Search results for: "Greed"
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- Gather ’Round the Breath… putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. Any thoughts that refer to the world in any way at all, just drop them, drop them, drop them, cut them off and bring them back in. That way you find the strength that comes when everything does gather together. In Thailand they like to use the image of thread. If you have individual …
- Staying True… And you don’t want to have your mind hijacked by greed, anger, or delusion at that time, so you want to work on training the mind, developing the good qualities you’re going to need to withstand these defilements. What this means is that in order to maintain the truthfulness of your original decision to stay here, you’ll need some discernment. You …
- Merit: Goodness of the Heart… You’re going to be less prey to your greed, aversion, and delusion—because an important part of the meditation is that when you make up your mind to stay with the breath, you’re going to have to fight off your distractions. What used to be normal thinking suddenly becomes something you’ve got to fight. It makes you more sensitive to ways …
- Basic Breath, Basic Insight… We do get gratification out of greed. We do get gratification out of anger—a certain amount. It’s not much, and it’s pretty miserable, but it’s there. Sometimes we get gratification from feeling that we’re victims or gratification from comparing ourselves with other people in a way that makes them look bad. Or we can even get gratification out of …
- Everything’s Right There… As the Buddha said, you’re putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. Anything that has any reference to the world, that would remind you that you’re on the human plane right now, just remember that it’s inconstant, it’s going to change. For the time being, you’re looking for something that’s more valuable than that. So …
- Skillful Desire… When the mind has a sense of comfort inside, then it’s not so willing to run along with greed, aversion, delusion, fear, or any of the things that make it go off course. My teacher had a student, a woman, who had cancer. And she had it for twenty years. She’d get cancer in one part of the body; they’d cut …
- An Ennobling Pleasure… They’re less subject to your greed, anger, and delusion. As you find more and more of your needs for happiness satisfied here, you’re going to impose yourself less and less on other people. Now, the Buddha does mention the dangers in getting stuck on jhana. He says it’s not the danger in doing the jhana, doing the right concentration, simply that …
- Glad to Be Here… It’s when you have a certain amount of detachment from your defilements, and can laugh at them, seeing how foolish your greed is, how foolish your anger is, how foolish your depression is: That detachment frees you from those things. Then when the mind is freed from those things, it can settle down. That’s the meaning of all those passages in the …
- The Mind Set Tall… This is why we need to practice concentration, to let the mind get really firmly settled, so that it can be in a place, an inner space, where it’s willing to look into what’s painful, the embarrassing things you begin to see about yourself—why you like anger, exactly where your lust comes from, where your greed and fear and jealousy come …
- A Meditator’s Environment… How do you do it? Who in your mind is doing the looking? Is greed doing the looking? Or is wisdom doing the looking? Anger? Jealousy? Are these things doing the looking and the listening? Is it the desire for something to get angry about? After all, it’s not the case that something outside will come in and just set off defilements in …
- The Brightness of Life… in the aggregates, in the different forms of fabrication, first in areas where it’s really obvious—when there’s greed or aversion—and then in the less obvious areas, where there’s delusion. He gives you the tools for taking these things apart and for understanding them and getting beyond them. That’s the whole point of this: We’re going beyond just …
- Finding Balance… As the texts say, put aside greed and distress with reference to the world. So pull away for a while. Get yourself out of those worlds. Look at things in the larger perspective, where your ordinary daily concerns don’t loom so large. Make the mind larger than its concerns, able to maintain an even keel no matter how things are going to turn …
- Change Your Mind… You try to be ardent, alert, and mindful in putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. In other words, you put aside any thoughts that would pull you away from the breath. You keep the breath in mind, you’re alert to what the breath is doing, and you’re ardent—in other words you’re trying with your whole heart …
- Metta Can Hurt… When is it skillful and when is it not skillful to hold to mettā? When is it more skillful to hold to upekkhā, equanimity? And how do you make sure that your actions are based on mettā* *for others? When thoughts of greed come into the mind, when thoughts of lust come into the mind, and you think, “Well, that’s okay. It’s …
- Forging a Path… For a while you just find that there’s greed, aversion, and delusion in ways that you didn’t really imagine or you didn’t readily admit to yourself. But you keep on digging deeper and deeper, and peeling things away, and you finally do get to things of real value inside. There’s a sutta where a monk is meditating, and he gets …
- The Awful Truth… So we each have to turn inside and say, “Okay, where are the roots of these unskillful conditionings?” They lie in the greed, anger, and delusion in our own minds. These are the things that cause us to act unskillfully, so that we cause ourselves suffering, and we cause suffering for the people around us. If these things can be uprooted, we’re not …
- Therapeutic Seclusion… When the mind is quiet like this, then there’s the opportunity to see the origination, when something gets sparked inside, such as lust or anger or greed or jealousy. You’re also in a position where you feel more solid, more secure, and you’re willing to open up more about what the allure of these things is. So this is the Buddha …
- Watch the Mind at the Breath… When greed, aversion, and delusion come into the mind, you use your mindfulness and ardency to put them out. One of the advantages of staying with the breath like this is that you detect these fires when they’re small sparks, tiny little flames just beginning to get started, and you can snuff them out before your head catches on fire. So try to …
- Ups & Downs… Sometimes the mind seems so clear and settled that you think it will never go back to its old greed, aversion, and delusion ever again. And then of course it does. Part of the reason, of course, is that you got complacent. When you get something good, do your best to protect it, maintain it. When things aren’t going well, remind yourself that …
- Building Character… This is a kind of greed, you might call it, that actually has no bad consequences. So when things are difficult, look around. I knew of another monk—I didn’t know him personally but I read an article he had written one time, about how when he had gone to Asia, he tended to look down on the monks and nuns who puttered …
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