Search results for: "Greed"
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- 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 …
- Sensitive to the Mind… They’re still suffering from greed, aversion, and delusion—and the way to solve those problems was found a long time ago. So that’s a tradition that’s worth maintaining. So look at your mind: When the Buddha talks about the steps of breath meditation that deal with the mind, the very first one is to be sensitive to the mind as you …
- Do, Maintain, Use… Things like greed, aversion, delusion, fear, impatience, boredom—how do they come to be? What are the steps in the process? To what extent are you contributing to them? And that means, to what extent can you stop contributing? See what happens then. Insight has to be reflective like this. It’s not a matter of seeing the world outside as being inconstant, stressful …
- Step Outside the World… all the clamoring and time spent in getting and spending, a society that conspires to take people who are blatantly selfish—filled with greed, anger, and delusion—and put them in power and praise them. Is this a society you really want to get sucked into? You step back even further to look at the whole human condition: Is this something you really want …
- Choices in the Present… You have battles to be fought here, in particular battling your greed, anger, and delusion. You’re battling your tendency to create unnecessary stress and suffering. As with any battle or with any warrior, you have to decide which battles should be taken up right now, which ones you’re ready for, and which ones you want to put off to the side. Putting …
- Concentration Work… If there’s still greed, aversion, and delusion in the mind, what are you going to do? They have to be dealt with, and you need concentration in order to deal with them. Otherwise, they’ll come on strong and overwhelm you. When they’re clever, you won’t even realize that you’ve been overwhelmed. So to get past these things, you’ve …
- Here to Learn… If you induce people to have greed, aversion, and delusion on purpose, okay, that’s harm. If you induce them to break the precepts, that’s harm. But if you hurt their feelings, sometimes it’s skillful and sometimes it’s not. So learn how to make distinctions like this. Learn how to develop the quality that the Buddha calls patibhana. It’s a …
- Endurance Made Easier… You don’t look for pain any more than you have to, but you realize that there are times when if you don’t put up with some pain or stress, then greed, anger, and delusion aren’t going to vacate your mind. The image the Buddha gives is of a fletcher, someone who makes arrows. The fletcher has to straighten the arrow shaft …
- The Triple Training… A lot of people, when they’re concentrated, are concentrated through lust, or through anger, or through greed or fear. They get obsessed with these defilements, and their minds can hold on to them for a long time. But that’s not the kind of concentration we want. The Buddha said that right concentration starts when you let go of unskillful qualities: everything from …
- Look after Yourself with Ease… It’s not by just being nice and saying, “Okay, greed, aversion, and delusion, I want to be nice to you.” We’ve got to realize that these things cause you harm. They make it hard for you to look after yourself with any genuine skill. So learn to look after yourself with ease, skillfully, so that you can taste some of the higher …
- Skills for Dying Well… the fires of greed, aversion, and delusion. You want to put out your confusion. **And you want to do this well. So at a time like that, you drop all your other thoughts, your concerns about other people, your concerns about your future, your regrets about the past. Tell yourself, “See? Here I’ve been meditating all this time, and here’s the test …
- In Earnest… Do they really believe that it’s good for you to eat more chocolate? Or do they just want to make money off of sparking your desires, taking advantage of your greed, aversion, and delusion? If you actually look at the activity of feeding, it’s pretty dismaying. You yourself are put to difficulties in order to get the food, and the food is …
- What’s Not on the Map… You can never tell when greed is going to come up or how long it’s going to keep coming back, coming back. There are times when lust seems to be really quiet for weeks and months on end, but you never know when it’s going to come back in full strength, and you have to be prepared for that possibility. So learning …
- Playing by the Buddha’s Rules… Mindfulness of what? We’re remembering to stay with the body, say, in and of itself, ardent, alert and mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world—the whole shebang, the whole formula. Mindfulness is not just being aware of the present moment. Mindfulness is remembering. And basically what you’re remembering is the Buddha’s rules. The first rule is …
- The Possibility of Letting Go… They kept trying to tell her, “Think about all the good things you’ve done in the past.” Apparently, her constant reply was, “Well, wouldn’t that be greedy to try to make the mind better?” So I had to explain to her that, No, that wasn’t greed. It was wise. Even though it involved desire to make the mind better, that’s …
- The End of Karma… It’s an analogy, the difference being that when the fires of greed, aversion, and delusion go out in the mind and you’re freed from them. They don’t get lit again. The important part of the image is that you get freed by letting go. Just as the fire is not trapped in the fuel, it’s trapped by its own clinging …
- Taking Risks… He starts out by saying, “Try to avoid acting on unskillful intentions.” How do you know if an intention is skillful? If there’s obviously any greed or anger or delusion in there, you don’t act on it. If you expect that it will cause harm, you don’t act on it. But many times you don’t see. Especially if it’s …
- Culture Shock… The culture of ordinary people — no matter where in the world — is just to keep families going, to keep the human race surviving, to keep people clothed and fed, to try to sort out a balance among different peoples’ greed, anger, and delusion in such a way that things are relatively peaceful. But this always takes place within the context of what’s possible …
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