Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 153
  2. Giving & Taking Time
     … To see what’s going on in the mind, you have to watch it over long periods of time. And you have to give up a lot of your other interests to focus on this. Ours is a society that likes to have its cake and eat it too—and get a few extra pieces on the side. But the practice, the training of … 
  3. To Practice Dying
     … A lot of images suddenly came up in the mind when I realized I couldn’t move. I was probably going to die from my own stupidity for not having checked the electricity. Then all of a sudden I remembered, “Hey, I’ve been meditating all this time. I’m going to have to learn how to use my meditation skills. This is what … 
  4. Ingenuity
     … Usually, whatever comes up in the course of your meditation, even if you don’t have devas or nagas coming and talking to you, there is a tendency to believe whatever comes up in the mind in meditation and then to want to run with it. You have to have a part of the mind that steps back, questions it. That’s when you … 
  5. Wise Endurance
     … The thoughts that come unbidden into the mind are all past kamma. But prior to that, you have the factor of fabrication, but also name-and-form—particularly intentions and “attentions,” acts of attention. Again, what are the intentions you have with regard to this situation you find so difficult? Can you change your intentions? If you’re dealing with pain in the body … 
  6. Becoming
     … We do this both so that we can get good at creating it and so that, in the course of creating it, we can put the mind in a good spot where it can watch things more carefully, more clearly. When the mind is comfortable in the present moment, at ease in the present moment, it can stay firmly in the present moment and … 
  7. Study & Practice
     … to have a set of concepts, a set of ideas, so that we can make distinctions when things happen in the mind. That’s what the four noble truths are all about. You have to learn to distinguish between stress and suffering on the one hand, and its cause on the other. Then there’s the path, which does involve some stress and suffering … 
  8. The Dhamma Bucket List
     … So ask yourself, “What qualities do I have in the mind that would make it difficult for me to go? Am I ready to go?” And the answer usually is “No. I’m not ready.” Okay what’s keeping you? What unfinished business do you have? Well, do that. What unskillful qualities of the mind might take over? Learn how to fight those unskillful … 
  9. Over & Over Again
     … All you do is keep looking after the mind: tending to it, watering it, giving it fertilizer. If you treat it the right way, it’ll grow without your having to squeeze it or pull it to make it grow faster. You make it grow faster by tending to it properly. There may come a point where you’re adding too much water, too … 
  10. Developing the Heart
     … So what we’re training here is not just the mind up in the brain, but also down into the heart. Now, the heart has two main functions: One is feeling emotions, and the other is willing actions. The two are very closely connected. With certain emotions, you don’t feel any energy to act at all. With others, you feel very strongly an … 
  11. Practicing for Dispassion
     … We do it all the time in the mind. The thing is, when we do it in the mind, it doesn’t stop there. It’s not just an act in the imagination. It can lead us to act and to being reborn on all kinds of different levels. Think about the knowledges the Buddha gained on the night of his awakening. The first … 
  12. Four Mountains Moving In
     … looking all around, so that in your efforts to prevent one danger, you don’t create others—the dangers here, of course, being the dangers in the mind. The world may be a dangerous place, but we’re even more dangerous people, and we can be dangerous to ourselves. If we let our greed, aversion, delusion, or fear take over, these four qualities—liking … 
  13. In Terms of the Four Noble Truths
     … You try to develop the factors of the path, in particular, Right View, Right Mindfulness, and Right Effort, to bring the mind to a state of Right Concentration so that you can comprehend stress. One way this works is when the mind is really concentrated and then you leave concentration, it’s useful to ask yourself, “Where is the stress coming in? As soon … 
  14. Beyond Gratitude
     … If the mind doesn’t get trained, you’re going to be continuing to find yourself placed in debt to other beings, other people, because your life depends on a lot of things outside you. When you’re born as a human being, you’re totally helpless. You have to depend on somebody to look after you. You need food, clothing, shelter, medicine. A … 
  15. The Karma of Self & Not-Self
     … You apply this perception to anything that’s placing a burden on the mind in any way at all, until the only thing that’s left burdening the mind is the path of practice itself. You turn on that, too. You say, “This, too, is not-self.” After all, your state of concentration is made up of aggregates, the same things that you use … 
  16. Testing Karma
     … You stitch mental moments together with mindfulness, remembering to stay with one object again and again and again, because the mind can so easily forget and slip off to other things. So you have keep reminding it, “Stay right here; stay with the breath,” and see how long you can do that. Push the envelope on inconstancy. You want to be as steadily with … 
  17. Skillful Thinking
    We often think of meditation is being a process of not thinking, but to get the mind to settle down, you have to think. A lot of the Buddha’s meditation instructions involve teaching us how to think in a way that’s useful, in a way that’s helpful. We may think, well, we know how to think perfectly well, thank you, but … 
  18. How to Use the Teaching on Kamma
     … We want to catch the mind in the present moment because that’s the source of all our karma. People in the time of the Buddha had lots of different teachings about karma. One of the prevalent ones was that the most important karma was what your body was doing, and then your speech, and the least important was the mind. As the Buddha … 
  19. Attachment vs. Affection
     … When we apply it to the mind, the mind’s upadana is a place where it looks for happiness—when you feel that the life of your happiness depends on having this person, that situation: whatever it is to keep your happiness alive. For most of us, our emotional feeding is on other people. This is the aspect of our relationships that the Buddha … 
  20. A Happiness Without Boundaries
     … You’re developing qualities of the mind—mindfulness, alertness, restraint—that give rise to a sense of ease and well-being inside that doesn’t depend on taking anything away from anyone else. You’re developing skill inside. This means that you need less and less from other people in order to keep your happiness going. And you also produce less greed, less anger … 
  21. Obstacles to Full-body Awareness
     … Otherwise, if—as the breath gets comfortable— your awareness gets very small, you tend to either fall asleep or go into delusion concentration, when the mind is still but it doesn’t really know anything, which is not what you want because nothing gets accomplished by that kind of meditation. The problem is, when you expand your awareness, sometimes there are things that get … 
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