Search results for: "Greed"
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- 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 …
- Don’t Limit Yourself… This is why, as part of the meditation instructions, the Buddha says for you to put aside greed and distress with reference to the world: in other words, what you want out of the world and what you’re unhappy about not getting out of the world. You learn to put that aside. The issue is not the world. The issue is what your …
- 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 …
- Determined to Be Undefeated by Death… You put aside greed and distress with reference to the world. That’s the letting go. Try to calm the mind, calm the breath, calm the perceptions you’re holding in mind right now, and the mind will settle down because you’re determined, and you’re determined in the right way. Now as I often say, when you meditate, you’re preparing how …
- Producing Experience… You find yourself acting on greed, anger, passion, fear, just to get the experiences you want. So to get out of that pattern you want to develop the skills that will make your happiness more solid, longer lasting, less likely to turn on you and eat you up. This is the type of discernment that underlies development in terms of virtue and concentration. You …
- Catch It in the Act… Every now and then you catch yourself acting on greed, acting on anger, acting on fear, acting on unskillful motivations, and you see that it’s causing stress. That’s when insight really does have an impact on the mind, really does make a change in the mind, makes a change in your habits. You hit the dog right at the right spot, and …
- 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 …
- In Restraint Is Strength… mind is getting strengthened by looking that way? The Buddha doesn’t say not to look, just learn how not to focus on the things that are going to stir up greed, aversion, or delusion in the mind. There are lots of things you can look at out in the world, lots of things you can listen to, and lots of things you can …
- Looking for Essence in the Wilderness… Finally, through this process of progressively emptying itself of disturbance, you can get the mind to a point where it has no more greed, aversion, and delusion for things, and that’s your dwelling. You’re not dwelling in nature anymore. You’re dwelling in emptiness. Of course, emptiness is not located anywhere. But we can use this location as a way to get …
- Heedful, Attentive, Mindful… The dangers multiply out from those three—you get greed, aversion, delusion; passion, aversion, delusion—all the long lists of defilements that the Buddha gives. These are things that cause suffering. To have appropriate attention, you focus inside—where the main dangers are, although the Buddha does recognize there are dangers from outside. But they’re not the ones you might ordinarily expect. It …
- Friendship Leading to Seclusion… But even then as you work with the defilements that come up—the subtle forms of greed, aversion, and delusion, states of becoming—you’re going to need some good friends to talk to you: the knowledge you gained from the texts, the knowledge you’ve gained from your teachers, the knowledge you gained from your own practice It’s not the case that …
- Surveying the World… He saw beings on fire with the fires of greed, aversion, and delusion. But his fires were out. So his relationship to the world was very different this time around. Now he was free. The first time around, there was a sense of terror—samvega—because he was trapped in this world. But after his awakening, he was freed—totally free, to the point …
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