Search results for: "Greed"
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- Nimble with Your Questions… Even though there are certain patterns that everyone has in common in terms of their greed, aversion, and delusion, still there are other aspects that are not quite the same. And you have to have to figure out what your problem is and come up with questions that are just right for you. We know the teachings of Dogen, the Zen master. So much …
- In Touch with Your Fabrications… Verbal is how you talk to yourself, what you say about a particular situation that provokes greed, aversion, delusion, sorrow, envy—whatever the emotion may be. Then there’s mental—your perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the mental labels you use for identifying this as this and that as that. Sometimes these labels are individual words. Sometimes they’re pictures. Then feelings, in this …
- Farming Your Body & Mind… But you also want to take this ability to observe your mind into daily life, so that you can detect when an unskillful intention comes up, one that’s based on greed, or aversion, or delusion. You want to see it as it’s happening and try to catch it as quickly as you can—before it gets strong, so that you’re not …
- Scramble the Image… things that the mind goes toward either because of lust or greed or anger or whatever. When you try to scramble those images, part of the mind will resist. It wants to protect them, saying, “Don’t touch these things. You can throw a lot of things out of the attic, but these things have to stay.” And if you listen to that voice …
- Speaking Truth to Defilement… Now, there are times, of course, when he says that if you say something that’s going to give rise to greed, aversion, or delusion within you, or would give rise to those mind-states in your listener, then you don’t say that. You learn to avoid it. The promise to yourself that you will not misrepresent the truth means that you have …
- Equanimity… You can tell yourself, “Greed used to overcome my mind, but now I can see through my greed.” There’s a sense of joy that comes with that. Or, “I used to be subject to anger, subject to jealousy, but now I can see through those things. They don’t have that power they had before.” There’s a sense of joy. So you …
- See Your Thoughts as Strange… We have to turn a blind eye to so many things in order to stoke our greed, stoke our lust, stoke our anger, and put the mind into what the Buddha would say is an abnormal state. Yet for us, that’s the spice of life. So we have to learn how to change our views, to see that we have a weird taste …
- An End to the Stories… You’re fighting with your own greed, aversion, and delusion—and all your attachments. The hardest attachments to let go of, they say, is the sense of having been wronged. There’s usually a desire to want to get back or, at the very least, to have the other side acknowledge that they did wrong. But remember, we’re living in a world where …
- Doing, Maintaining, Using… So you learn how to stay with the breath and keep the breath comfortable when there’s fear, when there’s anger, when there’s greed, when there’s uncertainty, when there are all kinds of things happening around you, or happening inside the mind. This is where the concentration really shows its benefits, in that you can keep feeding and strengthening the mind …
- A Safe Place… Sometimes your greed, your aversion, your delusion can take very strange forms; forms you wouldn’t like anyone to see. You get to the point where you don’t want to see them yourself. So little messages get sent around in the mind, and you turn a blind eye to them. You’re like a teacher in a classroom where the kids are sending …
- Be Observant… put more energy into being observant. That’s how the meditation grows—through little things like this—because the movements in the mind are even littler. That’s how defilements start. Greed, aversion, and delusion start with little tiny things: little tiny ideas, perceptions, feelings. If your vision isn’t all-around, they can start growing. So come to the meditation telling yourself that …
- The Dhamma Points Inside… As he said after his awakening, he looked around and he saw beings on fire with the fires of greed, aversion, and delusion. He felt compassion, because he’d been there, but now he was out. **That’s how you have to treat people who are insistent on still getting into battles. You don’t have to engage them in battles, but you do …
- Mundane Right View… If you can chip away at some of the greed, anger and delusion in your mind, the people around you are going to benefit a lot. This practice builds not only on generosity, but also on gratitude. If you open your eyes right now and look around, every material thing you see here is the result of somebody else’s generosity—maybe some of …
- 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 …
- Timeless… When you see this happening in the mind—something that would ordinarily spark lust, or anger, or greed, or fear, jealousy, resentment, whatever, but it doesn’t spark the emotion it used to spark—then you can say, “Now I’ve learned something important, something useful.” Of course, it’s no guarantee that you’re totally safe from those things, but you can improve …
- 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 …
- A Refuge in Mindfulness… How could you build anything of solid worth out of these things? Now, for mindfulness, all you have to do is learn how to look at things as processes, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. And you do it with three qualities: mindfulness—keeping in mind all the things you need to remember to do this properly; alertness—watching what …
- 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 …
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