Search results for: "Equanimity"
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- Kamma & Rebirth—A Handful of Leaves… Finally, to counteract the effects of past bad actions, the Buddha tells you to develop a mind that’s unlimited—in other words, your goodwill and your equanimity are unlimited. You train yourself to wish for the happiness of everybody, no matter who. No matter how good they’ve been, no matter how bad they’ve been, you tell yourself you don’t want …
- Bare Attention… He calls it equanimity. Even equanimity, here, is a fabricated state of mind. You make up your mind that you’re not going to respond to anything. You’re just going to watch. That’s a very strong intention right there. And sometimes, that’s all you need to deal with whatever is coming up. Sometimes it’s all you can do with whatever …
- Subduing Greed & Distress… We start out the meditation with that chant—thoughts of goodwill, thoughts of compassion, thoughts of empathetic joy, thoughts of equanimity for everyone—as a way of disentangling ourselves from the narratives of the day and the narratives of our lives. Whatever anyone has done to us, we have goodwill for them. Anyone who we know is suffering right now, we have compassion. As …
- The Noble Pursuit of Happiness… goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. That’s one of the reasons why we have that chant at the beginning of every meditation to remind ourselves that all four of these form our motivation. And these are the implications of that motivation: that we want to be aboveboard about our desire for happiness, or true well-being—a happiness that lasts, a happiness that …
- When Aging Closes In… They were able to deal with the illness with a lot more equanimity—and to deal with the pain without being overcome by the pain—again because of their practice. So the practice does a lot for you as the body grows ill, even as it dies. And it will grow sick and die: There’s no guarantee that because your mind is in …
- Right View… Or being equanimous: Some people think that you’re not doing anything at all when you’re equanimous, because there are no likes or dislikes, but to be equanimous, as the Buddha said, is also a kind of doing. You can get stuck on it, i.e., you keep doing it over and over again. When you see it as an action, that’s …
- Adult Dhamma… As one tradition would say, just be totally passive and aware, very equanimous, and just let your old sankharas burn away. And above all, don’t think. Or if you are going to think, they say, learn how to think the way we think. And they have huge volumes of philosophy you have to learn, to squeeze your mind into their mold, after which …
- Serial Clinging Is Still Clinging… Ananda, going through a list of the different stages of concentration, starting with the fourth jhana and going higher, talking about how when you get to the highest level of concentration, you realize there’s a pure state of equanimity. As long as you’re attached to that equanimity, you won’t be able to gain awakening. But if you learn to see that …
- Warm Your Heart… If not, that’s when you have to develop equanimity. But you still mean them no harm. That changes our relationship to the people around us in pretty radical ways. A lot of times, we treat the people we like well; and the people we don’t like, we don’t treat them well. We have to learn how to imagine ourselves as different …
- How to Feed Mindfulness… As the Buddha said, if you can develop an attitude of limitless goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity, that’ll mitigate the results of your past bad actions. If you can train yourself so that the mind isn’t overcome by pleasure, isn’t overcome by pain—in other words, you don’t let these feelings get in the way of your seeing what …
- A Sense of Yourself… generosity, virtue, renunciation, discernment, persistence, endurance, truth, determination, goodwill and equanimity. You can take that list and ask yourself, “Where are you lacking?” If you don’t know about what it means to “lack” in these qualities, you can think about the practices of the people you’ve admired in the past. How do you stack up against them in terms of these qualities …
- Goodwill Plus… calm, concentration, equanimity. It’s in learning how to understand goodwill or compassion or empathetic joy or equanimity as fashioned states that you’re going to learn how to go beyond them. But for most of us, the issue is not going beyond them, the issue is getting there. So focus first on learning how to put together a state of goodwill, through the …
- The Mind's Immune System… As for the ignorance obsession that tends to hang around neutral feelings, you can cut through it with the fourth jhana, where the mind settles down to a state of neither pleasure nor pain — total equanimity. “Purity of equanimity and mindfulness,” it’s called. Total, full-body awareness, like a white cloth covering the body from head to toe. There’s no ignorance obsession …
- True Honesty… Recently I’ve been reading some Dhamma talks where the teacher seems to think that the great part of honesty is to be honest about what a miserable meditator he is—and that the difficulty seems to lie in learning how to have equanimity about that. Be equanimous about the way things are, they say, “Well, this is what experience is. No experience is …
- Heedfulness Is Auspicious… That’s what you want to develop, and of those skills, thoughts of universal goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy and equanimity are really important. As you encounter thoughts of what things you did that were not skillful, or things that other people did to you that were not skillful, the Buddha has you think, in both cases, in larger terms. Things that other people do …
- Meditation Prep… As for feelings of equanimity, these are meant to counteract feelings of irritation. You want to be equanimous toward irritating things so that irritation doesn’t build up to the point where it makes you do something stupid. In each of these cases, you want to be skilled at giving rise to skillful attitudes when you need them so that you don’t just …
- Thinking & Evaluating… Things are not fair, there are issues where it’s hard to develop equanimity. So you have to think in ways that will allow you to develop that equanimity. I noticed, when I was living with Ajaan Fuang, sometimes I’d ask him a Dhamma question and I’d get a one-word, two-word answer. That was it. I realized that what he …
- Between You and Your Eyes… You don’t want to go to equanimity until you’ve got some basic skills in how to use the breath as a source of pleasure. This involves getting acquainted with your sense of the body sitting here in the present moment. Again, this is something else we tend to be ignorant of. We use the body for various things. Not only when we …
- Not Just a Witness… As the Buddha says, when you get that consciousness really equanimous, then you can apply the equanimity to higher and higher formless states. It would last a long time, but it would still be constructed. You have to ask yourself, “Is it worth it if it all falls apart? Is there something that doesn’t fall apart?” Now, these are questions you ask when …
- To Know the Unconditioned… You drop the perception of consciousness, and there’s equanimity. In equanimity, you realize that it, too, is fabricated. You have to drop your passion for that. In other cases, they simply describe the layers or levels of jhana and then the formless of states. The whole purpose, however you conceive the layers, is to get the mind more and more still, peel away …
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