Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 168
  2. Noble Priorities
     … This is the suffering he was talking about, the suffering in the mind, the suffering that you feel inside and nobody else can feel for you. Nobody else can take it away. There’s that passage where Ven. Ratthapala is talking to the old king, one of those passages we chanted just now: The world offers no shelter. There’s no protection. The king … 
  3. Two Guardian Meditations
     … That’s a useful way of augmenting your breath meditation, giving the mind, as Ajaan Lee would say, a good place to forage for food. Another way is the development of goodwill. Goodwill is the wish for happiness—for true happiness. And it’s to be extended to all. Again, this is to lift your mind up above ill will for anybody, no matter … 
  4. Resources for Endurance
     … We sit to get the mind quiet, bring the mind to concentration, gain insight. If everything depended just on the quality of the intention, that’d be all you’d have to do, just hold on to that good intention. But the question is, does it work? A lot of times, other things need to be brought in as well. You check the results … 
  5. Happiness is a Skill
     … But he says you can train the mind so that it doesn’t have to suffer from those things. And even more directly, the fact that your body ages, grows ill, and dies: You can learn how not to suffer from that, either. But here again, it’s not simply a matter of accepting. To one extent you do accept these things, but to … 
  6. Adult Dhamma
     … That problem, of course, is the suffering that the mind creates. And the solution is a skill. It requires a lot. You have to sort out a lot of things inside yourself and shed a lot of your childish expectations. So the question is, do you want to be an adult? If you do, this is what you have to do. Look at yourself … 
  7. The Pursuit of Excellence
     … Until then, there’s a tendency in the mind to say, “Well, I can imagine something else I’d prefer.” But look at your imaginings. We’ve been led around by our imaginings for how long? We don’t know how long. We’ve been going around and around and around for countless eons, led by our desire to think up this, think up … 
  8. Goodwill as a Guardian
     … Real goodwill has to do with ‘May you be deeply happy at heart.’” That kind of happiness has to come from developing skillful qualities in the mind. Real happiness, of course, comes from seeing that what the Buddha taught is true: There is a deathless element; there is a dimension where the mind doesn’t have to suffer from aging, illness, and death. When … 
  9. Seriously Happy
     … Random thoughts come into the mind. Something that occurs to you in childhood can take over the whole rest of your life. The Buddha’s recommendation is that you find someone who really knows—those who really know, of course, are those who have attained awakening—and you go and you ask them, “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term … 
  10. Working Hypotheses
     … He took something we’re doing all the time—shaping our experience—and asked, “What if you tried to shape it in the most skillful way possible? What would that entail?” And it turns out that it develops a lot of good qualities in the mind. Just that desire to find a happiness that’s more lasting, more solid, he said: That’s the … 
  11. The Buddha’s Buffet
     … So, one of the ways of getting beyond this addiction of clinging is to allow yourself to imagine that the mind doesn’t have to do this. Its habits, the ways it talks to itself, the ways it perceives the world, the ways it perceives itself, its ideas of what it has to do, its clinging to sensual pleasures or even just to the … 
  12. Play with the Breath
     … We’re doing something serious here in training the mind, but you don’t want to be grim. Otherwise, you start getting frustrated. You want to stay with the breath, other thoughts come in, and you run with those thoughts, and then you get upset because you ran away, and you yank yourself back to the breath. Sometimes you set up a bad relationship … 
  13. Desires Rightly Directed
     … This is one of the mind’s basic activities. It doesn’t just register facts. It has to pass judgment on these desires that come welling up, as to which ones are worth going with and which ones are not. And it’s a constant, ongoing process of judgment. We need certain standards for how we judge things. We’ll find that we get … 
  14. Compassion for People on Fire
     … It lifts the mind. You’re looking for a happiness in a place where you don’t have to fight anybody else off. No one’s going to come in and try to push you out of the way to watch your breath. It’s yours. And it does have a great potential. As the Buddha said, we have the potential for pleasure in … 
  15. Mindfulness of Death
     … You might think, “That’s pretty good, I can go where I want to go.” But the nature of craving is that it’s pretty blind, and if the mind is out of control—which easily happens if you’re in pain or drugged with painkillers—all kinds of weird cravings can come up at the moment of death and blow you off course … 
  16. When Attacked by Distractions
     … If it’s really worthwhile, if it’s really helpful, it’ll stick there in the mind. You’ll find that you have it in your pocket when you get to the end of the path, so you don’t have to worry about carrying it or trying to memorize it. If it’s worthwhile, it’ll follow you there. The problem is that … 
  17. Clinging, Addictions, Obsessions
     … And even when a large part of the mind realizes it’s bad for you, there’s another part that really goes for it and is thoroughly convinced it’s a good thing. You have to ferret that out, and you have to argue with it. Then there are habits and practices. We tend to be very quick to fall into old habitual ways … 
  18. Recollection of the Buddha
     … If you believe that all you are is a body and that your consciousness is just an epiphenomenon, as they call it—a side effect of there being a body—then you can’t really believe that by training the mind you’re going to have any impact on anything at all—because in the materialist view, the only reality is physical reality. Yet … 
  19. Distinctions That Make a Difference
     … But that’s not craving *at *the object; the craving is at your image of the object in the mind, or pictures you’ve seen of it. That’s where the craving is located. You need to make these distinctions if you’re going to understand the allure of the things you hold on to. It’s because we glom things together that, say … 
  20. Peace on Earth
    Peace on earth has to begin right here, right where the body and the mind meet at the breath. Try to develop a sense of harmony here. As you’re focusing on the breath, don’t push it too much but don’t wander away. Give it your undivided attention and see how it responds. If it responds well, stick with it. If not … 
  21. Surveying the World
     … Despite the ups and downs of the world, there’s something of solid value that you can build into the mind that’s not wiped away by the things that wipe away the treasures, the accomplishments, or the powers of the world. You see people abusing the power they have in the world. I remember listening to a lawyer one time who’d argued … 
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