Search results for: "Delusion"
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- Games the Mind Plays… In addition to your natural wisdom, there’s your natural greed, your natural anger, natural fears, and natural delusion: things that can pull you off the path and into the thickets on either side. So don’t believe that just whatever comes up in your quiet mind is something that can be trusted. You have to question it. Then you have to keep in …
- The Path to the Top… Someone who teaches for the ending of passion, aversion, and delusion: That’s the one whose teaching is right. The person who encourages passion, aversion and delusion: That’s the one whose teaching is wrong.” You notice here, the rightness or wrongness is not a matter of persons, it’s a matter of the quality of the teaching. But when we’re looking to …
- The Luminous Mind… In other words, if you believe that greed, anger, and delusion permanently stain the mind, then you believe you can’t train yourself. You can’t develop the mind. You have to depend on outside forces, outside agents to come and save you. But when you realize that the defilements of greed, anger, and delusion come and visit it—in other words, they don …
- Simple & Basic… And particularly you’ll find that when the defilements come on strong—the opinions that are bound up with greed, anger, and delusion, or passion, aversion, and delusion—they’ll have a tendency to push good things out of their way. And one of the first thing that gets stomped on is any state of stillness in the mind. We think it’s stupid …
- Responsible for Your Actions… Because our habitual way is to identify with whatever comes up and if it appeals to our greed or aversion or delusion, we just run with it. That’s a sign of weakness. Strength is when you’re able to step back and say, “Where’s this going? Is it going in the direction that I want it to?” What we are doing as …
- Overcoming Fear… That’s where the greed, the aversion, and the delusion come in. Delusion is the big one. There are things you want to hold on to, and you think they’re going to make you happy and secure. But then you realize they’re not all that secure after all. That accounts for a large portion of our fears, which is why we have …
- Therapy for the Mind… When greed, aversion, and delusion go through the mind, they leave their traces in the body: tightness here, tension there, blockage here. And because the body is so uncomfortable, it’s very easy to go running back to the greed, aversion, and delusion again. You don’t like being in the present moment, so you create worlds in the mind, little becomings. It’s …
- Right Fear… Then there’s delusion: the delusion that makes you identify with things that people are attacking, and you get afraid of losing them. Again, the Buddha doesn’t have you throw things away. After all, you need your body, you need a certain level of comfort, you need a certain level of well-being in order to practice the Dhamma. When you’ve got …
- Stay Principled… The third form of bias is the bias that comes from delusion. And one of the major forms of delusion is when you’re afraid that somebody else is going to harm you, so you figure out “How can I harm them first or stop them?” Of course, what that means is now the karma is yours. Often it’s unskillful karma. It happens …
- The Value of Concentration… It’s the greed, anger, and delusion that come out of the mind looking for those things: Those are going to burn your seed. So you have to be careful. Whatever is going to come out of your mind could destroy this little seed of concentration, this little seed of stillness. You’ve got to be very careful to keep the mind in check …
- The Skill of Restraint… You want to look at things in such a way that you’re not exciting greed, anger, or delusion. You want to listen to things in such a way that you don’t excite greed, anger, or delusion. And so on down through the senses. This is a skill. You want to be able to do it in such a way that you don …
- A Sense of Direction… The best way to deal with that is to realize, well, the roots of unskillful behavior are greed, anger, and delusion. And particularly delusion: The mind doesn’t even know itself. So ask yourself, well, what does it know? Bring everything back to basics. Focus everything right here. Is the breath coming in? Do you know that? Well, yes. Is it going out? Do …
- One Thing Clear Through… And you can think of the whole practice — all the way through the abandoning of greed, anger, and delusion — as an act of generosity, an act of goodwill. The less greed, anger, and delusion you have, the better off not only you are, but also everybody else. Think of all the suffering you’ve inflicted not only on yourself but also on other people …
- Withstanding Pleasure & Pain… There’s desire, aversion, delusion, and fear. And a lot of our desire, aversion, delusion, and fear are around issues of pleasure and pain. As long as your mind can get easily pushed around by pleasure and pain, it’s very easy for these four qualities to take over. So first you deal with the sources inside by learning how to be with pleasure …
- The Best Place to Practice… If you’re involved in a livelihood that requires that you develop greed, aversion, and delusion in yourself—or that you’re provoking greed, aversion, and delusion in other people—you do your best to get out. And there are those occupations. I saw a cartoon a while back, showing a hobo holding a sign saying, “Will work for food.” And right next to …
- Big Things in Little Things… All those worlds of suffering, all those worlds of delusion come from the fact that we’re deluded right here. So the only way to end our delusion is to look very carefully right here, try to solve the problem right here. So even though right here may seem like a very small place, and the things we’re focusing on may seem very …
- Right & Wrong Decisions… The problem, of course, is delusion. Delusion is never skillful. And it’s the hardest one of these qualities to see. No matter how much you read in the texts or hear the Dhamma, you can still be deluded in your interpretation of the text, you can be deluded in how you hear the Dhamma. The only way you can test for delusion is …
- A Valuable Gift… The extent to which you can get rid of greed, aversion, and delusion inside yourself means that there’s less greed, aversion, and delusion to inflict on other people. And you’re setting a good example: True happiness is found not by going out and trying to straighten out other people. It’s found by straightening out your own mind, because the source of …
- Friends & Enemies… The reason we don’t see it, of course, is because of our delusions. So we have to work on our delusion as well. These are the real enemies inside. So make up your mind that you’re going to weaken these enemies as much as you can in the course of the year. As for enemies outside, they’re going to do their …
- The Kindness of Body Contemplation… But if you hold no delusions about your body or anyone else’s body, you’re free. I’m always amazed at the people who don’t like this contemplation, who say it’s imposed on them, that it’s oppressive or unfair, whatever. It’s actually very liberating because it equalizes and strips away the delusions that keep us enslaved. As for whatever …
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