Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 155
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. Refuge
     … This is why we train the mind, so that we don’t forget the standards for skillful actions. And why do we forget? We get provoked. As the ajaans in Thailand noted, people in the West are really weak in two areas: endurance and equanimity. We lack endurance in not being able to stand harsh words; not being able to stand pain, unpleasant sensations … 
  11. An Issue of Control
     … Why is it that as soon as you focus on them, the mind gets pained as well? That’s the big issue. The simple fact that there’s pain in the body: That, you simply have to accept as a fact of life. It’s suffering or dukkha in the three characteristics. But you don’t just write it off. You look at it … 
  12. As Days & Nights Fly Past, Fly Past
     … When you have that kind of atmosphere, it’s a lot easier to practice, a lot easier to get the mind settled in concentration with a sense of well-being. The fifth quality the Buddha has you look for is discernment: To what extent do you see that you’re creating suffering that you don’t have to? That’s the big question. When … 
  13. Goodwill for the Real World
     … The reason we try to develop skillful qualities in the mind is because we see that we have to prepare for these dangers. Now, it’s true that some of the Buddhist teachings sound like they’re not designed for the real world. One of them is “goodwill for all beings.” A lot of beings are really misbehaving, so it seems difficult or impossible … 
  14. Practice at Home
     … maintaining your priorities, holding to the principle that the training of the mind is the number one issue in life. That has to be your bottom line. Out in the world, the bottom line is how much money you make. You’ve got to make enough to survive. But then your measure of, “How much is enough?” can get really distorted. There are whole … 
  15. Good Fundamentals
     … His basic principle is that the mind is capable of anything and is very quick to change direction. In fact, it’s so quick that he said he couldn’t find an analogy that was appropriate. Here he was, a master of analogies, and this is where he was left not knowing what to say. The mind can change direction that fast. So what … 
  16. Appropriate Attention Plus Admirable Friendship
     … But if you have a sense of well-being and trust, both in the breath and in your ability to stay here, then the mind can relax and spread out in the present moment. Because you do want to have your awareness filling the whole body. It’s when your awareness is just a point: That’s when it’s ready to go. But … 
  17. Thoughts with Fangs
     … As for the issue of how good a meditator you are, if that somehow pops into the mind, just let it pop out of the mind. It’s really irrelevant. And it can get into the way of deeper insights. There’s a passage where the Buddha mentions that it’s a sign of an untrue person who, on gaining strong concentration, uses that … 
  18. The Whole Elephant
     … We get the mind centered and, once it’s properly centered, it can look around itself—because you not only see the object that you’re focused on when you concentrate, but you also begin to see the activities of the mind as they relate to the object. That’s what you want to see. You want to see what you’re doing. This … 
  19. Life’s First Question
     … It’s happening all the time in the mind, and in very basic terms. When the Buddha defines wisdom, it starts with very simple things: “What when I do will to lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” Those are very simple things, very immediate, very direct. When he defines the measure of your wisdom, the measure of your discernment is your ability … 
  20. Admirable in the Beginning, Middle, & End
     … Breathing in a way that allows you to see how your perceptions and your feelings are having an impact on the mind, and learning how to calm that impact. Energizing the mind when it needs to be energized, steadying it when it needs to be steadied, releasing it from its burdens when it needs to be released. You do all this by developing that … 
  21. The Not-Self Discourse
     … So when there’s no place for the mind to focus its desires, this realization undercuts all possible craving, because as the Buddha said in the definition of craving, it delights here, delights there, focuses here, focuses there. It always has a place, always has a location, whether physical or mental. The purpose of the questionnaire is to deprive the mind of any possible … 
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