Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 185
  2. Broaden Your Range of Choices
     … In other words, look for the goodness in people who, otherwise, you find really hard to deal with because there’s a part of the mind that says, “Well, they’re so awful. Why should I go to the indignity of looking for any goodness in them?” Well, you need it. We’re all living in a desert. The other day, going to Death … 
  3. Habits & Practices
     … As you become more sensitive to your actions and intentions, then it gets easier to get the mind into concentration. After all, to hold to a precept, you have to be, one, mindful to keep it in mind. That’s what mindfulness means. Two, you have to be alert to watch what you’re actually doing. And three, you have to be ardent. You … 
  4. The Wheel of Dhamma
     … As long as you’re still on the path, you have to develop all the qualities the Buddha recommended, including desire—the desire to figure out which qualities in the mind are skillful and which ones are unskillful, and what can you do about them so that you can maximize the skillful ones and get rid of the unskillful ones and make sure the … 
  5. To Keep You Going
     … The issue is whether you stay on the path and you nurture all the voices in the mind that give you the energy to stay on the path. This is how you’re a true friend to yourself, in that you can ultimately taste the Buddha’s last principle, which is what gives the Dhamma all of its worth. When the Buddha talked about … 
  6. Parsing Out Suffering
     … He tested it for a while, and finally realized it had to do with the perception, that something in the mind likes the perception of beauty, and then likes to take that perception and apply it to things around you. That was what he was attached to, not so much the bodies out there, but his perceptions about them. You could say the same … 
  7. Disconnecting
     … You work really hard to develop good qualities in the mind, and then you can get reborn in a good place. Sometimes it’s so good that you get very lazy, very complacent, very used to having all your wishes met. You can imagine what kind of habits that develops—and then you fall. Ajaan Fuang had a couple of students who were extremely … 
  8. Introduction
     … They remove the dangers from the mind and provide it with genuine safety, genuine security. There’s nothing else in the world that can match it.
  9. Nobility Is the Best Policy
     … That’s how the mind can be freed. We have a story like that in the Buddhist tradition as well. There was a king and a queen whose kingdom was taken away from them by another king. So they disguised themselves and went and lived in the capital of the king who had defeated them. They had a son, and they realized after a … 
  10. Observant & Ingenious
     … That’s the way in which the mind is luminous: You can see yourself in action, you can see the results of your actions, and you can see the connection. If you couldn’t see these things, there’d be no way to develop the skills of awakening. That’s what we’re working on—a skill. As Ajaan Lee points out, the teacher … 
  11. Judging Your Meditation
     … You think about where you were and what the mind was like. Does that resemble anything you’ve heard of before? If it seems to resemble what’s in the Canon, put a post-it note on it. Don’t be too quick to name things, because you’re not here to explore the texts. You’re here to explore your mind. And as … 
  12. Not-self as a Raft
     … We’re here to learn how to use these functions of the mind, these perceptions, in a skillful way. Now, there will come a point at the end of the path where you’ve developed the path as far as it can go and you’re going to have to let it go. That’s when you apply the perception of not-self to … 
  13. Rebirth & Not-Self
     … The realization that you have these choices now is something you want to keep in mind every time you meditate, because as you’re working with the mind right now. You’re developing habits. And you’re also getting sensitive to these aggregates that you tend to cling to, out of which you create your sense of who you are. This will be especially … 
  14. Pissing on Palaces
     … This is important because what you do in the mind then becomes the basis for what you say, what you do, what you think. So that’s one way to tune into the Dhamma. When you see or hear anything that helps to support that, you know you’re seeing and listening to the Dhamma. As for anything that pulls attention away from that … 
  15. Mastery
     … When you’re working on concentration, you’re creating a state of becoming so that you can put the mind in a position where it can finally go beyond becoming. So it’s important that we realize the role of paradox in what we’re doing. Sometimes we have to develop skills that eventually we have to transcend, but you can’t get past … 
  16. Accepting the Way Out
     … But then the mind turns around and just shoots another arrow. The sutta talks about one arrow. But if you look at yourself, you find yourself with a whole quiver of arrows, you just keep shooting, shooting, shooting away. If you’re going to learn how to accept that fact, it doesn’t mean you just say, “Well, let’s just keep on shooting … 
  17. Right View Comes First
     … Especially as you get the mind into deeper and deeper stages of right concentration, you’re going to see things in your mind that you didn’t see before. As long as you have that framework of the four noble truths—What are you doing that’s the suffering? What are you doing that’s causing the suffering? What can you do to develop … 
  18. Remembering Ajaan Fuang
     … disappear from the world? After all, this is a practice where we’re not just sitting here accepting, accepting, accepting things as they come. We’ve got to figure things out. The mind is suffering. It’s creating its own suffering, even though it wants happiness. Why? How? What can we do to stop? We’re happy to accept help from those who’ve … 
  19. High-Level Dhamma
     … It’s our ability to see what the mind is actually doing to cause itself suffering: That’s where the real Dhamma lies. That’s the first noble truth right there, combined with the second noble truth. If you don’t look at that, there’s no way that the third and fourth noble truths can do their work. So whatever gets served up … 
  20. The Path of Mistakes
     … It has nothing to do with defilements of the mind. It’s simply the fact that we’re human beings with limitations. What’s different about arahants is that they continue to learn from their mistakes. They don’t get knocked off course by them because they have no conceit that’s going to be challenged by the mistake, destroyed by the mistake, or … 
  21. Not Getting What You Want
     … You can breathe short, you can breathe deep, you can breathe long, you can breathe shallow, heavy or light, fast or slow—and it can have a huge impact on your body and on the mind. And you have the choice to do these things. These are choices that we tend to overlook or to deny to ourselves. When we’re taught that we … 
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