Search results for: "Aversion"
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- Noble Priorities… After all, national customs—the usual civilizations of human beings—are based on greed, aversion, and delusion. They’re based on defilement. Their priorities are different. So as you take on the practice, you have to realize you’re changing your priorities, and you’re going to have to step outside of your culture. This was one of the things I appreciated about Ajaan …
- A Blameless Happiness… If it’s a happiness that depends on passion, aversion and delusion, that’s going to be blameworthy too. At the same time, if you’re inciting other people to kill, steal, have illicit sex, lie, take intoxicants, that’s a blameworthy way of finding happiness as well. It’s interesting that when the Buddha talks about benefitting yourself, he frames it in terms …
- Comprehending Clinging… Comprehending means putting an end to our passion, aversion, and delusion around it. In the first noble truth, the Buddha defines suffering and stress, in its short version, as clinging to the five aggregates. When we hear that, we tend to focus on the aggregates—that we need to comprehend them. Which is true, we do, but we also have to comprehend clinging. In …
- Learning Right Speech… There are a lot of things we could be saying that either give rise to passion, aversion, and delusion, in us or in the listener. With a truth like that, you leave it unsaid because it serves no purpose. Try to speak words that are true, that are harmonious, that are easy to listen to, and that really serve a purpose. So you have …
- Goodness… As the Buddha said, one of the best ways you can benefit others is to get them to be interested in getting rid of greed, aversion, and delusion; to get them interested in following the precepts, so that they can take care of the one person that each of them is responsible for. But that’s an area where you have to use your …
- Use Your Imagination… Greed, aversion, and delusion can come in 108 different forms, and maybe 108 is too small a number. If you want to just memorize a few principles and hope that those few things will take care of everything, the defilements will eat you up. You’ve got to be willing to come up with new ideas on your own. When you stop and think …
- Recognizing Fools… He said, “It’s a good thing that you didn’t kill the monk.” But it shows that devas still have greed, aversion, and delusion. Even the great Brahma has defilements. There’s the story of the monk who goes to visit the great Brahma after getting visions of many levels of devas. He’s been sent up the deva bureaucracy because he’s …
- Renunciation Isn’t Deprivation… Would he sleep well? And the young man he’s talking to says, “Well, yes.” But then the Buddha asks, “What about the fevers that are born of passion, aversion, and delusion? Could they keep him awake, keep him from sleeping well?” “Well, yes, that’s true.” The Buddha said, “In the mind of the Tathāgata, those fevers are banished.” In other words, the …
- Accepting the Buddha’s Standards… So when we sit down to meditate, all of a sudden we find ourselves face-to-face with greed, aversion, and delusion. Part of us likes to defend these things, saying that they’re okay, that we have to accept them as a necessary part of life. But skillful acceptance means accepting the fact that you’re creating suffering for yourself and other people …
- Inquisitive… As the Buddha said, we can use concentration as a pleasant abiding—in other words, just a nice place to settle in—but we can also use it to develop mindfulness and alertness, and to figure out how the mind can free itself of greed, aversion, and delusion. The breath is going to teach you those last two things only if you ask questions …
- Noble Right Concentration… To comprehend it means to understand it to the point of getting past any passion, aversion, or delusion around it. Stress is defined as the five clinging-aggregates: form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness. Where are you going to see those aggregates? You see them in the concentration. The breath is part of form. The feeling of pleasure that arises as you stay focused: That …
- Understanding Aggregates… Elsewhere, he says that comprehension means getting rid of all passion, aversion, and delusion around them. In his second sermon, he shows how to do that. He talks about how the five clinging-aggregates should be seen as not-self. One argument is that they don’t lie within your total control. If there’s any disease in any of the aggregates, you can …
- Your Higher Power… Otherwise your greed, aversion, and delusion, your fear and your lust—these attitudes in the mind, these emotions of the mind—come and take over. They take over the breath. They have their way of making you breathe so that you feel you’ve got to act on them. They hold the breath hostage. It’s as if they were saying, “As long as …
- Delight in Striving… So if you have, say, greed, aversion, or anger coming in and taking over the mind, and they don’t go away when you look at them steadily, then you have to look at how you’re breathing. Especially under the influence of anger, our breathing tends to get irregular and very uncomfortable. All we can think about is how we want to get …
- In the Context of the Path… We have to comprehend that—in other words, understand it to the point where we have no passion, aversion, or delusion around the suffering that we’re causing through our clinging. Of course, the clinging itself is caused by craving: craving for sensuality; craving to become, to take on an identity in a particular world of experience; or craving to destroy whatever identity you …
- The Rewards of Right View… on fire with greed, aversion, and delusion; on fire with sensuality. Of course, when we think of beings on fire, it’s a vision of hell. Because if you hold in mind the perception of inconstancy—that gain, honor, fame, the things that people go running after because they’re on fire, are not really cooling, are not really going to solve their problem …
- The Conditions for Goodwill… Greed, aversion, jealousy: All of these things are just as natural as the good side of the mind. And the mind is something that can change very quickly. There are passages where the Buddha asks the monks, “Have you seen a moving picture show?” You look at the translation and you say, “This must be a mistranslation.” But it turns out they actually had …
- Who’s in Charge Here?… Laugh at your aversion. Laugh at your delusion. See how foolish they are. In the Canon, most of the humor is in the Vinaya, which is the section on disciplinary rules. You wouldn’t think with discipline that there’d be a lot of humor, but this is how they make discipline palatable. Like the story about the monk who gets so drunk that …
- Five Precepts, Five Virtues… If we’re free simply to follow our greed, aversion, and delusion, that’s a kind of slavery. But the freedom that comes when you realize, “Okay, I can choose my actions based on what the long-term results are going to be, and I have the inner strength I need to resist any temptation to go for a quick fix. I’ll stick …
- From Inconstancy to Dispassion… What is it missing? What is it going to be lacking if it can’t give into that particular kind of greed or lust or aversion, delusion, whatever? And then when you see the actual allure, why you went for it, then you can compare that with the drawbacks. Often we do know some of the drawbacks, but the allure is hidden. And because …
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