Search results for: "The Mind"
- Page 180
- Wilderness Lessons… Well, our attitude is to give what you can of your goodwill and bring back whatever lessons you can learn for training the mind.
- Being Responsible… The real problems of the mind are inside. It’s only when you have good qualities inside that you can be safe from those problems. Taking the Triple Gem as a refuge means developing those qualities within you. Tonight’s the 59th anniversary of Ajaan Lee’s passing, so it’s good to reflect on this topic. He wrote two books on it: one …
- Skillful Fear… You want to strengthen the mind so that it can keep the long term always in mind. This is one of the reasons why we practice concentration, one of the reasons why it’s so important that we have a sense of well-being that comes as we focus inside on the breath. It takes strength to go against our immediate knee-jerk reactions …
- The Logic of Not-self… But then there will come a point when you’ve got the mind as still as you can manage, as peaceful as you can manage, and yet there will still be a sense of dissatisfaction because the concentration is something that’s fabricated, something you have to put together. This is where you have to think about the third noble truth. The Buddha is …
- Shaping Your Life… We may think that this teaching is simply about external actions but it also applies to what we’re doing in the mind. The way you’re focusing on the breath right now has an impact on how you’re experiencing the breath. Your concepts about the breath, your concepts about what it means to be focused, your intention in being with the breath …
- Mindful to Be Skillful… you’ll find that you develop that same quality in your meditation. And it is a useful quality to have, because not everything in the meditation is explained in the books. The mind has lots of in and outs that you can never really put in a book, but you’ve got to learn how to figure them out, you’ve got to learn …
- Practicing in Solitude… You need a friend? Take Dhamma books and chanting as your friends, so that the internal chatter of the mind is not always the same old stuff over and over again. You’re adding new committee members with new ideas, new attitudes, in hopes that they’ll shake things up a little bit. This way, you can make the most of the freedom you …
- A Sense of Yourself… And listen to the mind to see if it complains while you’re doing this. That way you get to know what’s standing in the way of your generosity. The fifth quality is discernment: seeing where you’re causing yourself suffering. This, of course, requires that you work on your concentration so that you can see things more clearly. Discernment is not just …
- Relating to Kamma… But if you know that you’ve done good in this lifetime, the sense of self-esteem, the sense of self-worth that comes with that keeps the mind from falling down. So it’s good to take kamma as a working hypothesis because it helps you create the conditions for living well and dying well with a sense of your own worth, a …
- The Larger Picture… Sometimes when you live with nothing but your problems, they loom very large in the mind and they become overwhelming. But if you see them in light of the problems of all living beings in all directions, it’s strange, but it makes your own problems easier to bear and gives you a better handle on how to deal with them. We can take …
- Truth… Having a sense of yourself means knowing your strengths and weaknesses, the areas you have to fix and/or improve, and also what areas or qualities of the mind you can depend on to make those improvements. To be honest with yourself and about yourself doesn’t mean saying, “I’m miserable and I accept the fact. Maybe I can be okay with this …
- Friends with the Dhamma Wheel… You can look at all the other things you have to be dispassionate for and deal with them from a solid foundation—the sense of well-being that comes when the mind can settle down and really be absorbed in the breath. It’s only when you’re really solidly here, and those other things begin to fade into the background—all the things …
- When This Is, That Is… If you sit there trying to be equanimous about whatever comes up, what happens is that the mind’s fashioning of things in the present moment goes underground, where it’s been all along. Hidden. You want to be more and more conscious of how you shape things right now. Because when you learn how to change that, you start getting more and more …
- The Identity Crutch… My ability to examine my thoughts, to step back from my thoughts, and look at them simply as processes in the mind: That might be useful to bring in here.” The qualities of endurance you’ve learned as you’ve endured pain sitting here: We learn to endure these pains not because this is the only place where endurance is necessary. When other situations …
- When You’re Discouraged… Then you’ll find that you develop a whole range of skills here in how to train the mind, how to get it more under your control, so that it thinks the thoughts you want it to think and doesn’t think the thoughts you don’t want it to think. That’ll be a skill that’ll really hold you in good stead …
- What Made the Buddha Exclaim… There’s a whole series of verses where the Buddha talks about how the mind of an awakened one doesn’t quiver at all in response to either pleasure or pain. Totally solid, a happiness that can’t be touched by anything else: That’s what we’re practicing for. In the case of the Buddha, the attainment that he achieved never lost its …
- Daily-Life Dhamma… Now, this requires that you learn how to not turn the mind into a pressure cooker. Again, you remind yourself that you’re better off by not saying those things. Whatever physical pressure there may be in the body, realize that it’s simply a matter of the anger having hijacked your breath, so you take the breath back. Breathe calmly. Breathe in a …
- The Core of Experience… As the Buddha said, one of the treasures of the mind is ottappa, compunction, which is the opposite of apathy. Apathy says, “Well, I’ll do what I want and I don’t care about the results.” Compunction places all the importance on the results, regardless of whether an action is something you like or dislike. The issue isn’t whether you like the …
- Before Your Face Was Born… It’s good to be able to admit the mistakes and to realize that, Yes, the mind does need training. Ok, here is an opportunity to do it. A lot of my training with Ajaan Fuang consisted of his pointing out to me where my weak points were. He wasn’t doing it all the time, but he did it at strategic times. He …
- Load next page...
