Search results for: "Greed"
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- 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 …
- Survival Tactics… anger, greed, jealousy, fear. These things will cause a change in the breath. If you’re there with the breath and you’re used to having it comfortable, you notice these changes immediately. They’ll alert you to the fact that something’s gone wrong in the mind. Again, for most of us, we’re off someplace else when these things begin to take …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Dwelling in Emptiness… So how to bring the mind to concentration? Get it focused on one thing, like the breath while, as the formula for mindfulness says, you’re “putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world.” All those disturbances related to the world right now—you can put them aside. They yell at you about how important they are, but remember, the Buddha’s …
- 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 …
- Factors for Awakening… You start out ardent, alert, and mindful, focused, say, on the breath in and of itself, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. When you do that really well, you get the mind into the four jhanas. The list called the factors for awakening basically goes into the steps on how you get from right mindfulness to right concentration, up through …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- In Your Power… right at the body in and of itself, at feelings in and of themselves, the mind in and of itself, mental qualities in and of themselves—ardent, alert and mindful putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world, taking these things simply as events in and of themselves. Then you watch to see what skillful and unskillful mental states come up around …
- 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 …
- Practice Without Gaps… Then you try to put aside all thoughts of greed and distress with reference to the world. That means any thoughts about the world, what you like about it, what you don’t like about it—just put those aside. Maintain your original frame of reference. As it gets more and more solid, that’s when the mindfulness practice turns into concentration practice. As …
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