Search results for: "Delusion"
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- A Meditative Life… Be careful not to focus on things that will give rise to greed, anger, or delusion. If you’re careless in your looking, careless in your listening, it’s very difficult to be careful about your thoughts, because thoughts are so much more subtle. This doesn’t mean that you go around with blinders on your eyes or plugs in your ears; it simply …
- When Attacked by Distractions… There’s a part of it that’s always saying, “Am I getting what I want? Is this worth the effort?” A large part of meditation is learning how to be more objective and be more clear-seeing about, “Is it worth it?” This applies to greed, aversion, delusion, all the defilements that would pull you away—sleepiness, restlessness, and anxiety. We have ways …
- The Power of Truth… the fires of passion, aversion, and delusion. You learn how to ward them off by being true in your meditation. That’s the only way you’re going to know if what I said just now is true. But it’s good to know that that’s where the truth resides: in your own truthfulness. It doesn’t reside in someplace else, some other …
- Not-self, Not No Self… If they come from greed, aversion, and delusion, you can tell yourself, “If I act on these thoughts, if I follow through with them, it’s going to cause trouble. I don’t want that.” So it can say No to those thoughts. As for thoughts that’ll lead to true happiness, you want to identify with them for the time being. So when …
- Top Priorities… Nobody’s going to mind the fact that you have less greed, less aversion, less delusion. And it’s a job that really can come to an end. This is one of the reasons, I think, they talked about the paramis of the Buddha. There are lots of disagreement on what the word parami comes from, but one of the possibilities is that the …
- Alone with Your Mind… This is what he discovered after having fought the mind past greed, aversion, and delusion. We’re so fortunate that we have a teaching like that. You can think about his wisdom, you can think about his purity, you can think about his compassion and remind yourself that this is what a human being is capable of. That’s uplifting because you can look …
- All-around Eye… When the arguments for your greed, aversion, and delusion come in really strong, you can have a quick and effective response. One of the principles of his teachings on protection was that you have to protect yourself all around. All too often, you hear the teaching boiled down to a few short phrases: let go, accept, don’t be reactive. Even though simplifying your …
- Beyond Nature… After all, as the Buddha points out, even little babies have their greed, anger, and delusion. It’s just that their faculties and bodies aren’t strong enough to act on those defilements very powerfully. But they suffer powerfully: You can see that very clearly. As soon as a child comes out of the womb, it cries. A lot of the child’s early …
- Right Resolve in Real Life… Otherwise, your greed, aversion, and delusion hijack the breath and hold it hostage. They say, “Okay, we’re going to be making a lot of unpleasant feelings here in your body until you do something in line with what we want. And only then will we let it go.” That’s a pretty high price, because what they want you to do can often …
- A Soiled, Oily Rag… The Buddha’s talking about a way of perceiving that helps you see through your attachments, that helps you see through your delusions about where you can find happiness, so that the question that lies at the beginning of wisdom—What when I do it will lead to my true long-term welfare and happiness?”—finally gets its answer in the skills you’ve …
- Endurance & Restraint… The Buddha didn’t believe in burning away karma, but he did believe in burning away your greed, aversion, and delusion. And you do that through patient endurance. But the trick to patient endurance is not just putting up with things. You learn how to talk to yourself in a way that makes you eager to be enduring, eager to have that strength, because …
- Shaping the Present… However, these calming qualities are not always desirable, because sometimes the mind just gets very sluggish or it goes into denial or you begin drifting off and don’t know where you are—what some of the forest ajaans called “delusion concentration.” You’re still; everything’s quiet; everything’s comfortable, but you’re not really clear about where you are. You come out …
- The Return of Chickens from Hell… What are the raw materials that we turn into, say, greed, aversion, or delusion? What are the raw materials that we’re holding onto? And by looking at their arising, you catch sight of them before you’ve made much of them and you can begin to see that some things are actually eggs and some things are not eggs—they’re chicken shit …
- Ironies… At first, you’re a slave to your emotions—a slave to your greed, anger, and delusion—but you also have this way of developing your own inner wealth, the wealth of mindfulness, the wealth of concentration, the wealth of discernment. And through that wealth, you can buy yourself out of slavery. That requires patience, requires dedication, the kind of patience and dedication we …
- Metta Metacognition… And when you meditate, you’re reducing the number of times you give into greed, aversion, and delusion. You benefit; the people around you benefit as well. And you benefit not only now, but also in the long term. These practices get you to think in the long term. That’s another important part of spreading thoughts of goodwill. As the Buddha said, this …
- Distractive Thoughts… Especially if it’s an obvious defilement, like greed, anger, delusion, or lust: If you thought about it for a while, you’d develop ruts in the mind that would be hard to get out of. Like driving through snow: You suddenly find yourself falling into some ruts, and the ruts take you right into the back of a parked car. So think about …
- Self View & Conceit… ll sit here for a while in a nice hazy buzz, but when you come out, you won’t have any sense of where you were. That’s concentration lacking alertness. Delusion concentration. So you learn how to be with the pleasure but not overcome by the pleasure. Then you can ask yourself, “Is this as still as it could be? Or is there …
- Proving the Teachings… When you get all wound up in greed, lust, anger, delusion, or fear, sometimes that mental state leads to uncomfortable breathing. Sometimes it’s the uncomfortable breathing that creates a bad mental state. When you notice that, then you can start exerting more control over your mind simply by the way you breathe. This gives you a back door into getting some measure of …
- Pleasure on the Path… This can lead to what Ajaan Fuang or Ajaan Lee would call delusion concentration, where things are very still in the mind, all very pleasant, but you’re not really sure where you are or what you’re focused on. Sometimes you can stay in that state for a while and, when you come out, you ask yourself if you really were awake or …
- Treasure Island… Is it something really honorable? Or is there some greed, aversion, or delusion in there? And when you hold on to these views, what kind of actions do they inspire? Do they actually inspire you to act in skillful ways? If you believe, for instance, that everything is determined by material or physical laws, what impetus is there to go to the trouble of …
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