Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 155
  2. The Buddha’s Rules of Order
     … Deeper parts of the mind pick them up, and those images can drive you. I think I’ve told you about the time I was visiting someone and he was watching a show on Fox. During the advertisement for the late-night news, there was a big white panel above the heads of the announcers, and on the panel they kept flashing: “Be afraid … 
  3. A Post-goodness World?
     … That creates a spaciousness in the mind. It’s a good theme to be thinking about. It feels good and it inspires you to do good actions. They, in turn, reinforce the basic wisdom in that original question: “What when I do it will lead to my long term welfare and happiness?” The wisdom lies in realizing that your happiness is going to depend … 
  4. Step Outside the World
     … At the same time, the mind is really solid. It’s firmly in its frame of reference: the body as a whole, from the top of the head down to the tips of the toes, with the breath still, and the mind in equanimity. This is the frame of reference where you can see these bubbles of little worlds coming up in the mind … 
  5. A Mind like Wind
     … If you want to create some space for the mind, you have got to cut these things away. This is why meditation starts by establishing a frame of reference. You start out with the body in and of itself. In other words you’re not thinking of your body in the world, whether it’s a good looking body or not, whether it’s … 
  6. Discipline
     … You’re going to have to subdue some of the thoughts in the mind that are opposed to the training. We see this in the formula for mindfulness practice. You keep focused on the body in and of itself—ardent, alert, and mindful—subduing greed and distress with reference to the world. In other words, whatever the affairs of the world right now, you … 
  7. Skillful in Everything
     … what behavior is skillful and what behavior is not skillful.” It starts with very basic things and works on up to the behavior inside the mind. There are skillful ways of acting, skillful ways of speaking, skillful ways of thinking, skillful ways of managing your mind—and there are unskillful ways. The practice is all about mastering skills that can lead to an end … 
  8. Gratitude, Goodwill & Generosity
     … And yet an important part of getting the mind to concentration is learning how to think skillfully first before you can stop thinking. Because some thoughts are very sticky: They actually prevent you from settling down, they keep coming up with all sorts of issues as to why you shouldn’t be meditating. So you have to learn to think in ways that counter … 
  9. What’s Not on the Map
     … Real insight, though, comes from developing these qualities in the mind. It’s like going out in the wilderness. You read the maps, you make your plans, but when you get out in the forest you realize that the forest doesn’t look like the map. The map has splotches of solid pale green with red lines and little symbols on it. But when … 
  10. Wisdom as a Tool
     … So as soon as something comes up that seems important, watch what happens next in the mind. You notice that all these pieces of advice teach you to be very careful about causality, learning to see all things—even your most profound insights—simply as part of a causal process. What happens after the insight? What can the insight be used for? If you … 
  11. Put the Other Person’s Heart in Yours
     … The biggest danger that faces you in the world is that you might do something unskillful under the influence of ill will, because that then becomes your own kamma and it becomes a habit in the mind. It bends the mind, as the Buddha said. When your mind is bent in that direction again and again and again, your views are going to be … 
  12. The Wisdom of Ardency
     … Mindfulness also means remembering to recognize what’s coming up in the mind. In Thai, they use the same word for “to remember” and “to recognize”: cam. When sensual desire comes up, you recognize it: “This is sensual desire.” You don’t go into it. You stand outside it. You recognize that it’s a hindrance and that you want to figure out how … 
  13. Culture Shock
     … In this way it wrecks the world, and also wrecks the mind. So we have to find something that will put the mind in a state where it doesn’t need to desire anything anymore. Part of this quest means learning to temper your desires, but it also means refocusing them. Instead of having scattered desires for all things in all different directions, you … 
  14. Close to What You Know
     … What are you doing with the breath? What are you doing with the mind? What assumptions are you using about the breath and the mind? And what results do you get? Sometimes you find yourself creating a sense of self around the breath. As you get more and more used to the breath energy in the body, you develop a set series of ways … 
  15. The Graduated Discourse
     … The fact that the mind is feeding on sensuality: He wants you to see that you’re feeding on something that’s really lower than you deserve. You should aim higher. Then he talks about renunciation. Renunciation doesn’t mean just giving up. It means looking for pleasure in things that are not sensual. This, of course, would be the pleasure of right concentration … 
  16. Perceptions for Training the Mind
     … There are other times, though, when the mind really does want to think about that distracting thought. The thought has some allure, so you try to think about it in ways that destroy the allure. The image the Buddha gives is a young man or a young woman, fond of ornament, looking in a mirror and seeing the carcass of a dead snake or … 
  17. Nurturing Patient Endurance
     … The more you can get interested in the breath, the less you’ll be worried about the things that are weighing down the mind in other areas. So talk to yourself about the breath. Some people find that that spot where they’re very sensitive to the breath is right around the area of the heart, the area of the sternum. How do you … 
  18. The Story behind Impatience
     … You’ve learned something about the mind right there. The act of bringing it back strengthens your original intention, strengthens your resolve, and the fact that you’re able to catch the mind as it’s wandering off strengthens your mindfulness and alertness. So whether things are progressing at the rate you’d like to see in your ideal narrative, that’s not the … 
  19. A Sense of Yourself
     … Things that come into the mind go out the mouth right away. You’ve got to work on that filter. There’s a passage where the Buddha says, “We’re born with an ax in our mouths, the tongue.” We can use it to harm other people and we can use it to harm ourselves if we’re not careful. At the same time … 
  20. In the Elephant’s Footprint
     … When you come back from that, it cuts through some fetters of the mind, some of the fetters that tie you to the process of samsara. One of those fetters is self-identity views, in other words, viewing that you either are your aggregates or you own the aggregates, or the aggregates are in you or you’re in the aggregates. The mind doesn … 
  21. Generosity & Virtue as Skills
     … You want the mind to settle down. How do you get it to settle down? You just keep it with the breath. So keep coming back to the breath. As soon as you find that you’ve wandered off, come back, come back, come back. And any chattering voices in the mind that speak in tones of discouragement or boredom or whatever, you’ve … 
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