Search results for: "Greed"
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- Yes & No… You try to keep track of that, ardent, alert, mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. There are two activities there. One is choosing your topic. And the other is learning how to say No to everything that’s going to pull you out into the world. The “world” here can either be the world of the senses outside or …
- Compunction… You cause harm to yourself by giving in to greed, aversion, and delusion. You might think of breaking the precepts as harming other people, because after all, you’re killing them or stealing from them, lying to them. But he said, no, that’s where you’re harming yourself. If you want to harm other people, you get them to do these things, because …
- How to Change… If it’s not delusional, sometimes it’s anger, sometimes it’s greed, sometimes it’s unskillful desires of other kinds. As you watch the conversation, you come to see: This is how the Buddha handles these people, this is how he handles these defilements. It gives some idea of how you can apply that same approach yourself. This is one of the reasons …
- At Home with the Breath… That way, when the mind moves in a particular way—out of greed, anger, or delusion—and creates a sense of stress inside, you’ll see it. It’s no longer obscured by the background hum. So this ability to create a sense of ease in the present moment to make this house of the body into a home is important not just for …
- Remembering Ajaan Suwat… Because you realize that you’re doing this not to make yourself better than other people, but simply because you’ve got these diseases of greed, aversion, and delusion in the mind. You need to cure them. Then there’s the fourth custom of the noble ones, which is to delight in abandoning and to delight in developing. In other words, you abandon unskillful …
- The Story-telling Mind… So a good part of the meditation is often not just being with the breath but — if you find you’ve got a story that keeps obsessing the mind, stirring up greed, anger, delusion, fear, whatever — learning how to deal with that story, learning how to tell yourself new stories. Learn a corrective to the old stories. One of the basic ways of doing …
- Concentration Nurtured with Virtue… For instance, when someone has asked you a question, and you know that if you tell them the full truth about the answer, it’s going to harm them—giving rise to greed, anger, or delusion—then you’ve got to be ingenious about changing the topic or giving a partial answer without lying. Taking the precepts requires you to be ingenious, to plan …
- The Dignity of Restraint… You realize the benefits that come from saying No to your greed and allowing other people to enjoy what you’re giving away. For example, when you’re living in a group there’s food to be shared by all. If you give up some of your share so others can enjoy a bigger share, you’re creating a better atmosphere in the group …
- Protect Your Inner Center… For instance, when greed, aversion, or desire arises in the mind, sometimes it arises in a very weak form—so weak that you hardly notice it. But you may notice that something’s changed in the breath. Sometimes you’ll notice that the influence goes the other way: Something happens in the breath, there’s a tension you’re holding in a certain part …
- Feeding on Open Wounds… What’s my motivation for looking? What happens to my mind when I look in that way? When I’m listening to things, why am I listening? What is my motivation?” Or as Ajaan Lee would say, “Who’s doing the listening? Who’s doing the looking? Is greed doing the looking? Is it lust? Anger? Fear? Jealousy?” If those characters are doing the …
- Equanimity & Action… In other words, is greed, anger, or delusion involved? What do you want to get out of this? Maybe something can be changed there. Or your motivation: Why are you doing this? Or your perception: How are you perceiving things right now? What’s the story you put around things? What are the images you have in your mind? What happens if you change …
- The Whole Story… We just can’t go around acting on our greed, acting on our aversion, or acting on delusion without any consequences. Even though we don’t tell ourselves the whole story, the whole story actually happens. We don’t want to think about the consequences, but the consequences happen. So it’s in our best interest to cultivate that kind of fear—not an …
- Well-armed Efforts… Even though they may eventually run out, you don’t want to just sit there and watch when, say, greed or anger has taken control of the mind, and simply wait for it to end. The Buddha says you have to act like someone whose head is on fire. If these things come in, you have to put out the fire, everything else has …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
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