Search results for: "Equanimity"
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- Purity of Heart… Which would you rather be involved in? When the mind is really still, there comes a sense of ease, rapture, and equanimity from the stillness. This not only gives you something to compare, but it also gives you a perspective on your life: Do you want to spend your whole life running around feeding in these ways, knowing that if you’re dependent on …
- To Be Trustworthy… And even though this is described as a state of equanimity, there’s a strong sense of well-being. This is an innocent pleasure. Ajaan Fuang used to say it’s the grass at the gate: the image being of a herd of cows being kept inside a corral. The owner opens up the gate, and the cows go running out to find grass …
- Concentration Develops Right View… As for the sub-factors of name, there’s going to be attention to your topic, your intention to stay, your perception that holds you here, the feeling of pleasure that you try to maintain, or the feeling of equanimity if you get deeper into concentration, and then contact among these mental events. These sub-factors all work together. The thing is, you may …
- Tenacity… a sense of ease, a sense of rapture or fullness, a sense of equanimity that you can develop. But it requires work. As with any skill, it takes time. There are going to be lots of mistakes, but you have to learn from your mistakes and not get discouraged by them. Stick with the determination to see things through. Ajaan Mun once said in …
- Empathetic Joy… And you wonder what he would have said about a passage I read the other day in a Buddhist magazine—that if you can maintain equanimity during sex, that can also be a form of purification. The Buddha had no use for these ideas. You don’t have to burn off your old kamma. If you had to burn off your old kamma, he …
- Asalha Puja – Completeness… When the mind is nourished, it can look at a situation with a lot more equanimity, a lot more objectivity, whatever the situation, and see what it needs to be done, what would be the skillful thing, the harmless thing to do right now, and it’s willing and able to do it This is how the mind achieves completion, fullness, by developing a …
- Concentration: A Balancing Act… calm, concentration, and equanimity. If you get drowsy, and there is that tendency as things begin to calm down—you’re focused on the breath, and it seems very natural to fall asleep—you’ve got to fight that tendency. That’s when you develop the more active factors: analysis of qualities, persistence, and rapture. Analysis of qualities means reading what’s going on …
- Grief & Regret… goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity. Because these thoughts help get you past any desire to punish yourself or punish the other person or punish anybody at all. They reinforce your desire not to make mistakes that are harmful. And they give you a much larger perspective on things. Those brahmaviharas are for everybody. As the Buddha said, they should be immeasurable. Because when the …
- The Buddha Teaches a Yakkha… You develop the equanimity to not get provoked, and that puts you in position where you can more clearly see what would be the most effective useful thing to say at a particular time. The same with physical pain: When you’re not afraid of physical pain, then you’re not easily pushed around. That puts you more in a position of power, a …
- Hindrances Based on Delusion… The cure for too much energy, the Buddha said, is getting things concentrated, getting them serene or tranquil and developing a sense of equanimity. But to get the mind serene, you’ve got to analyze things a little bit, to see what’s working and what’s not. Especially when it’s restless like that. Now, some people do find that simply repeating a …
- Appropriate Attention Always… Then you can get to a state of really solid equanimity, where you can see things as they’re happening very clearly. As the Buddha said, this is where mindfulness becomes pure. These are things to develop in as many circumstances as you can muster. The Buddha’s giving us a framework to apply to every present moment so that we realize that in …
- The Importance of Being Focused… You’re learning to develop equanimity for things that are not important, and to focus your attention, focus your energy on things that can be changed. This skill becomes really handy as you get older, as you start suffering illnesses and as you approach death. When an illness arises, it’s so easy to get upset about what you suddenly can’t do, how …
- How Right Mindfulness Leads to Right Concentration… Then there are the chants on goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity. Those are to help you get past any anger you might be carrying around from the day. Remind yourself that however you’re going to deal with other people, you want to make sure that your goodwill comes first, so that you don’t act on ill will. If you act on ill …
- Happiness Without Conflict… Right resolve is the resolve to renounce sensuality; to develop non-ill will, in other words good will, or at least equanimity; and to develop harmlessness, or compassion. These are the desires we want to foster. And then, based on them, then there are the desires of right effort: the desire to prevent unskillful qualities from arising in the mind, the desire to get …
- Anybody Home?… It’s in the doing that renunciate grief turns into renunciate joy, renunciate equanimity, something that can’t be contained in any little house. The Buddha said that, while he was alive, he dwelled with unrestricted awareness, an awareness that wasn’t associated with the six sense spheres at all. So when the six sense spheres passed away, that awareness remained unaffected—if we …
- We’re All Learning the Ropes… works the other way around. It’s by looking out after others that you develop good qualities inside. Developing goodwill is good for you. Developing patience, forbearance is good for you. Equanimity, kindness: These things are obviously good for other people, but they’re also important parts of training your own mind. So there’s a back and forth. You work on your inner …
- Dethinking Thinking… Well, what are you assuming? When you start getting critical of things outside, what are you assuming? I think I’ve told you the story of the Buddhist scholar who said he could understand that the Buddha learned equanimity in his awakening. But the idea that he found the deathless and then went to total unbinding after his death, didn’t make any sense …
- Goodwill as Right View… That’s where you need to have equanimity. This is why the brahmaviharas all go together. But you do want to maintain your goodwill in all situations. As the Buddha said, you want to protect your goodwill as a mother would protect her only child. Sometimes that image is misinterpreted as meaning that you should love everybody the same way a mother would love …
- Using the Committee of the Mind… Then the rapture gets based on concentration, which makes it even stronger, and then you move the mind to a state of calm and, eventually, to equanimity. In every case, you apply appropriate attention to these things, which means that you see that they’re good things and you try to develop them, maintain them, let them grow. But it’s based on the …
- The Four Biases… And again, as we live in the world we’re often afraid of having this kind of equanimity, because we feel that we’re not being loyal to the people around us. But putting yourself in a position of weakness like that is not loyalty to anybody. It doesn’t help anybody. You’re actually a lot more help to other people when you …
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