Search results for: "The Mind"

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  2. Dispassion & Delight
     … Delight when you can get the mind to settle down and it stays. Delight in concentration—when the mind can be on its own and have a sense of well-being that’s totally sufficient inside. Delight in the fact that you’re on a path that leads to harmlessness, to an absence of conflict, to total peace with nothing lacking. Let those thoughts … 
  3. Mundane Right View
     … what we do, how we think, how we focus the mind, how we position our awareness. These are all very important things in the meditation. When the Buddha starts with the principle of karma, he starts in two very interesting ways. The first is the principle that there are things that are given. In other words, the act of giving is important. It has … 
  4. Samvegic Ironies
     … It may not seem like much—just in and out, in and out—but the way you develop your mind as you stay with that in and out, explore it, experiment with it, use it as a mirror for seeing what’s going on in the mind, can take you to freedom. And it can make you reliable. When you can depend on yourself … 
  5. Forgiveness
     … Then there’s transcendent right view, which deals more with events in the mind: suffering, its cause, the end of suffering, and the path to its end. Many of us make the mistake of wanting to go straight to the transcendent level. Who wants to muck around in the mundane? Especially when you hear the theory about two levels of truth, that there’s … 
  6. The Right Piece in the Right Puzzle
     … Fabrication consists of your directed thought and evaluation as you adjust the breath to fit with the mind, adjust the mind to fit with the breath, and then keep them there together. Then there’s consciousness, which is aware of all these things. You have to see that these things, too, once you’ve mastered the concentration, are stressful, and inconstant—and they’re … 
  7. Recollecting the Devas
     … Whatever he saw in the vision, he would then take it and test it, and consider whether it really was a useful principle in training the mind—whether it would make him more scrupulous, make him more observant, give better results. In those ways, the visions were a good thing. But it wasn’t the case that he accepted everything that came in every … 
  8. Friendship
     … If you don’t take an interest, if you see it simply as a chore—you’ve got to sit here for an hour watching your breath, and there’s nothing else to do—what usually happens is that the mind starts creating other worlds for itself. It starts remembering the past, planning for the future, doing all kinds of other things except learning … 
  9. Pay Careful Attention
     … But then there are actual situations, the actual qualities in the mind that are truly there. The fact that they’re truly there, your experience of their being truly there: That’s the second kind of truth. For instance, with the four noble truths, the Buddha said to comprehend the first truth, to abandon the second, to realize the third, and to develop the … 
  10. Unlimited Mind, Limited Resources
     … Because acts of generosity and taking the precepts are food for the mind. Recollection of death is for when you’re getting lazy. After all, death could come at any time. Earthquakes happen, little things can malfunction in your body, and they don’t come with any forewarning. So you have to ask yourself, “Am I ready to go tonight?” If not, that means … 
  11. Asalha Puja
     … So he asked himself, “Could this be the path?” And something inside him said, “Yes.” But then he realized that because he’d been starving himself, he didn’t have the strength to get the mind into good strong concentration. That’s why he left his austerities. So the key to the path—and as the Buddha sometimes said, the heart of the path … 
  12. The Bowl of Oil
     … And as for the part of the mind that complains, you don’t have to listen to it—because the practice isn’t just sitting with your eyes closed. The Buddha taught a complete path. It includes generosity and virtue along with the meditation, and so be happy in other people’s generosity. Now is a good time for us to practice our generosity … 
  13. The Three Perceptions as Tools
     … He was less interested in looking at the characteristics of what things are, or in making statements about reality out there, and was more interested in developing perceptions that will have an impact on the mind—perceptions that are true as far as they go, and that focus on an aspect of reality to develop dispassion. In other words, we’re not trying to … 
  14. To Be an Adult
     … This is why we train the mind. Society likes to keep adults like children. They give you flashy things or dangle flashy things in front of you, saying, “If you want this, do what we tell you.” They don’t care whether you’re really an adult or not. In fact, advertisers, politicians, the people who run the media: They all want to keep … 
  15. All Your Old Baggage
     … And what have you got right here? You’ve got the body sitting here breathing, you’ve got the mind thinking and aware. So you’ve got all the raw materials you need, all the tools you need for a good meditation. And regardless of however well it’s going to go, try to keep a good attitude toward the whole thing. In other … 
  16. Finding Your Own Balance
     … It’s not that you try to forbid the mind from thinking. You have to think about the object. You have to evaluate the object, evaluate how the object and the mind are getting along together. If they’re not getting along, what can you do to change? For the breath, not only is there the question of how long or short or heavy … 
  17. Understanding Goodwill & Equanimity
     … There’s part of the mind that says, “I’d like to see them suffer a little bit, to get a taste of what they’ve been handing out to other people.” But think about it: Often when people are suffering from their unskillful actions, they don’t stop. They can often become even more and more unskillful. So, ideally you’re hoping that … 
  18. Go in Brightness
     … harmless in that it doesn’t intoxicate the mind, blameless in that you don’t create any bad kamma. Nobody gets harmed by your pursuit of pleasure inside. So you put aside thoughts of sensuality and focus simply on the sensation of the body as you feel it from within right now. Notice how the breath feels as it comes in and goes out … 
  19. The Karma of Ideas
     … We tend to forget that it also applies to the mind. In fact, though, it applies primarily to the mind. Our ideas are instances of karma as well. The things you focus on, the things you choose to think about, the questions you choose to ask, the perceptions you choose to hold in your mind: These are actions as well. They all fall into … 
  20. Chanting on Your Own
     … Now in general, meditation is helped by chanting simply because if you’ve been going through the day picking up different issues, different concerns, and the time comes to meditate, it’s good to have something to empty those issues and concerns out of the mind, to give you a different perspective, to think about the Buddha—the fact that we have a Buddha … 
  21. Your Judgments Matter
     … If you put them into practice, will they develop good qualities of the mind or bad ones? And how are your own powers of judgment? Are they up to the task? This is one of the reasons why we meditate: to develop the qualities of mind that make us better judges—better judges of other people, better judges of the things they teach, and … 
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