Search results for: "The Mind"

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  2. To Take Danger in Stride
     … You want your home to be right here, as close to the mind and as close to the body as possible. And the breath is the closest thing to the mind there is. It’s your basic experience of the body. Even before you experience the solidity of the body, there’s the energy of the breath that gets you in touch with it … 
  3. Angry
     … In the second tetrad, you get sensitive to ways of breathing that give rise to pleasure and rapture, and then you notice how they have an impact on the mind. In other words, you’re sensitive to mental fabrication, seeing how those feelings and the perceptions affect the mind. Then you adjust the feelings and the perceptions so that they calm the mind down … 
  4. The Power of Perception
     … keeping track of the body in and of itself, keeping track of feelings in and of themselves, keeping track of the mind in and of itself, keeping track of mental qualities in and of themselves. Those are the targets of your meditation. Those are what you take as your theme. You maintain that theme by having a perception. As the Buddha said, that’s … 
  5. A Sense of Time & Place
    When you focus on the breath, you’re creating a home base for the mind, a home base for your actions. This is the place where you’re going to take your stance: being with the breath all the way in and all the way out—being with the direct sensation of how it feels to breathe, and learning to relate to that in … 
  6. Focus on Your Skill
     … It was by focusing on this skill that the Buddha was able to avoid a lot of issues that would pull the mind off into wrong view no matter which side you took. There were a lot of questions that he wouldn’t answer. “Is the world a oneness?” “Well, no,” he said. “A multiplicity?” “Well, no.” “Is there a self? Is there no … 
  7. Discernment & Determination
     … So try to calm the mind and give up any attitudes that would get in the way. Learn to identify them as separate voices in the mind, voices that you don’t have to identify with. This is where discernment comes in again. It informs all of these qualities. To be truthful, you have to know how to think about maintaining things—how to … 
  8. Bless Yourself
     … And you’re ardent in doing what? Trying to get the mind to settle down. So as you’re sitting here right now, try to be mindful of why you’re here. Then focus on doing what you need to do. In some cases, we come to the meditation wired, tense, and nervous, so we have to emphasize getting the mind to settle down … 
  9. Unlimited Compassion, Limited Resources
     … You have to ask, why am I doing this? What inside the mind is getting fed by this? Again, it requires concentration to get the mind still enough to see these things, and discernment to ask the right questions. So all of the brahmaviharas have to be limitless—in other words, something you can apply to anybody in any situation. And they require the … 
  10. Circumspection
     … After all, the mind is a complex thing. The needs of the mind in training are complex. And this is not a onefold path. Even with the practice of exercising your discernment, as the Buddha says in his comments about the factors for awakening, the analysis of qualities which is the discernment faculty: Sometimes if you use that too much, it gets the mind … 
  11. Dichotomies
     … What’s skillful, what’s unskillful? What’s dark in the mind, what’s bright in the mind? Because those pairs really do make a difference. There was a famous translator one time who translated that passage and then wrote a footnote saying he didn’t understand how this was the proper description for discernment. I guess he was assuming that discernment had to … 
  12. Recollection of the Buddha
     … It’s a way to understand what’s going on deep down inside the mind, and why the mind is so often fooled by its cravings. After all, we all want happiness, and yet cravings get us to do a lot of things that make us suffer. Why are we so bamboozled? What in us likes the craving? Why do we listen to it … 
  13. Smart About Lust
     … It’s something inside the mind itself. There’s a thirst, a sense of lack, and then there’s the thought that “Well, I could fill in this lack with thoughts of sensuality. Even if I can’t get what I want, I can fantasize.” Of course, fantasizing leads the mind to think more and more in terms of actually acting on those fantasies … 
  14. Unlearning Unskillful Behavior
     … Just pose that question in the mind, and then drop it to the side. Focus on the breath. Try to get the mind as concentrated and still as you can. If any nibblings of that thought come up in the course of the hour, say, “No, not yet, not yet. Wait until the mind is in better shape.” Then, at the end of the … 
  15. The World of Conviction
     … You could tell where the movie was going, so I walked out—because it seemed so unhealthy to treat the idea that the mind that desires purity, the mind that desires a true happiness, should be mocked. But it wasn’t just that one movie. It’s a theme throughout our society: making fun of people who want to keep their virtue pure, making … 
  16. Safety in an Uncertain World
     … As the Buddha describes concentration, it’s basically feeling tones of pleasure, rapture, and the calm of equanimity after the mind has been nourished with pleasure and rapture. We’re feeding the mind so that it’s not so hungry for quick fixes. That way, it can learn to trust itself more. But even then we’re still subject to further dangers: the simple … 
  17. Karma & Not-self
     … We’re getting a sense of what it means for us to act, particularly with action in the mind. When you focus on the breath, what happens? When you have a particular idea about the breath, what happens? When you change that idea about the breath, what happens? When you have a sense of the observer inside the body, what happens if you move … 
  18. There is This
     … This is one of the reasons why we get the mind concentrated because as the Buddha said, once the mind is concentrated, you can see the aggregates as they arise, as they’re originated by conditions. You can see events at the sense spheres. You can analyze your sense of the body into aggregates and properties. When the mind is still in the present … 
  19. Dependent Co-arising Right Now
     … Tell yourself you want to understand the fabrications of the mind, the workings of the mind, and get “you” and “the world” out of the picture as much as possible. Acting on that kind of desire gives results. So even though dependent co-arising is complex—and there’s that famous passage where Ananda comes to the Buddha and says, “It looks complex, but … 
  20. Single-minded Determination
     … This is what training the mind is all about: getting the mind to gather around that single-minded purpose, that single-minded intention. This kind of training starts with the precepts. They show us exactly where our minds are many-minded. When you observe the precepts, you have to focus on your intentions all the time. As you get to know your intentions, you … 
  21. The Rewards of Stream Entry
     … As Ajaan Chah used to say, “It’s not that the noises are disturbing us; we tend to disturb the noises.” In other words, the mind makes comments on the noise, and then those comments are the things that disturb the mind. So just let the noise go through you and out the other side. Stay with the sensation of the breathing coming in … 
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