Search results for: "Delusion"

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  2. The Language of the Heart (1)
     … In other words, you’ve allowed your greed, aversion, and delusion to drive you for who knows how long. They get you to do things that are not in your own interest. And in Ajaan Lee’s image, they get you to do these things and then, when the police come to catch you, they run away. You’re the one left to deal … 
  3. Questioning the Hindrances
     … The last three are more related to delusion one way or another. The only way you’re going to get past these things is to understand them, because in each case we tend to fall in with a hindrance. We believe it. We get fooled by it. That’s why we get ensnared in it. You start thinking about things you like—sights, sounds … 
  4. Mindful Judgment
     … The more delusion we have about what’s good and what’s bad, the harder it is to figure out what needs to be developed and what needs to be abandoned. So we need to develop this quality of learning how to ferret out what’s skillful and what’s not. On the one hand, we can benefit from gaining instruction from outside to … 
  5. Fabricated Path, Unfabricated Goal
     … So we’re here to catch the animals that are greed, aversion, and delusion in their many forms. You can’t get them to make appointments as to who will come when. You deal with whatever is coming up and disturbing your concentration. And if you can deal with it, undercut it, understand it, drop the cause, then that amount of concentration was enough … 
  6. The First Noble Truth
     … In other words, you’ve been driven around by greed, aversion, and delusion for who knows how long, and there’s a part of you that says, “Enough!” Nourish that part. Keep it strong. Make it a larger voice in your decisions as to when to meditate, when to read the Dhamma, when to turn off the TV, when to turn off the Internet … 
  7. Meditation Prep
     … When you’re looking at greed, anger, and delusion in the mind in this way, it helps to loosen some of the sense of identity around them. Another way to loosen that sense of identity is to think of the mind as a committee. The committee contains all kinds of members who propose all kinds of things. Just because somebody in the committee has … 
  8. Abusing Pleasure & Pain
     … In the meantime you’ve probably lost focus and drifted into a delusive state. So you need to establish a very large frame of reference, the whole body breathing in, the whole body breathing out. This is where you become more sensitive to the breath energies in the body: the flow of energy down the back, or sometimes up the back; down the legs … 
  9. No Happiness Other than Peace
     … After all, the Buddha did recognize that it’s possible to get into very strong states of absorption based on greed, aversion, and delusion. They’re wrong concentration but they are absorption and there’s an element of peace, an element of stillness there. Whatever pleasure those things contain, it lies in those moments of peace, those moments of certainty. Of course the problem … 
  10. Observe Yourself in Action
     … Does it involve aggravating your greed, aversion, and delusion? If so, maybe you should look for another livelihood. But again, you’re looking at what you’re doing by stepping back. You’re not saying, “Well, just because I’ve identified myself as someone who does this livelihood, I’m going to stick with it.” You pull back to see: “This is the role … 
  11. The Need for Right View
     … And you want to be very careful to look at your intentions, to make sure that they’re not clouded by greed, anger, or delusion. If you find yourself acting or speaking and thinking in ways that are thoughtless—knee-jerk reactions that are harmful—you’ve got to stop and very carefully retrain yourself not to act, not to speak, not to think … 
  12. Customs of the Noble Ones
     … We really like our greed, aversion, and delusion. In fact, we identify ourselves with our suffering. As the Buddha said, suffering comes from clinging to the five aggregates. And what is our identity made out of? Out of the clinging to those same five aggregates. We identify with our suffering. So of course it’s going to be hard to let go as long … 
  13. Insight from Jhana
     … Now, why does this have an impact that goes all the way through the mind and affects even your strong greed, aversion, and delusion? Because there’s a common pattern to all our suffering. It’s analogous to eating. Just as the body needs to feed, the mind needs to feed, and it’s in the act of feeding that we suffer. But this … 
  14. Developing Discernment
     … Sometimes you can understand a particular defilement—a particular case of greed, aversion, or delusion—simply by watching it and seeing, “Oh, this is how it comes; this is how it goes.” Because you never watched it before, the ability to observe it can cut through what you hadn’t noticed before. Other times, though, the defilements are not that easy to deal with … 
  15. Sensitive in Seven Ways
     … When greed, aversion, and delusion come in, with their tender, sweet voices—how do you deal with them? When they come with their harsh voices—they’re yelling at you and, as the Thais say, they’re squeezing your nerves: What do you do? You need to have techniques for recognizing different groups of defilements and dealing with them effectively. Then finally, which voices … 
  16. Lessons in Fabrication
     … greed, anger, delusion, fear, anxiety. These are all things we put together by the way we breathe, by the way we talk to ourselves, by the perceptions we hold in mind and the feelings we focus on. So, you want to learn alternative ways, better ways, for how to do this. The important thing is that you keep in mind the principle that what … 
  17. Dealing with Limitations
     … Greed, anger, and delusion are natural; I just have to accept them if I want to be happy.” That’s totally giving in. Your raft on the ocean gets tossed wherever the currents and the waves may go, and you never get to shore. If, on the other hand, you simply go on the force of belief, believing that you have an unlimited power … 
  18. The Sublime Attitudes
     … The three roots of unskillfulness — greed, aversion, and delusion — can branch out into five hindrances, seven obsessions, ten fetters, 108 forms of craving. They grow exponentially. No one skillful quality can take them all on. Each skillful quality has to be strengthened by others to be effective, to play its part in the training of the whole mind. At the same time, each has … 
  19. Tranquility & Insight
     … Okay, what’s the origination of this thought? What sparks this thought? Is it greed? Aversion? Delusion? Is there a perception that sparks it? What’s the origination? How does this come about? The Pali word for origination, samudaya, literally means arising together. What arises together with the thought? Then you look at it go away. When the cause goes away, then the thought … 
  20. Basic Breath, Basic Insight
     … You get to see your greed, aversion, and delusion, and it’s not fun. It’s not pleasant. Often the mind wants to pretend that they’re not there, or that they’re okay, or whatever. None of those attitudes accomplishes much. So you need to get the mind into a good mood where it’s willing to look at its own faults and … 
  21. The Breath All the Way
     … Having this safe inner space is an act of kindness for others as well, because when you’re coming from a comfortable spot here, a comfortable sensation here in the body, you’re less likely to act on greed, aversion, delusion, or any of the other ways of being unskillful with others. That way, other people will suffer less from your defilements. This is … 
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