Search results for: "Greed"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. Equanimity as a Skill
     … You’re getting your mind under control, and you can develop qualities of discernment, mindfulness, and alertness to learn how to put aside your greed, aversion, and delusion. When you can do that, you benefit and the people around you will benefit, too. This is a part of your motivation for being here: that it’s going to be better for the people around … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. Rehab Work
     … the diseases of greed, aversion, and delusion. We wound ourselves with things we do under the influence of these unskillful mental qualities. Although we may have picked up habits from the outside, in the same way that we can pick up germs from the outside, the act of choosing to follow the habits that others have modeled for us was our choice. Our resistance … 
  19. Perception
     … If greed comes, you want to be able to perceive it very early on. Lust comes, you want to perceive it very early on. Any unskillful emotion: If the mind is quiet, you can perceive it. The two senses of the word in English—to detect something and to identify it—are actually two separate words in Pali. The first, simply acknowledging the presence … 
  20. The Skill of Renunciation
     … The whole point of concentration practice is that you can put the mind in a position where it has a sense of well-being inside, so that it’s happy to stay in the present moment—so that it can watch itself, see where it’s getting involved in greed, aversion, or delusion, even on very subtle levels. For that, the mind has to … 
  21. The Larger View
     … So as you’re sitting here meditating and finding that thoughts of greed, aversion, or delusion come up—or fear, jealousy, whatever—you’ll always want to remember the larger picture. And regardless of what’s coming up and what your mind is telling you about how you have to obey these things, or fall in line with them, and regardless of what it … 
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