Search results for: "Delusion"
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- A Blameless Happiness… If it’s a happiness that depends on passion, aversion and delusion, that’s going to be blameworthy too. At the same time, if you’re inciting other people to kill, steal, have illicit sex, lie, take intoxicants, that’s a blameworthy way of finding happiness as well. It’s interesting that when the Buddha talks about benefitting yourself, he frames it in terms …
- Comprehending Clinging… Comprehending means putting an end to our passion, aversion, and delusion around it. In the first noble truth, the Buddha defines suffering and stress, in its short version, as clinging to the five aggregates. When we hear that, we tend to focus on the aggregates—that we need to comprehend them. Which is true, we do, but we also have to comprehend clinging. In …
- Learning Right Speech… There are a lot of things we could be saying that either give rise to passion, aversion, and delusion, in us or in the listener. With a truth like that, you leave it unsaid because it serves no purpose. Try to speak words that are true, that are harmonious, that are easy to listen to, and that really serve a purpose. So you have …
- Goodness… As the Buddha said, one of the best ways you can benefit others is to get them to be interested in getting rid of greed, aversion, and delusion; to get them interested in following the precepts, so that they can take care of the one person that each of them is responsible for. But that’s an area where you have to use your …
- Use Your Imagination… Greed, aversion, and delusion can come in 108 different forms, and maybe 108 is too small a number. If you want to just memorize a few principles and hope that those few things will take care of everything, the defilements will eat you up. You’ve got to be willing to come up with new ideas on your own. When you stop and think …
- Recognizing Fools… He said, “It’s a good thing that you didn’t kill the monk.” But it shows that devas still have greed, aversion, and delusion. Even the great Brahma has defilements. There’s the story of the monk who goes to visit the great Brahma after getting visions of many levels of devas. He’s been sent up the deva bureaucracy because he’s …
- Disposable Worlds… Lust, greed, anger, delusion, fear can arise from these world-constructs that we’re so adept at making. You hop into a thought and think it’s going to take you someplace you’d like to go —to the Rocky Mountains, to the Grand Canyon—and it ends up taking you down to hell. One thought leads to the next, leads to the next …
- Renunciation Isn’t Deprivation… Would he sleep well? And the young man he’s talking to says, “Well, yes.” But then the Buddha asks, “What about the fevers that are born of passion, aversion, and delusion? Could they keep him awake, keep him from sleeping well?” “Well, yes, that’s true.” The Buddha said, “In the mind of the Tathāgata, those fevers are banished.” In other words, the …
- A Refuge from Karma… If you lose that foundation, either you go into delusion concentration, which is pleasant but it’s like falling asleep, or else the feeling of pleasure dissipates. So to maintain that feeling of pleasure, you have to remember: Focus on the causes and don’t just run off with the pleasure. All too many meditators are like people who get a job, but when …
- Stepping Back… And without insight, you’re totally immersed in delusion. What is it like to be totally deluded? You’re totally unsure of things. Deep down inside, things don’t seem quite right, and there’s always an element of fear. As the Buddha said, “As long as you’re uncertain about the true Dhamma, there’s always the fear of death.” What’s going …
- Inquisitive… As the Buddha said, we can use concentration as a pleasant abiding—in other words, just a nice place to settle in—but we can also use it to develop mindfulness and alertness, and to figure out how the mind can free itself of greed, aversion, and delusion. The breath is going to teach you those last two things only if you ask questions …
- Fixing the Present… pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain—and looking at your perceptions, the images running around in your mind, giving rise to greed, anger and delusion, fear, panic, whatever. You want to calm both the feelings and the perceptions. And a first step in that direction is simply to see what perception’s operating there in the background. One of the ways you do that …
- Noble Right Concentration… To comprehend it means to understand it to the point of getting past any passion, aversion, or delusion around it. Stress is defined as the five clinging-aggregates: form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness. Where are you going to see those aggregates? You see them in the concentration. The breath is part of form. The feeling of pleasure that arises as you stay focused: That …
- Understanding Aggregates… Elsewhere, he says that comprehension means getting rid of all passion, aversion, and delusion around them. In his second sermon, he shows how to do that. He talks about how the five clinging-aggregates should be seen as not-self. One argument is that they don’t lie within your total control. If there’s any disease in any of the aggregates, you can …
- Three Levels of Concentration… They fall into what Ajaan Lee called delusion-concentration: moha-samadhi. Things are quiet, pleasant, still, but you have no idea where you are. So the important thing in this stage is to give the mind work to do in the pleasure. Just as with momentary concentration you focus directly on dealing with the problem — its weakness in the face of pain or displeasure …
- The Pursuit of Pleasure… These are the kinds of pleasures that are bait for the mind, to get you stuck on the hook of greed, anger, and delusion. Obviously, you don’t want to fall for them. But the opposite is niramisa sukha, a form of pleasure that’s not baited at all, doesn’t depend on the flesh at all. It starts with right concentration and goes …
- Your Higher Power… Otherwise your greed, aversion, and delusion, your fear and your lust—these attitudes in the mind, these emotions of the mind—come and take over. They take over the breath. They have their way of making you breathe so that you feel you’ve got to act on them. They hold the breath hostage. It’s as if they were saying, “As long as …
- Safety All Around… It saves us from our delusion. Saves us from our ignorance. So this is how the Buddha gives protection: by teaching us how to protect ourselves from our unskillful habits. Ultimately, we even get protected from our skillful habits. As long as we hold on to our skillful habits, after having abandoned the unskillful ones, we’re still subject to inconstancy, stress, not-self …
- Respect for Concentration… Subject the mind to fewer and fewer distractions, fewer and fewer stimuli that are going to excite greed, anger, delusion—so that the mind has space to gather its strength, so that it’s not always having to contend with drains on its energy. In other words, you have to learn to husband your strength for the things that are really important. There’s …
- Negative Emotions… Our desire to maintain those delusions: That’s what keeps us divided from ourselves, and that’s what keeps all the important things in the mind under wraps, behind the curtains. The purpose of the meditation, the purpose of training the mind, is to open those curtains to look inside. You may or may not like what you find when you look inside, but …
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