Search results for: "Greed"

  1. Page 39
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. Always Willing to Learn
     … all the time, everybody gets bored. Nobody comes to watch them again. So they put on a new show with a new plot, new costumes. But it’s the same actors. Greed again. Aversion again. Delusion again, just dressed up in different ways. So you have to be willing to take it in stride that the lessons you thought you learned you haven’t … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. Joy in the Process
     … To see where you used to be a slave to greed or aversion or delusion or jealousy or fear or lust, but now you can step back and say, “No, I don’t want to follow that. I’m above that”: That kind of joy is really worth cultivating. One of the reasons why we meditate, getting the mind into concentration, is that if … 
  18. The Elephant in the Clearing
     … When you follow this particular mental quality, what happens? When you follow that one, what happens? You see that unskillful qualities like greed, aversion, and delusion do lead to suffering. Skillful qualities lift you from that suffering. But you have to be a reliable witness to judge these things properly, which means you have to learn how to be honest and observant. That’s … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
  22. Load next page...