Search results for: "Greed"

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  2. Goodness
     … As the Buddha said, one of the best ways you can benefit others is to get them to be interested in getting rid of greed, aversion, and delusion; to get them interested in following the precepts, so that they can take care of the one person that each of them is responsible for. But that’s an area where you have to use your … 
  3. Use Your Imagination
     … the case there’s just one way that things will work in the mind, because the mind doesn’t have just one set of defilements. It has lots of different defilements. Greed, aversion, and delusion can come in 108 different forms, and maybe 108 is too small a number. If you want to just memorize a few principles and hope that those few things … 
  4. For Your Future’s Sake
     … You could say No to your greed, No to whatever selfish ideas you might have. This gives you a sense of power. You know you’re doing something good for other people, and it’ll serve you well down the line. You learn that over time. The same with the precepts: There are lots of things you may like to do right now that … 
  5. Recognizing Fools
     … He said, “It’s a good thing that you didn’t kill the monk.” But it shows that devas still have greed, aversion, and delusion. Even the great Brahma has defilements. There’s the story of the monk who goes to visit the great Brahma after getting visions of many levels of devas. He’s been sent up the deva bureaucracy because he’s … 
  6. Imagine Your Breath
    Keep focused on the breath, in and of itself—ardent, alert, mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. That’s the formula. What it means is that you put aside all your concerns about the world right now. You can think of the world as anything from starting from the skin around your body on out, except for the cocoon … 
  7. Disposable Worlds
     … Lust, greed, anger, delusion, fear can arise from these world-constructs that we’re so adept at making. You hop into a thought and think it’s going to take you someplace you’d like to go —to the Rocky Mountains, to the Grand Canyon—and it ends up taking you down to hell. One thought leads to the next, leads to the next … 
  8. A Refuge from Karma
     … We put aside greed and distress with reference to the world. This world outside that we’ve been taking as our standard: We’ve got to put that aside, at least for the time being, and just look inside. The mindfulness is what remembers the Dhamma, the alertness is what watches what we’re doing, and the ardency is what tries to bring that … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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