Search results for: "Delusion"

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  2. Four Mountains Moving In
     … If we let our greed, aversion, delusion, or fear take over, these four qualities—liking, hating, being deluded, being fearful—lead us astray. In Pali, they’re called agati, the wrong course. They can skew our perceptions, and our perceptions can skew our actions, distorting things so that even when we think we’re acting rightly, we’re actually following the wrong course and … 
  3. Obstacles to Full-body Awareness
     … Otherwise, if—as the breath gets comfortable— your awareness gets very small, you tend to either fall asleep or go into delusion concentration, when the mind is still but it doesn’t really know anything, which is not what you want because nothing gets accomplished by that kind of meditation. The problem is, when you expand your awareness, sometimes there are things that get … 
  4. Recollection of the Buddha
     … We protect the good part inside us, the part that wants to find a true happiness, and we protect it from all the greed and aversion and delusion and laziness and other unskillful qualities that would pull us away. So recollection of the Buddha is one of the most important weapons in our arsenal. Bring it out to use on a regular basis, and … 
  5. Your One Responsibility
     … So many times you hear people say “Well, if everybody behaved in line with their innate nature and didn’t have any of this awful social conditioning, everybody would be wonderful and fine.” But if we didn’t have the potential for greed, aversion, and delusion in the mind, no amount of bad social conditioning would have any influence on us. It’s because … 
  6. On Top of Your Actions
     … The Buddha talks about being biased through things you like, through things that you’re angry at, biased through fear, biased through delusion. In Thai they call this taking sides with yourself. In other words, whatever your opinions are, you tend to see things, “It’s got to be true that way.” The only hope you have for any kind of practice is to … 
  7. Teaching Old Selves New Tricks
     … You’d have to want them to give rise to passion, aversion, and delusion. But here you’re doing none of that. So be careful as you look for your happiness, and treat everybody with goodwill, even the people you don’t like—especially people you don’t like. Think of that case of the bandits sawing off your limbs with a two-handled … 
  8. Surveying the World
     … Passion, aversion, and delusion were burning their hearts. At that point, his response was compassion. That’s how he began to think that maybe he might teach. This is a point in his life that the commentaries get all upset about, because after all, he was going to become the Buddha anyhow, right? He was going to teach, but after his awakening he began … 
  9. A Post for the Mind
     … We get fascinated by our sensual fantasies that can enflame the mind with greed, aversion, and delusion. When the Buddha talks about the problem of sensuality, it’s not that the objects out there that are the problem; it’s our fascination with going over a particular sensual desire, making plans, making adjustments. There are not that many things that people get fascinated with … 
  10. The Real World Isn’t for Real
     … Often their attitude is that “There’s nothing much you can do about those things, so buy our stuff.” They encourage your greed, encourage your anger, encourage your delusion—all which are going to be really bad for you. Society is bad for your health—your mental health—and your real issues don’t get addressed at all. So here at the monastery you … 
  11. Dwelling in Emptiness
     … Ultimately, the Buddha said, his level of an emptiness dwelling was undisturbed by passion, undisturbed by aversion, and undisturbed by delusion. That’s the direction in which we’re headed. As you learn how to appreciate lack of disturbance of the mind as a really good thing, you’ll be more and more inclined to want to go in that direction, too. This is … 
  12. The Gift of Spiritual Materialism
     … Your actions don’t weigh on them, because you’re able to see through your own greed, aversion, and delusion, and to cut them through. That way, other people aren’t subjected to those things. Now, there is a point on the path where you take all these noble treasures you’ve developed and you give them up. Even discernment is something that, at … 
  13. Patience Is a Skill
     … But the Buddha said you don’t accept the fact that you’ve created aversion and delusion in the mind and that they’re going to stay there. You accept the fact that they’re there, but you want to do something about them. This is going to take time because the roots are deep. They’re old habits. You’ve been letting them … 
  14. Respect for Concentration
     … You need to get it very solid, very secure, because when you start working on the issues of insight — trying to understand why greed, anger, and delusion take over the mind — you’re going to find yourself running up against all kinds of storms. If your concentration isn’t really solid and settled, you’ll just get blown away. So you have to respect … 
  15. Single-minded
     … You’ve got something better than thinking about greed, aversion, or delusion. You look at the pleasures that they have to offer, and you realize you’ve got something more solid and reliable here. So content yourself with the oneness. Get so that you’re really good at this. You know your spot, you know the comfortable breath, and you learn how to deal … 
  16. Skillful Fears
     … If your fear is combined with greed, aversion, or delusion, then it’s going to be unskillful. But there’s also wise fear. The main wise fear is being afraid of the possibility of your doing something unskillful. In other words, you don’t have to be afraid of things outside, or of things that are going to happen to you. You have to … 
  17. The Tricks of Denial
     … Sometimes there’s intentional not-knowing; intentional delusion; intentional illusions that the mind creates for itself. The mind has its tricks, so as a meditator you have to learn some tricks of your own. You’re dealing with a tricky this mind. have to learn tricks yourself.
  18. Conceit
     … We like our delusions, and yet all these things have to be put aside, let go of as we practice. But it’s within human capability to do this. Even if you do die in the practice, it’s a good way to die. It’s better than dying without having accomplished anything or dying doing something really stupid. So try to think in … 
  19. The Middle Way
     … You’ve got to come down hard sometimes on your complacency, on your pride, on your greed, your delusion, your anger. This is why discipline is such an important part of the path. It’s a part we don’t like to talk about. Look at how many books on American Buddhism deal with discipline: almost zero. Yet it’s an essential part of … 
  20. Totally Secure
     … That requires a quality of truthfulness, both in the sense of being true to your determination and also seeing exactly what is actually happening in the mind so that when you find yourself leaning in one direction—leaning toward liking or disliking, or toward delusion or fear—you can right yourself. You can get the mind back in a state where it’s not … 
  21. Goodwill for All Beings
    They say that after his awakening, when the Buddha surveyed the world with the eye of a Buddha, he saw all the beings on fire—as we chanted last night—“on fire with passion, aversion, delusion, sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress and despair.” He, however, was no longer on fire. So he spent forty-five years teaching other people, other beings, how to put out … 
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