Search results for: "The Mind"
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- Cornered… You can either direct yourself to places that will be conducive to the practice, or you can deal with what’s coming up in the mind right then and there, and gain release. That’s possible, too. But it all depends on how you learn to fabricate your experience here in the present moment while the body is still strong. So what have you …
- Making a Refuge… Those are especially good because given all the other things that are sloshing around in the back of the mind, it’s good to have some Dhamma passages that teach you heedfulness sloshing around there as well. Then there’s the quality of being compliant, in which you take instruction well. Even though you may not 100 percent agree with it, you give it …
- The Buddha’s Narrative… developing mindfulness, alertness, concentration, ardency, and all the skillful qualities of the mind. He was able to bring his mind to good solid concentration. Then he started asking questions: Was this his only life or were there other lives? In other words, is life preceded by nothing or is it preceded by other lives, is it followed by other lives? He remembered back many …
- Self-Healing… So these are the things you need to use to get the mind to settle down: Focus on the breath. Talk to yourself about the breath until you figure out what kind of breathing is most comfortable. And then you create feelings and use perceptions: an image of the breath flowing through the body, say. You can ask yourself, “Where does the breath come …
- A Friend to the World, A Friend to Yourself… If another part of the mind says, “I can’t put up with goodness all the time, I need to have some time to relax,” this is what meditation is for. In fact, all the forms of strength that the Buddha talks about are there for giving your goodness the power it needs so that you don’t have to be taking goodness from …
- In Line with the Dhamma… There’s a voice in the mind that says, “You won’t be able to do this. Don’t even try.” All too often we listen to that voice. It’s a very stubborn voice. It would rather be miserable in its own way than put out the extra effort required to find true happiness. So if you find that voice inside, recognize it …
- Metta… So we’re not just trying to browbeat the mind into having metta by repeating phrases over and over again. We have to think about it and what it means. In terms of the image of the committee of the mind, there are lots of committee members who have their ideas about what’s good about ill will, and you’ve got to learn …
- How to Change… So as the Buddha’s teaching you, he’s noticing that the way you talk to yourself, the way you breathe, the way you hold different feelings and perceptions in the mind is causing you to suffer, and he wants you to change. He’s trying to teach you how to fabricate in a new way right then and there. That’s why the …
- Abandoning Craving… You get the mind still, and you start seeing these things in action. As I was saying last night, as you practice concentration, you get a better and better sense of the aggregates and a better sense of the different operations that go into creating a thought-world. You get to have a chance to see precisely where you’re attracted to something, because …
- The Source of Goodness… If you learn to be at ease with the breath, sensitive to the breath, you know what’s going on in the mind, because the breath does mirror the events in the mind. That puts you a lot more in touch with what’s going on inside. Thoughts and emotions will show up in the breath. You can use the skills we’ve been …
- Vows… These are pretty harsh images but they’re harsh on purpose, for when the mind gets fixated on a sensual pleasure it doesn’t want to listen to anybody. It’s not going to be swayed by soft, gentle images. You have to keep reminding yourself in strong terms that if you really look at sensual pleasures, there’s nothing much: no true gratification …
- Determined to Practice… to abandon unskillful behavior, to get the mind into concentration, to develop discernment, to gain release. All these things follow naturally from the initial conditions. The problem is those initial conditions: Those are the things that do require an act of will. They don’t happen on their own. There are two primary ones that the Buddha mentions. One is friendship with admirable people …
- The Duty to Understand… Once the stress and suffering of that first noble truth is done with, then the inherent stress of the aggregates doesn’t weigh on the mind anymore, because you’re not dragging it in to burden the mind. In other words, the stress that remains: It doesn’t matter. The stress that weighs down the heart: It’s gone.
- Separate… This is why we focus on our awareness in the present moment, directing it first to the breath, so that we can leave thoughts of past and future, and get all the mind gathered around one thing. Try to expand the breath—your sense of the breath—so that it fills the whole body and feels good throughout the whole body. They talk about …
- The Practice is Wherever There’s Mindfulness… You can also remember what ways have worked in the past to get the mind to settle down, so that if you come up against an obstacle, you can work your way around it. This involves three qualities: mindfulness, alertness, and ardency. Each of them has to be right. Mindfulness, if it’s right, is remembering, basically, what’s skillful and what’s not …
- Conviction & Focus… These are precisely the skills you’re going to need as aging comes in, and the mind starts wandering around thinking about the past, because you don’t like to think about the future. The future doesn’t seem to hold much, but you think about things in the past: the pleasant things that get you nostalgic, or the unpleasant things that fill you …
- Motivation… Because part of the mind will try to dress up little bits of insight and little bits of concentration into something more than they really are. Another part of the mind will know that this is self-deceit, and there will be a war going on inside as you get pulled back and forth between unrealistic estimations of what you can do and a …
- Equanimity & Action… Sometimes the mind doesn’t want to stay with the breath. Or it starts getting sleepy when it stays with the breath. Well, you might want to change. Start contemplating the different parts of the body. Visualize them; go through the whole catalogue. Give the mind work to do so that it doesn’t just drift off, come back, and wonder where it was …
- The Equanimity of a Winner… In other words, when your efforts at being mindful get successful, the mind can finally settle down. When it settles down fully, it reaches a state called purity of mindfulness and equanimity. That’s useful for seeing that even in good things, like the concentration, there’s still more to be done. There are still subtle levels of stress in the state of concentration …
- Fear & Conviction… Why put yourself out? Why make an extra effort? But deep down in the mind, everybody has this sense that things could go wrong. Either we try to cover it up with platitudes or we start getting unrealistic and give rise to very unskillful kinds of fears. Neither approach is helpful. The best way to deal with our fear is to learn how to …
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