Search results for: "Greed"
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- 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… Stay focused on the body in and of itself—in this case, it’s the breath—ardent, alert, mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. In other words, you’ve got one topic that you’re focused on. If anything else comes up that’s related to the world, you put it aside. That’s the formula for establishing mindfulness …
- A Friend When You’re on Your Own… Having lived with someone who embodied the Dhamma so much, it was striking to find someone who actually had a lot of greed and was not ashamed to show it. I realized I couldn’t stay around that person. I didn’t want to pick up his attitudes. That’s one of the lessons you want to take with you, both as you go …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- The Strength of Heedfulness… One, it gives you an alternative to the pleasure of sensuality—thinking about sensual fantasies, lust, desire, greed—which for most of us is our only escape from suffering, our only escape from pain. But concentration gives you an alternative: You can have a sense of well-being, a sense of intense well-being throughout the body simply by the way you breathe, by …
- The Limits of Control… That’s your first sense that you’re not totally a slave to your desires, totally a slave to your greed. You’re free to say No to them, and a higher pleasure comes as a result. This is a very skillful way to exercise control. The same with the precepts: You can say No to your desire to harm someone else, No to …
- Delight in Striving… So if you have, say, greed, aversion, or anger coming in and taking over the mind, and they don’t go away when you look at them steadily, then you have to look at how you’re breathing. Especially under the influence of anger, our breathing tends to get irregular and very uncomfortable. All we can think about is how we want to get …
- Deconstructing Anger… You apply this framework to the fabrications that go into your anger or greed or lust or jealousy or any of the other unskillful emotions that you can think of. And you find that your hands-on experience with these different kinds of fabrication in the concentration gives you a leg up in taking unskillful emotions apart, deconstructing them, and understanding what was the …
- The Opportunity to Be Quiet… When the Buddha says to subdue greed and distress with reference to the world, use that thought: Anything that’s an affair of the world—gain, loss, status, loss of status, praise, criticism, pleasure, and pain—you don’t want them to get their vines around your mind. Try to cut through, cut through, cut through anything that would connect. Even the thoughts in …
- The Rewards of Right View… on fire with greed, aversion, and delusion; on fire with sensuality. Of course, when we think of beings on fire, it’s a vision of hell. Because if you hold in mind the perception of inconstancy—that gain, honor, fame, the things that people go running after because they’re on fire, are not really cooling, are not really going to solve their problem …
- The Conditions for Goodwill… to be developed. It’s not innate to the mind, any more innate than hatred can be. Hatred can be very easy to feel. Anger can be very easy to feel. Greed, aversion, jealousy: All of these things are just as natural as the good side of the mind. And the mind is something that can change very quickly. There are passages where the …
- Attahi Attano Natho… So when you’re practicing mindfulness, where do you do that? “Keeping track of the body in and of itself, ardent, alert, and mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world”: It points inside to body, feelings, mind, mental qualities, all in-and-of-themselves, right here. That’s where the work is to be done. That’s your frame of …
- Five Precepts, Five Virtues… If we’re free simply to follow our greed, aversion, and delusion, that’s a kind of slavery. But the freedom that comes when you realize, “Okay, I can choose my actions based on what the long-term results are going to be, and I have the inner strength I need to resist any temptation to go for a quick fix. I’ll stick …
- True Protection for the World… As long as they’re still acting on greed, anger, and delusion, they leave themselves wide open for suffering. And the Buddha says, Yes, that’s right. Armies are not a protection. Your good karma is your protection. Your good thoughts, your good words, your good deeds: those are your protection; protection against yourself, your own unskillful habits and protection against the unskillful habits …
- Full Attention… You focus on the body in and of itself, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. And part of the enjoyment of meditation is rejoicing in the fact that you don’t have to worry about the world outside right now. Take delight in that fact. You’ve just got your body sitting right here. You can give it your full …
- Take the One Seat… If greed comes in and takes over the chair, or if grief comes in and takes over the chair, or anger, or any of the other emotions: If they take over the chair, then you’re down on the floor. Or if there’s a squabble over who gets to sit in the chair, you’re not an observer anymore. So you stay right …
- A Conglomeration of Germs… If you use it in a way that gives rise to more greed, aversion, and delusion, that’s destructive. If you use it in a way that gives rise to kamma that harms others, that’s destructive, too. If you use it to meditate—to give rise to concentration, to give rise to discernment—or as a means for generosity and virtue, that’s …
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