Search results for: "Greed"
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- A Pure Happiness… If you start thinking about it in big terms—like a huge mass of greed, huge mass of desire, huge mass of anger or whatever it is—it’ll knock you over. But if you realize you can break it down into little bits and pieces—just this particular thought right here, right now—you realize that that particular thought is not so difficult …
- What to Keep in Mind… What are the different frames of reference that you can use as you’re practicing right mindfulness? It never asks any questions about what it means to be ardent as you’re doing this, or what it means to put aside greed and distress with reference to the world. Those parts of the mindfulness formula just don’t get touched on. For that, you …
- Hypocrisy… Or you begin to discover that there are really some strong areas of greed or aversion that you haven’t been honest with yourself about, that tend to show up around issues of food, clothing, shelter. So look for them. Delight in abandoning the unskillful qualities and in developing the skillful ones, wherever you may find them functioning, so that this becomes a habit …
- A Healthy Body Image… walk. Mindfully. With concentration. When they talk about being wakeful: You spend the time—when you’re not lying down to sleep—walking and sitting, cleansing the mind of unskillful qualities: greed, aversion, delusion, lust, fear, jealousy, all the unskillful things that can come up. When you’ve got the strength, that’s the best use of your strength. So the body is good …
- Where You Set Your Heart… Then two, you put aside greed and distress with reference to the world. **In other words, any thoughts that come up with regard to the world, about what you want about the world, about how you’re upset about what’s going on in the world—you have to put those aside. ** **You’re very definitely making a choice of where you’re going …
- Samvega vs. Dispassion… It’s trapped by its own greed. That’s samvega. You look around and there’s nowhere in the world that you can see any way out. Everybody’s fighting over what little bit of food there is, emotional or physical. The Buddha’s image was of fish fighting over that last gulp of water in a dwindling puddle before they’re all going …
- Take Care… If you focus on the wrong kinds of things, they can give rise to anger, greed, delusion; and then the ripple effect goes rippling out. So, we’re learning a very important skill here as we’re meditating: being very careful to stay with the breath, not letting the slightest thing pull us off, not letting the slightest thing interfere. This is precision work …
- Pleasing to the Noble Ones… You focus on an aspect of the body in and of itself, and you put aside greed and distress with a reference to the world. That’s what the formula says. You’re doing two things. One is trying to keep focused on the sensation of an aspect of the body, like the breath. The other is that if anything else comes up to …
- The Path Is in the Details… Is there any greed, anger, or delusion in there? If so, watch out. You have to be willing to the test your intentions and to learn from your mistakes. All this is the nuts and bolts of the meditation, which may sound dull and uninteresting, but if you keep your awareness on this level, you find you have less and less chance of being …
- Taking an Active Role… full-body awareness, it’s like throwing a rock into a ball of clay. The rock penetrates into the clay very easily. This can be an image for your own thoughts: Greed, anger, and delusion can take root pretty easily if you’re not filling your awareness with mindfulness, mindfulness of the whole body. Other people’s energies can enter into your space as …
- A Positive-Sum Game… But if you learn to gain some control over your mind so that it doesn’t go into areas that cause suffering, it doesn’t go into areas that cause stress, doesn’t go into areas that give rise to greed, anger, and delusion, impatience, fear, whateve: When you’ve gained the concentration, the mindfulness, and the discernment to see through these things, those …
- A Slave to the Dhamma… After all, what do the defilements ask us to do? Anything for the sake of greed, anything for the sake of anger, anything for the sake of delusion. You look at the ways of the world, the way people cheat, lie, mistreat each other, mistreat themselves: That’s what the slavery to defilements is like. You do horrible things, things you’re ashamed to …
- Fear of Others… Fear becomes unskillful when it’s tied up in greed, aversion, and delusion. That’s the kind of fear you want to get past. The fear that comes from knowing that your mind has unskillful habits and the conditions could come about where those unskillful habits might take over: That’s something legitimately to be feared. You want to train your mind so that …
- Joyous Discernment… They find ways to avoid your line of sight, so that greed, anger, and delusion can still arise, even though they’re not appearing in your line of sight. They’re off to one side. But that’s what the mind always does. When it’s going to play tricks on itself, it tends to find ways of getting out of the line of …
- Endurance… There are times, though, when you do have to analyze why you have a particular penchant for getting upset about what someone has said, or about physical discomfort or whatever the disturbance is; why you have a penchant for greed, anger, and delusion. In case like that, you really have to analyze the causes. The image of being solid like the earth won’t …
- Turn Off the Automatic Pilot… Well, who designed that automatic pilot? Who set the automatic pilot? Usually, if we’re not paying attention, greed, aversion, and delusion get to determine the default settings. This means you have to learn how to question them. This is one of the reasons why we read Dhamma books: They help us question areas that we previously didn’t question before. We just felt …
- 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 …
- Like an Athlete in Training… Who’s doing the looking? Who’s doing the listening? Who’s behind all this? Is it you? Is it your greed? Is it anger? If you allow these things to feed, they’ll get strong and take over. Those are the things you need to starve. You want to feed your discernment. You want to feed your virtue. You want to feed your …
- Common Ground… As the Buddha said, you keep track of the body in and of itself, or feelings, or mind, mental qualities in and of themselves, ardent, alert and mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. The “in and of itself” there is important. Say you’re going to focus on the breath. It’s just the breath right here. That’s …
- A Position of Strength… He says you want to make sure that you never do anything unskillful and can never kill, steal, have illicit sex, never lie, speak divisively, speak for the purpose of hurting people’s feelings, let your conversation wander off in all kinds of idle chatter; to give in to greed, ill will, or develop wrong views. All these things, he said, are categorically unskillful …
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