Search results for: "Delusion"
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- Getting Back on Your Feet… When you’re looking, why are you looking? What’s the motivation? Greed? Aversion? delusion? Okay, don’t look in that way. Don’t let those members of the committee be the ones who take over your eyes. Also look at the impact that whatever it is you’re looking at has on the mind. Here again, if you see that it tends to …
- Mastery… You may have good intentions, but if the results don’t come out well, maybe it’s an example of something you couldn’t control, or maybe it’s an example of an area where you had some delusion. It takes experience to be able to tell which is which—the experience of testing and experimenting over and over again, until you finally reach …
- Not Crushed by the World… So, you want to make sure that wisdom is looking, discernment is looking, not your greed, aversion and delusion. You have to see the way you engage with your senses as a cause-and-effect process. What you’re looking for, what you’re listening for, will have an impact on the mind. So be very careful about how you go about these things …
- High-Level Dhamma… When we read about high-level Dhamma, all we get is just perceptions, labels, but when we look at our practice, we see we’re dealing with very simple greed, anger and delusion: anger about this person, frustration about this—common everyday defilements. We don’t like to have to deal with those. We want to go straight to the higher levels. But it …
- The Lightning Bolt… finding someone who’s a person of integrity—which the Buddha defines in one of the texts as someone who doesn’t have the sort of greed, aversion, or delusion that would cause him or her to claim knowledge that he or she didn’t have: You find a person of integrity, you listen to the person’s Dhamma, you apply appropriate attention to …
- Worldly Narratives… The same goes with power and all the other delusions that we put ourselves through around youth, beauty, and our sensual pleasures. The question is, what happens when those things leave you? There’s a huge sense of emptiness—not only in the sense of loss, but also in the sense of how empty those things were all along. Then you look back on …
- Determined on Awakening… The letting go of all greed, passion, aversion, delusion: That’s the highest possible relinquishment. And of course, the calming of all the disturbances in the mind that comes with nibbāna is the highest possible calm. So those are the things you’re determined on, the things at which you aim. But you use those qualities as well. You have to develop them in …
- Adjusting the Flame… If you focus there, you can easily get into what’s called delusion concentration, where things are quiet but hazy. You’re not quite sure where you are, what you’re focused on. It’s concentration without mindfulness and alertness. So the first thing to remember is always to stay with the sensation of breath. Don’t leave that. And the second thing is …
- Two Things to Keep in Mind… If you see that the way you’re looking at something is causing greed, aversion, or delusion to arise, you want to look in a different way. Again, this helps you to remind yourself that you’re not totally on the receiving end of these things. Sometimes you hear people say the because there’s something beautiful out there, of course it’s giving …
- An End to Suffering… That’s because the mind always gets some pleasure out of greed, gets some pleasure out of anger and delusion. If it didn’t get some pleasure out of these things, it wouldn’t indulge in them. So you’ve got to look for what that pleasure is. What is the mind feeding on when it’s feeding on lust? What is it feeding …
- The Noble Eightfold Path to the Deathless… You see the harm that comes from wrong livelihood—engaging in a livelihood that either breaks the precepts or intentionally gives rise to passion, aversion, or delusion in your mind or in the minds of other people. So you abstain from wrong livelihood. This is where you’re actually carrying through on your resolves. And as you’re carrying through, you begin to realize …
- Choosing Your Allies… Try to act in ways that are not overcome by greed, aversion, or delusion, and you find that you really will benefit. You’ve got that power within you. So here’s a wisdom that comes from the desire for true happiness. The Buddha’s question is what gives the right direction to that desire. Compassion comes from the desire for true happiness, too …
- New Feeding Habits… greed, aversion, and delusion. You know you have them, but you don’t really know them, you don’t really discern them. Persistence requires that you learn to understand: “Why do I go for anger? Why do I go for greed?” When you come to understand these things, then the next time there’s a temptation to go for them, you realize, “No, I …
- The Power of Intention… It’s when you can admit to yourself, “This is why I like greed, this is why I like anger, this is why I like delusion,” at the same time that you see that these things have definite drawbacks: That’s when you get past them. And notice the word the Buddha uses there. It’s not so much that you kill them—you …
- Reclaiming the Breath… Don’t let your greed, aversion, delusion, or fears take them away from you. If they have, this is how you reclaim them: Move into the body gradually. Get to know its various energies and how you can take advantage of it—the moving energies; the still energies; the movements of the mind; the still parts of the mind. Try to make a survey …
- Scribe Knowledge, Warrior Knowledge… Greed, aversion, and delusion don’t come along only while you’re sitting and meditating. They come up all the time and, in fact, they’re more likely to come up while you’re not meditating. And they can do a lot of damage. So you have to be prepared to watch out for these things all the time. This is why we practice …
- Nuclear Thinking… thoughts that pull you off into greed, anger, and delusion, thoughts that stir up any of the unskillful potentials in your mind. So this particular step in the meditation — once the breath gets comfortable, start spreading your awareness to fill the whole body and then allow that comfortable breath to fill the whole body as well — is an extremely important part of the meditation …
- Worldly Equanimity & Its Uses… The awakening itself isn’t equanimity—it’s the highest happiness—but when you reflect on your mind afterward, seeing that it is now freed of greed, aversion, and delusion, you can either feel joy, rapture, or equanimity. That kind of equanimity, you don’t create. It just happens. The other two kinds of equanimity you have to fabricate. Notice that the first one …
- Protection… But if you give into greed, aversion, and delusion, and you kill somebody else, that could pull you down. So the main dangers are inside. When you have conviction in the Buddha’s awakening, all the other strengths follow, if you’re heedful. You realize that you have to do what you can to abandon unskillful qualities in your mind, because that’s where …
- Antidotes for Clinging… When we bring in reality like this, it helps cut through a lot of our delusions around sensuality, a lot of our attachment to sensual designs, sensual plans, sensual dreams. Or you can contemplate the body, in all its parts. You can think of a beautiful body, but when you think of the parts inside, you say wuuh. Just a few micrometers below the …
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