Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 131
  2. Lessons in Happiness
     … Keep reminding yourself, especially when the mind has this tendency to run away and be done with everything, that that’s not the Buddha’s way. The Buddha followed the path of exploring, cultivating, developing, letting go of what is unskillful, anything he could sense was a weight or burden on the mind, and then going to deeper and deeper levels, from body, feelings … 
  3. Keeping Your Values Alive
     … the fact that there’s suffering and stress, and it’s caused by things that happen in the mind. So you want to learn how to change those causes so that the mind actually gets on the path to the end of suffering. You learn to look at issues in that way: Where is the stress here? What’s causing it? And particularly, what … 
  4. Patience & Urgency
     … Because the practice isn’t a mechanical process where you simply force on the mind through the meat grinder and you come out with nibbana as the product. The technique is here to develop your powers of perception, to develop your powers of concentration, so that you can use your discernment to figure things out more clearly for yourself. If you rush through things … 
  5. The Perception of Inconstancy
     … Some things in the mind are actually unskillful: There’s the dhātu of sensuality—in other words, this potential in the mind is lying there, waiting for something to provoke it—although, as Ajaan Lee noted, often it doesn’t wait. It goes out looking for things to provoke it. But then there are good potentials in the mind as well: There’s the … 
  6. Heedfulness
     … But the Buddha’s more concerned with the life of the goodness of the mind, its skillful qualities. And that’s really much more important. It’s why we’re here. We’re looking to keep the goodness of the mind alive so that it can develop even further to something that goes beyond good and evil, i.e. to the deathless. But the … 
  7. Limitless Compassion, Limited Resources
     … We’re here because there are a whole range of virtues and good qualities we need to develop in the mind: both in the way we deal with other people and in the way we deal with the mind itself. And a large part of the skill we have to develop in the practice lies in learning how to balance these things out.
  8. Against Your Type
     … We don’t have a full range of skills for dealing effectively with greed, anger, and delusion; for dealing effectively with difficult people; for dealing effectively with friendly people; for dealing effectively with the mind when it’s down; for dealing effectively with the mind when it’s up. Instead of simply acting out of force of habit, or deciding to change your habits … 
  9. Mindfulness + Discernment = Intelligence
     … Just thinking about getting the mind concentrated is very wearisome.” If that’s how you think, you’re never going to get the mind concentrated. The duty with regard to concentration is to give rise to it and develop it. In terms of self or not-self, in the Canon there’s a case where a monk decides that if the five aggregates are … 
  10. Sensitive to Fabrication
     … Otherwise, if there are little impulses here and there, little knots of energy that get tied up, the mind tends to run with those and go off someplace else because it doesn’t like being here. And that can be for any number of reasons. One is simple boredom. You don’t see anything happening right here and you want to make up a … 
  11. Therapeutic Seclusion
     … It’s something in the mind that’s looking for that kind of thing. It wants lust. Why? See also how it passes away—because it’s not there all the time. You learn a lot by seeing the mind state when, say, there’s no lust or no anger, when things are calm. The lust or anger has gone away, as if it … 
  12. Dissolving Distress
    In the Buddha’s description of right mindfulness, he’s telling us how to get the mind into right concentration. The formula is this: You remain focused on the body in and of itself, ardent, alert, and mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. That covers two activities. Keeping focused on, say, the breath, in and of itself: That’s … 
  13. A Heart & Mind of Goodwill
     … If there are gaps in your attention, your breath goes back to its old ways in the gaps, which may or may not be okay for the breath and the body, but it’s certainly not good for the mind, these gaps. They’re a direct experience of ignorance. You’re suddenly off someplace else, not paying attention to what you’re doing. The … 
  14. Three Types of Equanimity
     … His sense of equanimity was more a matter of keeping the mind on an even keel in the midst of the ups and downs of life—and it’s important to note that when the Buddha taught equanimity he didn’t teach it as a single member of a list. It was always part of a list that had other members, other qualities, and … 
  15. Indecision
     … If you have those qualities in the mind, they’ll lead you to act in ways that are unskillful. Delusion, particularly, will make it difficult to see what’s skillful or not. You harm others by trying to incite passion, aversion, and delusion in them. So, again, if you look at a particular occupation, a particular way of life, does it depend on inciting … 
  16. Right View
     … If you want to get beyond eating, you’ve got to fine some way of developing the mind. That’s kind of desire is helpful, because it points you to what needs to be done, to get the mind in a position where it doesn’t need to feed. Then you can be content. Then there’s the issue of conceit. Ananda says, you … 
  17. Firm in Your Intent
     … The real danger is what comes out of the mind. So if we don’t want to suffer from the dangers of the world, we have to look inside, because that’s where they come from. Our greed, aversion, and delusion give rise to all the circumstances that cause us to keep coming back like this. We feel a hunger; we feel a lack … 
  18. A Skillful Heart
     … As Ajaan Chah said, when you look steadily at the mind, one of the first things you’re going to see is its tendency to lie to itself. When the mind can lie to itself, then it can talk itself into doing all kinds of unskillful things. In the same way, as when we see other people lying shamelessly we have a sense that … 
  19. Dedicating Merit
     … It was being there when I was still receptive—and being around the ajaans and other people practicing meditation—that I began to realize that there’s more to the mind than Western materialistic ideas can account for. And one of the things about the mind is the notion of the current of the mind. The mind is constantly sending out currents. When the … 
  20. Painful Feelings, Hurtful Words
     … Then if part of the mind complains “Why is that pain still there?”, remember, pain is normal. We come into the world with pain. We go out with pain. And so in the meantime, we’re trying to clear a little space here so that we have some well-being, so that the mind can settle down and look at itself and figure out … 
  21. Cutting New Paths in the Mind
    Cutting New Paths in the Mind October 10, 2011 When we’re taught to meditate, there’s so much emphasis placed on being in the present moment, not wandering off to the past and not wandering off to the future, that we tend to neglect a very important part of right effort, which is to prevent unskillful qualities from arising. To prevent these things … 
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