Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 122
  2. Audacious & Undaunted
     … The third knowledge, which he gained when looking there, was what ended the effluents, in other words, the outflows of the mind that keep the mind going in this process of death and rebirth and re-death and rebirth. He saw that if he understood things in terms of four noble truths and followed the duties appropriate to each of those truths, he could … 
  3. The Desire for Things to Be Different
     … You get the mind to the point where there’s just pleasure in the body, equanimity in the mind. Then you find that even the need to breathe in and breathe out feels oppressive. Your sensitivities have been heightened at that point, so you allow the body just to be there. Because your awareness fills the body, breath energy fills the body, and the … 
  4. Our Sense of Self
     … that strange process of finding that simply being able to talk about things can often help solve a problem in the mind. What you’re doing as you’re talking is that you’re learning how to articulate what’s going on in the mind. Once it’s articulated, then it’s a lot easier to deal with. All too often, we have these … 
  5. The Karma of Perception
     … It’s also one of the elements most responsive to the image you hold in your mind, and it’s also a good mirror for the mind itself. This practice in perception is useful both for the sake of getting the mind into concentration and also for dealing with other issues as you go through life. You get more and more sensitive to how … 
  6. The Power of Perception
     … Normally, the mind is fragmented with all sorts of perceptions, ideas, and intentions, and they can affect the mind for good or bad. The problem in many cases is that it’s all pretty random. We stick with one perception for a while then drop it to move off to something else, and then something else. It’s like throwing a stick up in … 
  7. Skillful Effort
     … Because after all, what are you doing as you get the mind concentrated? You’re pushing against the three characteristics. In other words, you’re taking things that are inconstant and trying to make them constant. You want the mind to stay still. You take things that are stressful—this body here has lots of stress—but you’re learning how to make it … 
  8. Preparing for Death
     … Whereas with the mind in concentration, even though there is a lot of pleasure, it doesn’t require that you turn a blind eye to what you did to get the pleasure. In fact, you can see it even more clearly. So concentration helps to get over that craving for human sensuality. As for fear of losing the body, when the mind really settles … 
  9. Equanimity in Action, Equanimity at Rest
    Equanimity—the ability to keep the mind on an even keel in the face of pleasant and unpleasant things, to accept what has to be accepted—is an attitude we’re supposed to develop immeasurably: in other words, for all beings without exceptions. But it has a different meaning based pm whether we’re talking about equanimity in action or equanimity at rest. At … 
  10. Delight in Striving
     … The other was not resting satisfied even with his skillful qualities, to say nothing of unskillful qualities in the mind. He didn’t practice “radical acceptance.” If something in his mind was unskillful, he would try to get rid of it. If he had done something skillful, he would take joy in that fact but he wouldn’t rest satisfied. He would try even … 
  11. Rooted in Heedful Desire
     … You’ve always got to keep watch on what the mind is doing. Upasika Kee brings up this principle in her teaching. She says, “As soon as you gain an insight, you have to watch immediately: What does the mind do or say right after the insight?” It’s not enough to be right, you have to learn how to take that right insight … 
  12. Grounded in the Elements
     … It’s most responsive to the mind. It’s through the breath that the mind can exert control over the body, make it move. And it’s through the breath that the mind experiences the body. Without the breath, you’d be going separate ways. So think of the breath as primary. And it’s everywhere. It’s all around your body. Wherever you … 
  13. Virtue & Right View
     … You want to give the mind a place where it can settle down and find a source of well-being inside. We live in a world that doesn’t go the way we want it to often, but we can learn how to control our minds. That’s an important distinction. Sometimes you hear it said that just wanting anything to be different from … 
  14. In the Context of the Deathless
     … What does the Buddha say? You try to get the mind in a state of concentration with a sense of ease and rapture or refreshment. In fact, the ease, pleasure, and refreshment are one of the main points of getting the mind into concentration. So the path may have its difficulties, but it has its rewards. And it doesn’t save its rewards for … 
  15. Sensitive to Fabrication
     … Then we can ask ourselves, “Okay, when the stress level in the mind goes up, what were the perceptions that brought it on? What were the feelings? What were the thought constructs?” The perceptions usually are the big troublemakers because they’re quick and they have an immediate impact. They deal with the mind on its lizard-brain level. So again, as you’re … 
  16. Skills for Dying Well
     … The skills that you gain in learning to keep the mind in one spot, to peel it away from distractions, will be extremely useful at that point; but the word ‘skill’ here means not only techniques but also attitudes, qualities of your character. These get developed in the meditation and they’ll be useful at that time, too. In terms of techniques: As the … 
  17. Look After Yourself with Ease
     … One of the common questions you hear in the forest tradition is that, when the mind gets really still, you should ask it, “Who are you?” When you look at it in those terms, what do you see? There’s nothing male or female about it, nothing white, nothing black, nothing Asian. It’s just the mind; it’s just awareness. You want to … 
  18. Stay
     … It doesn’t require a lot of intelligence, at least not of the book-learning type, but it does require the kind of intelligence that can deal with your defilements—the parts of the mind that want to go exploring other fields. You have to keep reminding yourself of why you want to be here and of the drawbacks of going any place else … 
  19. Renunciate Grief
     … So you’ve really got to train the mind, because otherwise it’s just going to keep trying to find the pleasure it thought it might have had, could have had, or just missed. It’s going to come back and try for it again. You’ve got to look deep into the mind because that’s where all of this points. After all … 
  20. Ekaggata
     … This makes you more sensitive to the speech inside the mind. After all, the Buddha said that when we talk it comes from two mental activities: directed thought and evaluation. These are precisely the things we’re working on as we meditate. You focus your thoughts on something, and then you observe it, you evaluate it. This is how alertness moves inside the mind … 
  21. Visakha Puja
     … That’s how he did it, by looking at his actions—not only his external actions but also the actions in the mind—seeing what was skillful, what was unskillful, seeing where his actions were causing harm, even subtle harm in the mind, even a subtle sense of stress, disturbance, a weight in the mind. He saw that as a problem and resolved to … 
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