Search results for: "Delusion"
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- Fear & Insecurity… to fear making unskillful choices—choices that are harmful for yourself, harmful for others, based on unskillful intentions, laced with greed, laced with anger, laced with delusion. Notice that the Buddha doesn’t say that fear is necessarily unskillful. It is one of the wrong courses, or agati. You can go wrong based on fear. But not all fears make you go wrong. After …
- What’s Real… We’re not constantly bombarded by the images meant to incite greed, aversion, delusion, lust, fear, whatever, that the media are churning out. But if we didn’t have the germs for those things in our minds, the media wouldn’t be able to do anything to us. Even when you’re sitting perfectly alone with your eyes closed, those germs can get into …
- A Refuge from Aging, Illness, & Death… Many of us are very driven, but we have the option to step back, look at our greed, aversion, and delusion, to look at our pride, and ask ourselves: “Are these the things that are going to take us to happiness? Can we really trust them?” This is why one of the Buddha’s most basic teaching is on the topic of refuge. We …
- A Happy Tradition… They had their greed, aversion, and delusion. Sometimes we read the biographies of the ajaans and it sounds as if they were born arahants, but that’s not the case. They had a lot of defilements they had to fight against. On top of that, they came from a society in which they were very low on the ladder. A lot of the teachings …
- Fighting the Defilements… It’s only when you begin fighting off greed, anger, delusion, sleepiness, restlessness, that you realize how strong they are. Otherwise you just go along with the flow. Today seems to be a good day to be lazy, so you’ll be lazy. Today’s a good day to be industrious, so you’re industrious. In other words, you tend to follow your moods …
- The Power of the Will… When greed, aversion, and delusion arise, how do they arise? How do they pass away? How do they come back again? When they come back, why do you go for them? What’s the allure? Again, the texts will answer in general terms, but you want to answer yourself in specific terms on what the drawbacks are in going with them. Then it’s …
- To Be an Adult… They can get us to break the precepts, they can get us to give in to passion, aversion, and delusion, telling us that greed is good, anger is good—all kinds of horrible things they can say are good. If we believe them and act on those beliefs, that becomes our karma—and that’s the danger. So we have to look into our …
- Your Inner Ally… Then when the breath starts getting comfortable, what do you do then? We talked earlier this morning about delusion concentration, where things get comfortable and you leave the breath and start focusing on the sense of pleasure. You don’t want to destroy the sense of pleasure. You just stay with the breath. You know the pleasure is right there, but that’s not …
- Let Pleasure & Pain Fall Off the Plow… That turns into what Ajaan Lee would call delusion concentration, where you’re quiet and still but not really sure where you are. Or, even worse, it just turns into drowsiness. You just start falling asleep because you’ve forgotten your work, which was the directed thought and evaluation: to make sure that the breath stays right, which is something you can’t really …
- The Four-in-One Establishing of Mindfulness… Here we’re trying to develop a mind free from greed, free from aversion, free from delusion, one that’s centered and not scattered, but enlarged. In other words, you’re aware of the breath throughout the whole body. That’s right here. Your range of awareness is enlarged. Then finally, there are dhammas. These can be the five hindrances or the seven factors …
- Feelings Not of the Flesh… When you come out of it, sometimes you wonder, “Was I awake? Was I asleep?” It’s called delusion concentration. As the name tells you, you’re not going to gain insight there. You indulge in the pleasure in the way of a person who works and then quits his job to enjoy the wages that come from his work: If you stop your …
- To Comprehend Food… Of course, “comprehend” here means understanding it to the point of dispassion, where you have no passion, aversion, or delusion around it. So how do you go about comprehending food? First, there’s that reflection we often have about how you eat simply for the sake of maintaining the body so that you can practice. It’s not for beautification, not for putting on …
- Skillful FearI’ve known a number of psychotherapists who’ve asked me why the Buddha doesn’t put fear in his list of the causes of unskillful behavior, along with passion, aversion, and delusion. It’s because some forms of fear are unskillful, but others are skillful. The most unskillful form of fear is the one that the Buddha lists in the four biases, when …
- Training the Whole Mind… When greed, anger, and delusion come into the mind, they usually barge in with a lot of force and expect to push you right over. So one thing you have to do is to ask, “Well, why? Why should we follow that? Why should we want instant gratification?” And there will be an “of course-ness” to their answer the first time around. “Of …
- Bowing & Chanting… You can ask yourself as you go through the day, what do you bow to? Do you bow to your moods? Do you bow to your fear of other people’s power? Do you bow down to your lust, to your aversion, to your delusion? If you don’t like bowing down to those things, it’s good to practice bowing down to something …
- Beyond Likes & Dislikes… Two of them are following your likes and dislikes; the other two are giving in to delusion and fear. These things pull people off the path. We go wandering into the underbrush and then off to who-knows-where simply because we like to follow what we like and to avoid what we dislike — even though the things we dislike are often the things …
- Taking a Stance… Some qualities in the mind — like greed, anger, and delusion — are false friends. They come promising all kinds of things, and then they don’t deliver. They run off to desert you, leaving you worse off than before. Those are your false friends inside. The true friends are the ones who are really helpful, like the good qualities we’re trying to gather around …
- Gradually Sudden… Recently I did an article on the topic of psychic powers that can come from meditation, and I got some pretty snide rebuttals from people who were trapped in their Western point of view, or the materialist point of view, in which psychic powers are delusions. They asked, “How can you possibly believe in this stuff? Didn’t the Buddha teach you to question …
- Protecting the Mind from Itself… the dangers that come from our own greed, aversion, and delusion—the things that can get us to behave in ways that will cause trouble for ourselves, trouble for other people. When the Buddha said that the duty of a teacher is to protect the student in every direction, what he meant was that he gives us instructions on how to behave in a …
- The Size of Your Eyes… We may not consciously think of it when we’re developing it in the direction of greed, aversion, and delusion, but that’s what we’re going. But we have the choice to develop it in a good direction. Remember that this is what wisdom is all about. Sometimes, when you hear about Buddhist wisdom, you think about emptiness or not-self or statements …
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