Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 138
  2. On Deserving to Be Happy
     … They’re four ways of practicing concentration that emphasize different aspects of concentration or what can get the mind into concentration. But if you line them up as a list, they work pretty well as a guide to what you have to do in order to become skillful. The first is desire. You have to want to get your desires in line with the … 
  3. We’re All Learning the Ropes
     … Well, it’s the same with the mind. As long as the mind is starving, feeling irritated and unhappy, all it can think about is immediate results, a desire for an immediate hit. To counteract this tendency, we feed the mind with concentration, we feed the mind with comfortable breath sensations, work those sensations through the body so that we can feel bathed in … 
  4. The Power of Human Effort
     … This is a good way of uplifting the mind—or as the texts say, gladdening the mind. These recollections put you in the right mood to meditate. You think about the kind of person the Buddha was, the person who found this path. You think about how good the Dhamma is, and how noble the example of his noble disciples. Of course, each of … 
  5. Make Yourself Small
     … Anything else that comes along in the mind, you say, “Not now. Not right now.” If you do find the mind has slipped away, don’t engage in a lot of recrimination. This is one of those places where there’s no shame and no blame. In other words, you’re not here to prove something to yourself about what kind of person you … 
  6. Meditators at Work
     … We’re not here just to treat diseases, but that’s one of the ways of getting the mind to really want to focus on the breath, to pay attention to it, and to take an interest in it. Then you can get into the issue of when you have a vagrant thought, what happened to the breath? How does the breath relate to … 
  7. Fear & Uncertainty
     … It’s to look for something more secure inside the mind. The way you starve the hindrance of uncertainty is to look in the mind and see what’s skillful and what’s not skillful there inside. And as it so happens, that’s the same way you provide food for analysis of qualities as a factor for awakening, which is the discernment factor … 
  8. The Quest for Inner Happiness
     … This way, the meditation is not an exercise in clamping down on the mind. It’s an exercise in exploration, seeing what way of relating to the breath seems most fruitful. If you find the mind wandering away from that, bring it back and then ask yourself, “What way of breathing would be more comfortable?” Maybe it’s not comfortable enough yet. If it … 
  9. The Karma of Self
     … And we neglect to control some things where we really do have some power, particularly in the area of the mind. If it weren’t possible to bring the mind under some control, you couldn’t do meditation. You couldn’t focus the mind. You couldn’t be mindful. You couldn’t develop any of the qualities that are needed. You’d just be … 
  10. The Brightness of Life
     … But if you can learn to focus on the drawbacks of these things, learn how to let go of them, the mind opens to something much bigger and much better. That’s where the brightness lies. So the Buddha’s approach is strategic. He doesn’t say, “Life is suffering,” simply, “There is suffering in life.” He doesn’t say, “Everything is bad.” He … 
  11. Imagine
     … Then you use your powers of evaluation, your powers of analysis to figure out if what you did got good results—and if it didn’t, what could you do to get better results? The Buddha relates these four qualities to how you get the mind into concentration. Sometimes you emphasize the desire. You really want to do this. Which means that if the … 
  12. The Dhamma Wheel
     … you keep in mind the fact that, one, you want to stay here with the breath; and then, two, you want to remember how to recognize unskillful thoughts that would come up and destroy your concentration, and distinguish them from the skillful thoughts that are actually part of right concentration, as you begin to get the mind settled down, as you adjust the object … 
  13. Ironies
     … It means that once the mind has a sense of ease, you try to use that ease to develop the patience and endurance you need to comprehend what the mind is doing to create suffering. This means that all these duties work together, so that we can finally, at some point at least, free ourselves from these ironies so that we can will for … 
  14. From Darkness to Light
    We sit here watching our breath because the breath is very close to the mind, and the mind is where the problem is. The problem, of course, is that we’re causing ourselves suffering through our own actions. Even though our intentions are done for the sake of happiness, pleasure, and well-being, they end up causing all kinds of trouble. That’s because … 
  15. Investing Your Happiness
     … For example, a thought comes into the mind. Our tendency is then to just jump with the thought, and go into the thought-world, and ride with it wherever it goes. Or in other words, we get taken wherever it’s going to take us. But if you’re really observant, you begin to notice that it’s possible for a thought to arise … 
  16. Goodwill First & Last
     … In the beginning, you start the meditation with thoughts of goodwill as a way of putting the mind in the right frame, in the right context to meditate. You want to pull yourself out of your own little personal narrative, the events of the day, and take a larger view before you settle down and look at the present moment. If you don’t … 
  17. Factors for Stream Entry
     … Are you learning how to develop a sense of disenchantment and dispassion for your old feeding habits? Are you learning how to feed the mind with the well-being that comes from concentration, learning how to feed the mind with the sense of relief that comes when you see, “I’ve been holding onto this, clinging to that, and I don’t need to … 
  18. Recovery Skills
    Worry is one of the hindrances that gets in the way of the mind’s settling down. And so we have to learn how to deal with it so that it doesn’t take over. One way of trying to deal with it is to tell yourself things will all work out in the end. But that’s not a very effective approach because … 
  19. The Perception of Space
     … reflections or perceptions to keep in mind as you get the mind in shape to be with the breath. These reflections and perceptions can be useful in all kinds of situations. One of the perceptions he taught to Rahula was make your mind like space. Nothing can be written on space. This is an image that keeps reappearing throughout the Canon. When the Buddha … 
  20. Rebirth is Relevant
     … Be very precise about what’s going on in the mind, because every instance of thinking is an action. It’s something the mind does, and tends to do very unskillfully, which is why it’s tied up in suffering. If we follow the path, at the very least we can learn how to think skillfully, which makes it easier to know how to … 
  21. Head & Heart
     … The decisive factor is how much honesty you bring to the practice each time you make a decision when some issue comes up in the mind. Otherwise, opportunities for developing skillful habits get lost, and opportunities for stopping unskillful ones get wasted. We’re working on a skill here, and it’s important to remember each time you reinforce the skill that you’re … 
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