Search results for: "Greed"
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- The Kamma of Self & Not-Self… There’s restraint over what you take in through the senses, noting that if you’re looking for the purpose of lust or greed or aversion, you’d better look in another way. There’s also restraint over what you say and do and think. In both cases, you suppress the urges to do unskillful things and you replace those urges with another form …
- If at First You Don’t Succeed… On the one hand, you stay with your frame of reference, and on the other hand you put aside greed and distress with reference to the world—and here world means anything in the world that’s not related to what you’re doing right now. So you’ve got this double task. You have to make yourself want to do this double task …
- Skills to Take Home… your greed, your aversion, your delusion. You’ve had enough. This is another reason why it’s good to have the breath as your defense against other people. Because, so many times, we keep our defilements up as armor to protect ourselves, or we think we protect ourselves, from others; staking out our place with our anger, staking out our place with an aggressive …
- Goodwill for the Real World… So the first thought in generating goodwill has to be that you’re doing this for yourself so that you can protect yourself from your greed, your aversion, your delusion, and especially from your ill will. The Buddha admits that there are a lot of people for whom it’s difficult to have goodwill. That second chant we had just now, from the Paritta …
- The Wounded Warrior… You put aside greed and distress with reference to the world. Any world issues, you just put them aside right now. You don’t have to go there. If you go there, Mara will get you. The Buddha talks about this being your ancestral ground, your safe place, your haven: right here the breath in and of itself. If you go out thinking about …
- Respect… When you’re practicing mindfulness, you want to be ardent, alert, and mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world—in other words, with reference to the ordinary happiness you would find out in the world. You focus instead on four things and you bring three qualities to those four things. The four things, of course, are the body in and …
- Flexibility… They tend to fall into large categories, like the hindrances or the categories of greed, anger and delusion. But you also begin to see in your mind that they have their own particular features, and whether or not you like their particular features, those are the ones you’ve got. So learn how to deal with them. As you face the particulars, you start …
- What Am I Becoming?… In other words, you’ve got the sufferings that come from the aggregates, you’ve got the sufferings that come from the six sense spheres, you’ve got the sufferings from your greed, aversion, and delusion. These things are going to harass and plunder you as much as they can as long as you’re on this shore. The only safe course of action …
- All About Change… One is to put aside greed and distress with reference to the world and the other is to stay focused, keeping track of, say, the body in and of itself, or the breath. So you’re doing two things at once. You’re trying to create a sense of steadiness, consistency in your gaze here—consistency in your keeping track of the breath all …
- The Body Doesn’t Care… At the same time, you subdue or let go of greed and distress with reference to the world. So you’re developing your concentration, alertness, and mindfulness as you let go of everything that gets in their way. You’re holding on to the object of concentration as you let go of the hindrances. And behind all this, you hold on to the idea …
- Directing the Flow… If it hasn’t been trained, it’ll make a mess here, a mess there, all over your life. Just as things are going well, you act on some stupid desire: Greed, anger, and delusion come in and make a mess of what you’ve done. We see this happening all over the world, and yet when it comes time to train our own …
- Getting Untangled from Thorns… how one particular perception can ignite anger and another perception can ignite lust or fear, greed or envy. You begin to realize how arbitrary these things are. That in itself is very liberating. So, if you find that your blanket is snagged on the thorns, just stop and very carefully take things apart one thorn at a time. Have the patience so you don …
- Past Intentions, Present Intentions… In other words, if a thought of greed comes up, think about the disadvantages of struggling to find the object you’re greedy for. If lust comes up, think of the disadvantages both of the object of the lust and of the actual lust itself. It’s an unpleasant state in the mind. If anger or fear, any of these things come up, think …
- Don’t Objectify… Your old friends—greed, aversion, and delusion—can come knocking on the door, and you’re not as interested in them as you used to be. You’ve got new friends. You’ve got directed thought and evaluation, you’ve got pleasure, you’ve got rapture or refreshment, singleness of mind. These are much more interesting friends and they’re much more reliable. So …
- Against Your Type… We don’t have a full range of skills for dealing effectively with greed, anger, and delusion; for dealing effectively with difficult people; for dealing effectively with friendly people; for dealing effectively with the mind when it’s down; for dealing effectively with the mind when it’s up. Instead of simply acting out of force of habit, or deciding to change your habits …
- Mindfulness + Discernment = Intelligence… You start out, say, with the body, staying focused on the breath in and of itself, ardent, alert, mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. “Mindful,” of course, means keeping things in mind. “Alert” means noticing what you’re doing while you’re doing it, and “ardent” means trying to do it well. It’s in the ardency that mindfulness …
- Lessons from Stilling the Mind… There’s a formula: “ardent, alert, mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world.” You’re with the breath, he says, but you don’t think thoughts associated with the breath. In other words, you drop your thinking and evaluation of the breath—your discursive thinking about it, thinking in terms of sentences—and you’re just left with a perception …
- Better to Give than to Consume… Ultimately, you’ll be giving up your greed, aversion, and delusion, giving up even your sense of self or your many senses of self. First you give up your unskillful selves as you develop the skillful ones, but then after you’ve worked so hard on developing the skillful ones, the Buddha said you’ve got to give those up, too, for the sake …
- One Thing Clear Through… But when you stop and think that you actually get more happiness out of giving, one, you’ve learned freedom of choice—you don’t have to give into your greed—and two, you’ve learned how to observe your own mind—that the pleasure that comes, say, from eating something is nothing compared to the pleasure of seeing someone else being made happy …
- The Endurance of a Long-distance Runner… You don’t just sit there and say, “Oh, this is what greed is like; this is what anger is like,” and just leave it there. You try to do something about it. If you watch it for a while, you watch it for the sake of getting past it, for understanding its weak points. Think of that five-step program we talk about …
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