Ajaan Suwat 100 Years
     … Try to pare things down to what’s really relevant to getting the mind to stay still right here, right now. And as for any disturbance in the mind, simply regard it as an instance of the first noble truth, or the second. In other words, something to be comprehended and then to be abandoned. Even little disturbances in the mind, you learn how … 
  16. Taking Initiative
     … So what do you have to take with you? What you’ve built into the mind. So keep your focus right here. What you’re doing right now, what you’re training in the mind, is yours. It’s as if you’re packing your bags to go. If you just let your mind wander around with whatever, then you’re just packing junk … 
  17. Modest in Manner, but Not in Goals
     … You want to be able to watch your own mind, because, as the Buddha said, our happiness and our suffering come from within the mind. We do things that lead to suffering because we don’t know what we’re doing. The way around that, of course, is to be more alert to what you’re doing. And it starts right here with the … 
  18. The Truth of Perceptions
     … What happens if you put aside this perception of the mind being one? The mind goes to a perception of nothingness. This takes you as far as perception can go, but you’ve learned an important lesson: Perceptions are a sketch. They focus on different aspects of reality. And some are true, some are false. But you can have lots of different true perceptions … 
  19. Ardency
     … Why bother? Well, for one thing, the breath keeps you grounded in the present moment, where the mind is creating unnecessary suffering and stress. And two, when you’re close to the breath, you’re also close to all the processes of fabrication or intention in the mind. When you’re close to your intentions, you can begin to see where the ignorance is … 
  20. Healing Awareness
     … Get on good terms with it, and it’ll teach the mind a lot of things it needs to know—because the breath, as Ajaan Lee said in one of his Dhamma talks, is a mirror for the mind. It responds very quickly to what the mind is doing. So it’s a good topic for becoming sensitive to what your awareness is like … 
  21. The Dhamma Mirror
     … You try to do the two of them together, because where are you going to learn insight? From getting the mind still. After all, “insight,” as far as the Buddha was concerned, was not a technique, it was a quality of mind that you’re trying to develop. You don’t wait until your concentration gets really strong, and you don’t wait until … 
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