Search results for: "Mindfulness"
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- Customs of the Noble Ones… If the fundamentals are good—such as the four noble truths, the noble eightfold path, the four establishings of mindfulness—then fundamentalism is good. You’re putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world, you’re getting away from the world. You might say that it’s also counter-cultural. That’s what appealed to me, at least at the time, and …
- Surveying the World… Look into what the mind is doing right here, right now—because that’s going to solve the problems you see when you survey the world. The first time he surveyed the world, he saw it as being like a stream drying up. There were fish in the stream, fighting one another over the water. No matter who won out, they were all going …
- In the Land of Wrong View… Simply keeping that claim in mind and looking at the example of his teaching, the example of his behavior as it’s recorded, and the examples of people who’ve followed his teachings down through the centuries: Keeping that claim in mind puts your life into perspective. You can ask yourself: “Do you want to accept that challenge to see if it’s true …
- Focus on What’s Important… So, in seeing your life in perspective like this, that enables you to be more objective about what’s going on, so that the events of the day don’t loom so large in your mind, and a larger pattern takes over. You can step back and look at the patterns in your mind with a lot more objectivity. It helps you to deal …
- Imagine… Then you use your powers of evaluation, your powers of analysis to figure out if what you did got good results—and if it didn’t, what could you do to get better results? The Buddha relates these four qualities to how you get the mind into concentration. Sometimes you emphasize the desire. You really want to do this. Which means that if the …
- From Anxiety to Confidence… But if we build treasures into the mind, nobody else can take them away. We’re the only ones who can destroy them. And we have no good reason to do that. We may get discouraged that we don’t have as much time to do this as we’d like, but remember that the Buddha said one day practicing the Dhamma is worth …
- Emotion… And particularly awareness of what kind of breathing is easeful and what kind of breathing is stressful; what kind of breathing is good for the mind, good for the body; what kind of breathing is bad for the mind, bad for the body. Learn to get a sense of cause and effect as it surrounds the breath. This is one of the most important …
- Self-Reliance… But in the beginning, it’s simply a matter of learning to reestablish mindfulness, reestablish mindfulness. In order to stay established, there also has to be a sense of well-being: It feels good to be here with the breath. You can play with the breath in any way you want until you get that sense of well-being. How do you know it …
- Metta Through Samvega… It’s very easy—when the mind is quiet and you’re off by yourself—to start thinking about old wrongs: people who’ve harmed you, the injustices you’ve been subjected to. That’s when it’s good to hold the image of the fish in mind: The things you’re competing for, the things you’re upset about, are just that last …
- Hitting a Wall… And each of us has very particular sufferings, very particular ways of suffering, particular issues that weigh down the mind. But there’s also a sense in which it’s something we all have in common. After all, we all do suffer. We recognize that. And as the Buddha pointed out, there’s a common pattern to the suffering. The same issue applies to …
- Furnishing Your Home for the Mind… This is the natural place for the mind to be. You drop the other thoughts and here you are with your breathing. Now, to stay here requires several qualities in the mind. You have to be alert to what’s going on. And at the same time you have to have some strategies for making this a nice place to be. You’re trying …
- Hold onto the Breath… One thing you do know about the future is that whatever’s going to happen, you’re going to need mindfulness and alertness to deal with the unexpected. And where are you going to get your mindfulness and alertness? You get them by developing them now. And as for tying up loose ends from the past, just leave them loose and dangling. The only …
- Facing Pain… No matter how much the mind keeps screaming at you that you’ve got to focus on the pain, you say, “No, I don’t have to. I don’t have to get involved.” Now, sometimes as you extricate yourself from getting involved in the pain, you begin to see the chatter of the mind that pulls you back toward the pain. As you …
- What You Sense Directly… Then perceptions are the images you hold in mind that help you stay with the breath—the markers of the mind, the signposts—or the way you visualize to yourself how the breath goes through the body. So the question is, are those two different types of fabrication—in terms of rebirth and in terms of the meditation—related or not? Scholars like to …
- Wisdom Through Doing… Anything unskillful comes up in the mind, you want to let it go. You should focus on the breath. Anything that’s not related to the mind and the breath together, just let it go. Give the mind some time to be by itself. You’re not concerned about anything else but just this awareness in the present moment, anchored in the breath with …
- Me, Me, Me… Now I see that they don’t really make much sense.” When you see that you have the alternative that you don’t have to do them and you’re better off not doing them, you don’t have to tell the mind that things are inconstant, stressful, and not-self or whatever. The mind simply lets go. So we’re dissecting the sense …
- Layers of Selves… There’ll be part of the mind that wants to keep going back to the pain, but you have to say, “Nope, nope, nope. We’re going to stay right here.” You can use a little bit of not-self thinking here. If there’s a pain in the leg, a pain in your hip, you can say, “That’s not me right now …
- Thinking About Rebirth… But at the same time, you may do a lot of skillful things, and then your mind can change from that, too. As the Buddha said, there’s nothing so quick to reverse itself as the mind. So even though you did those skillful actions, you might go to a bad place because of a last-minute change in your mind. This taught the …
- Factors for Stream Entry… So you use your understanding of right view and you apply it to the mind, trying to develop concentration, mindfulness, and all the other factors you need so that you can really see into the mind clearly. You use your right view to look at all other views that would pull you away, and you learn how to take them apart. Anything that would …
- Cosmic Scale, Human Scale… A young journalist interviewed Herschel when Herschel was quite old and, to put it in modern terms, Herschel pretty much blew the young man’s mind about how the stars you see in the sky are so far away that the light we see was emitted many millions of years ago. Maybe the stars themselves no longer exist. Here was an old man who …
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