Search results for: "Greed"
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- Pride in Your Craft… out in this land of wrong view, where people tend to be careless about the way they look at things, listen to things, and allow their minds to give rise to greed, aversion, and delusion. It’s very easy for you to go along with the general trend. But there is no safety in numbers. Just because lots of people are doing it doesn …
- Remembering Ajaan Lee… That’s where you use your focused powers of ardency to look at the defilement, whether it’s greed or lust or aversion or delusion or whatever the defilement is. If it’s really insistent, if it keeps coming back, you’ve got to look at it and figure out, well, why does the mind like this? And also look at what its drawbacks …
- Deconstruct Your Emotions… There’s an element of intention and, in many cases, the intentions have become so habitual that they seem automatic, because of the strength of the perceptions and the strength of the breath or that particular way of breathing around greed or aversion or delusion. You tend to think, “Well, this is what I really feel.” But it’s just a habit, and as …
- A Committed Relationship… with difficult situations, but you don’t want to be equanimous about everything that comes along, “You know, the mind isn’t getting concentrated, well, I’ll be equanimous about it. Greed has moved in: I’ll be equanimous about it." Well, that doesn’t work. When things outside aren’t going well, the Buddha doesn’t say to replace them with more pleasant …
- Dwellings… empty of greed, aversion, and delusion. But it’s not really a dwelling, because again and again the texts say that the enlightened person is everywhere released, fixated nowhere. The image they give is a light beam that doesn’t land anywhere. Look up in the sky at night. It looks dark to us, but there are lots of light beams going back and …
- How to Use the Teaching on Kamma… The same goes for lust and greed. As Ajaan Fuang once said, when you really desire a sensual pleasure of some kind, it’s a sign that you enjoyed it in the past. You’ve had it already. Then he’d say, “Think about that for a few minutes. It’s enough to give rise to strong sense of samvega.” After all, if you …
- Questioning & Acceptance… Is there any greed in your mind? Is there any anger? Is there any aversion? Lust? Envy?—a long, long list of possible things that, if you find any of these things, you’ve got to work on them. If your meditation wasn’t working, he’d encourage you to ask: What’s not going right? He gave the analogy of a cook working …
- The Buddha’s Questions… Is this the sort of person who would tell a falsehood, pretending to know something he didn’t know because of greed, aversion, or delusion? Would he try to get someone to do something that wasn’t in that person’s best interest? You’ve got to check out the teacher first, realizing you can’t just trust anybody you come across, no matter …
- Unskillful Habits… Lust, greed, desire: Those are habits as well. We often just follow along with them. They’re old ruts. They seem to be old friends, but they’re just old ruts. The mind unthinkingly follows them one step to the next and the next, believing that they’re all necessarily connected. But it just happens to be a pattern we’ve learned to follow …
- Mindful of Death… Then you ask yourself, “Okay, what unfinished business do I have? Are there still unskillful thoughts in my mind?” If you notice that there are attitudes of greed, aversion, delusion, or any of the reasons why you might fear death, he says to work on them as quickly and with the same sense of urgency and mindfulness that a person whose head was on …
- Read the Breath… keeping track of the body in and of itself, mindful, alert and ardent, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. That’s just one part of the formula, and it involves some insight, too. That ardency is a factor of right effort, which means that you’re looking for what’s skillful and what’s not skillful, how you can develop …
- The Same but Different, but the Same… So regardless of your nationality, regardless of the type of mental illness you suffer from—greed, anger, delusion are all different forms of mental illness—the basic structure of the problem and the basic structure of the path to its solution are the same across the board. The difficulty lies in taking that large structure and applying it to your own particular sufferings, your …
- Right View Tells You What to Do… The descriptions in the texts are there to tell you about what it should be ideally, but first you’re going to have to grub around in some of your own greed, aversion, and delusion. Because it’s one thing to be able to see the mind forming another thought, and realizing it’s not all that interesting to begin with, and so you …
- The Choice Not to Suffer… When there’s greed, aversion, or delusion, you recognize them as unskillful thoughts. You’re seeing them simply as events, part of a process. You’re not concerned about how well they’re representing the world to you, or whether they’re telling you something you need to get worked up about. For the time being, you’re not involved. It’s just, “That …
- The Fourth Noble Truth… And you can use that level of involvement in the concentration to help peel away a lot of really gross defilements, because as you leave concentration, and the mind picks up greed or aversion or delusion, you see how gross those things are. The mind inclines to not go for them because it’s got a better point of view, a better perspective, coming …
- The Reality of Your Thoughts… The ones that really stir-up a lot of greed, aversion, delusion, fear, jealousy, grief: They seem real because they have such a lasting impact in the body. But the Buddha has you regard these, as well, as processes. And again the question is: Where do these things lead? Most of us never think about them in those terms. As with grief: We don …
- The Role of Attachment… It gives you a sense of well-being deep down inside so that when you come across other things that ordinarily would have tempted you to react with greed or anger, delusion or fear, you don’t see the need to react in those ways. You’ve got something better right here. You know that if you let go of it, you might lose …
- Breath Meditation: The Fourth Tetrad… We have a passion for digging up our anger, just as we have a passion for digging up lust, digging up greed, whatever our standard problems are. Once there’s a moment of anger, you don’t have to say, “Here it is to stay,” and latch onto it. Instead, you want to see, “Here, it’s come, but it’s going to go …
- Negotiating with Death… It’s on the side of greed or on the side of anger—or on the opposite side. Or you’re trying to get the mind to settle down, so you check your progress against the Buddha’s list. Either it’s concentrated or it’s not. And when it’s not concentrated, it might be because it’s too energetic; too scattered or …
- Be Bigger Than Your Pains… When you’re free of greed, aversion, and delusion, you’re no one’s debt at all, which means that everything you do, say, and think is a gift. That would be a really nice position to be in, instead of the way we are right now, constantly piling up karmic debts. We’re beholden to this person for food, that person for shelter …
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