Search results for: "Greed"
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- The Kamma of Self & Not-self… What am I doing to make this experience worse? Sometimes you’ll find that there’s greed involved, sometimes aversion, sometimes delusion. Who’s responsible for those things? You can’t go blaming your parents, you can’t go blaming society, because that will take you nowhere. If you look for what you’re doing in terms of your greed, anger, and delusion right …
- Right Speech, Inside & Out… Your friendship with your greed, with your aversion, with your delusion: Those are friendships you want to break. So here again, you have to be very discerning in how you apply this principle. The same with harsh speech: You don’t want to beat yourself down; you don’t want to discourage yourself and say that you’re hopeless. But there are times when …
- Humility… seeing the processes of the mind as they give rise to greed, anger, and delusion, or to mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. Even though these things have abstract names, they’re specific events. Choices are made each time you breathe in, each time you breathe out. Look for the specific choice, look for the specific movement of intention that heads either in a skillful or …
- A Safe Harbor… You’re here trying to overcome your ignorance, your greed, anger, and delusion. When you’re less prone to greed, anger, and delusion, other people are less subject to your defilements as well. Because you’re not inflicting these things on other people, you don’t have to worry about adding lots of extra dangers to your life. This path is a safe path …
- The Basic Medicine… At the time of the Buddha people were suffering from greed, anger, and delusion just as we are. With modern culture, modern society, it seems as if we have more diseases of the mind, more complex ways of getting involved in creating delusion, but they all basically come down to the same three roots. So the treatment here is to learn how to uproot …
- Compassionate Duties… You’re focused on the body in and of itself, you’re ardent, alert, and mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. That’s the standard formula. You stay with the body, right here, right now. You take one aspect of it that you experience, like the breath, and you stay alert to what the breath is doing, and how …
- Gratitude, Goodwill & Generosity… The more greed, anger and delusion you can uproot from your own mind, the less often people have to suffer from your greed, anger, and delusion. This is why people support meditation monasteries like this. They see it as good for the world as a whole that people are training themselves. Here’s an opportunity to do this. They benefit too. So we’re …
- The Ivory Intersection… So try to find a place, your own island in the midst of the flood, keeping track of the breath in and of itself, the body in and of itself, ardent, alert, and mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. That’s the traditional formula. The world is still there, it’s just that you’re learning how to put …
- Unentangled Compassion… I can think about anything I want.” And it goes straight to things that get you riled up in terms of anger, fear, greed, lust. And so the effort here means learning how to drop those things, how to disentangle yourself from those thoughts. See them simply as events coming into the mind. And don’t get hoodwinked into thinking that they’re something …
- Appreciation… When we meditate and lessen our greed, anger, and delusion, we learn how not to be overcome by our moods and emotions. We realize that we have tools to use so that the emotion is not just a given that we have to accept, but is instead something we can learn to work with. We learn how to reshape the present moment in a …
- Doing, Maintaining, Using… You begin to see where your personal issues are, which things spark your greed, which things spark your anger, which things are still surrounded by delusion. These things are easier to notice if you stay with the breath. For one thing, when anger begins to arise in the mind, it’s going to make a change in the breath. There will be a catch …
- Question Your Perceptions… That allows you to question the perceptions that give rise to greed, aversion, and delusion, and the perceptions that serve the purposes of greed, aversion, and delusion. As you call them into question, you find that you open up a lot of understanding inside. So perception is a good aggregate to focus on, because it’s key to a lot of our defilements. There …
- Perceptions for Training the Mind… Then there’s the other activity, which is putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world—in other words, dealing with all the distractions that would pull you away from your topic. He provides perceptions for dealing with those, too. It’s good to remember that we have this body of knowledge, this body of perceptions that we can draw on. We …
- A Victory that Matters… This is why the Buddha said that it’s better to focus on the battles inside, battles over your own defilements, greed, aversion, and delusion. Those are the battles that can be won, and when you win, you don’t create any bad kamma. As for whether the people outside will acknowledge your victory, that doesn’t really matter. In fact, as Ajaan Lee …
- The Origination of Suffering… The other side of our task, of course, is to put aside greed and distress with reference to the world. Any thoughts about the world outside right now, you just put them aside. Remind yourself: What are those thoughts? The world itself, as the Buddha said, is simply sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and thoughts. And your thoughts about the world: Either they …
- Cheerfully Ardent… Put aside greed and distress with reference to the world. Here your greed and distress related to the world might be that you’re too eager to get results, saying, “The amount of time I have here is so little. I’ve worked so hard to get here. I really want to see results of this right now.” Well, the results are going to …
- Generosity & Virtue as Skills… You can say No to your greed, you can say No to your possessiveness. This is especially true when you’ve given something, not because it was the holiday when people give things or you were under a compulsion to give, but because you just felt like giving. You saw something you had, and that someone else could use it well and would benefit …
- Head, Heart, & Gut… Actions based on greed, aversion, and delusion are going to cause suffering. Actions based on the lack of greed, lack of aversion, lack of delusion can lead away from suffering. That’s one of the basic principles of causality. In fact, causality is so central to the Buddha’s awakening that when he gave the very shortest description of what he awakened to, it …
- Interconnectedness… As you work through the processes that ordinarily would give rise to greed, anger, or delusion, you find that you can manage them in a way that doesn’t have to stumble into those unskillful states. At the same time, you find that the people around you are subjected to less of your greed, anger and delusion as well. The whole atmosphere surrounding you …
- Damming & Diverting… In other words, greed, aversion, and delusion don’t start from things outside. It’s not the case that we’re just sitting here perfectly fine—passive and placid—and then something comes along and stirs us up. All too often we’re out there looking for trouble. The mind goes flowing out, looking for things that it can desire, looking for things that …
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