Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 184
  2. Victory
     … You see that something’s really strong in the mind and you say, “If I even try to do a little battle with it, I’m going to lose anyhow, so I might as well give up.” That’s your defilements speaking. That’s their fifth column inside your mind. So, at the very least, try to fight these things. Recognize them as the … 
  3. Different Paths Go Different Places
     … All the good qualities of the mind get sold off in most people’s lives. So it’s a question of making a wise, intelligent trade. We see the pleasures that other people are enjoying, but we can’t see their pain. This is why, when looking at other people’s lives, sometimes we think, “Well, that looks like an easy life. That looks … 
  4. Determined on Goodwill
     … As the Buddha said, there’s nothing quicker to change direction than the mind. There’s no adequate analogy for how fast it is. Even the twinkling of an eye is too slow. So the fact that we have these desires, we have these directions, has both good and bad potentials. If we want to make the potentials good, we have to work on … 
  5. Customs of the Noble Ones
     … And you’re fascinated by the puzzle, because what could be more fascinating than the way the mind lies to itself, and then searching it out and uncovering the lies? This is your own mind, and it’s been deceiving you. So you want to be able to look through the deceits, trace them down. And take some joy in this. There is joy … 
  6. The Power of Truth
     … They focus on this process of what the mind is doing with the truth. In this way, they contain the seeds for their own transcendence. There’s a passage where Anathapindika is talking to a group of wanderers. He wanted to see the Buddha, but it was too early in the morning—the Buddha and the monks were out on their alms rounds—so … 
  7. The Buddha’s Conventions
     … So, when you listen to the Dhamma, remember that you’re asking not only, “How does the Buddha describe things?” but, “What kind of description is he replacing?” When he asks a question, what questions is he not asking? This comes under the heading of appropriate attention—how you frame things in the mind. The way you frame things, and the perceptions you use … 
  8. In the Mood to Meditate
     … And the mind is willing to go along with it. There are other times, though, when it’s not. Either there are some physical difficulties or some spots of tension or whole globs of tension in your body that you can’t work through. You’ll have to learn how to work around them, and that requires patience. This is why you have to … 
  9. The Thoroughbred Horse
     … These are good qualities to develop in the mind. And that goodness doesn’t change. When you look around and see other people are not doing it, you can’t let that set you back. You have to respect the fact that everybody has freedom of choice. If you wait until everybody agrees that this is a good thing, the world will probably come … 
  10. Suffering Starts Before Life
     … That image of the fire going from the house also applies to the mind in this body, in this life, right here, right now. We keep going for this, going for that. We get frustrated here, frustrated there, so we try something else. If we get what we want, we consume it, and then we’ve already started looking for more. That’s what … 
  11. Getting Untangled from Thorns
     … And often, it acts as a good mirror of what’s going on in the mind. Sometimes there are subtle currents that you otherwise wouldn’t notice, but because they have an effect on the subtle aspects of the breath energy, you can detect that they’re there. So there are a lot of good reasons for wanting to stay with the body. It … 
  12. Heedfulness for the Holidays
     … When issues come up in the mind, which ones can you deal with directly right now? And which ones do you simply have to bounce off for a bit so that you can have some more space, some more time to strengthen yourself? In some cases, the issue comes up in such a way that you can’t avoid it, so you use whatever … 
  13. Respect Opens Possibilities
     … And finally, consciousness—your awareness of whatever is coming in at the senses, of whatever is happening in the mind. We cling to these things. We cling to these things for sensual pleasure; we cling to these things because they provide us views about what is world is like; we cling because they give us an idea of what should and shouldn’t be … 
  14. The Kamma of Self & Not-self
     … Once you develop a good, strong body of skills on how to be mindful, how to bring the mind to a good state of concentration, you’ve taken the sense of self and its quest for a good long-term happiness about as far as it can go. But the quest for happiness doesn’t end there. It goes further. At that point, you … 
  15. What’s Relative, What’s Constant
     … Have you ever stepped back and just said, “Well, this is just a bunch of directed thoughts and acts of evaluation,” and looked at it simply in those impersonal terms? When thoughts are going through the mind, have you ever stopped to categorize, “What are the actual perceptions, the labels I’m putting on things, that have led to this riot of thoughts in … 
  16. Loss
     … He had suffered brain damage in an accident and he said, “You know, my brain is telling me all kinds of weird things; all kinds of weird perceptions are coming up.” At the very least, he had the mindfulness to recognize that they were weird. And then he added, “But that thing I got from my meditation. That hasn’t left.” That’s something … 
  17. Admirable Friendship, Inside & Out
     … the Dhamma eye that sees that “Whatever is subject to origination is all subject to cessation.” This doesn’t mean that whatever arises passes away. “Origination” usually refers to causes that come from within the mind. Cessation comes from dispassion. You learn how to train yourself to look at things in such a way that gives rise to dispassion. Then from the dispassion comes … 
  18. The Psychology of Self
     … Then there’s the principle of suppression, realizing that you have some unskillful attitudes, some unskillful urges that come up in the mind, and if you give in to them, it’s going to cause trouble. So you learn how to say No. In Buddhism we have this too. The Buddha teaches restraint. Anything you would do, say, or think that would cause harm … 
  19. Nothing Wrong with Right & Wrong
     … He gives long lists of the possible connections in the mind that cause suffering. And the lists, it’s really interesting, are not always the same. There is a standard common list for, say, the factors of dependent co-arising. But not every time the Buddha mentions that does he mention the same factors. He adds a few in some cases, takes away a … 
  20. A Game of Chess
     … And that simple act, if you use it for the purpose of training the mind, turns the form of your body, your sensation of the body, into an element of the path. So try to take advantage of that fact. The way you feel, the way you perceive things has an intentional element, too. Learn how to manipulate these things in a way that … 
  21. Friends
     … The more still the mind can be, the more it can detect really subtle movements. And the more continuous its stillness can be, the more it can see cause and effect. Otherwise, our awareness of things is like connect-the-dots: There’s a dot here and then there’s a dot over there, and you have to imagine where there’s a line … 
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