Search results for: "Greed"
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- Advice for a New Monk… Who’s doing the looking? Is mindfulness doing the looking? Or is greed, or is anger, fear, lust? If you’re looking at things for the sake of provoking lust, you’re stirring up more trouble in the mind. If you’re listening to things for the purpose of provoking your own anger, again, you’re stirring up trouble. So in cases like that …
- May I Look After Myself with Ease… So this discernment is medicine for all the misunderstandings by which the mind makes itself ill, gives rise to greed, gives rise to anger and aversion, jealousy, feelings of being mistreated and wronged. Because what happens is that you tend to feed on those things. If you don’t have good food inside, you tend to feed on garbage that’s going to make …
- Why We Practice the Way We Do… You try to get rid of your greed and your stinginess—the narrowness of the mind that doesn’t want to help other people—by being generous with your time, generous with your things. That way, you develop skillful qualities in place of unskillful ones. The same with the practice of virtue: You abstain from harming others and you develop a mind of goodwill …
- Gaining the Dhamma Eye… This is why it’s important to find somebody that you really trust, someone whose behavior is inspiring, who you can trust not to make false claims of knowledge on the basis of greed, aversion, or delusion; and someone who can show you the path—because they suggest to you what’s possible in human life. This is why the Buddha once said that …
- Kamma & Rebirth—A Handful of Leaves… One is that if you do something with a skillful intention—i.e., one free from greed, aversion, and delusion—the result is going to be happy. If you do something with an unskillful intention, the result is going to be miserable. And there are gradations. And because you’re doing things all the time, you’ve got lots of kamma. Another thing he …
- Right View… Lying, abusive speech, divisive tale bearing, idle chatter, greed, ill will, and wrong views: These are all unskillful things. These are the standard do’s and don’ts that hold across the board. This is like those signs they used to have up in Alaska about bear awareness, warnings about bears. They start out with do’s and don’ts, because there are certain …
- Ask the Right Questions… I have to learn how to be nice to my anger, nice to my greed, nice to my delusion. Otherwise I won’t be accepting of the way things are.” The Buddha never had you just accept the way things are. That’s not one of your duties. You have to learn how to comprehend the way things are, and where there’s suffering …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Mind Control… What’s worse is that it would get you tangled up in greed, anger, pride, fear, lots of different kinds of unskillful thinking, lots of different unskillful states. Do you really want to go there? Sometimes you can remind yourself, “This is a pattern of thought I’ve done many, many times. I know where it’s going to go, and it’s not …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- The Power of Your Actions… And you’re putting aside any greed and distress with reference to the world. That’s basically a recipe for concentration practice—keeping one topic in mind, keeping focused on it, like the breath, that you’re doing right now. “Breath in and of itself” means just the breath as you experience it directly. Any other thoughts that would come up about the world …
- 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 …
- The Walls of Ignorance… So we work with mindfulness and alertness, trying to be as continuously aware of the breath as possible without any gaps — because the gaps are what give ignorance the space to create walls, to create little dark corners where it might seem right to act on anger, on lust, on fear, passion, and greed. These things seem right because we block off our sense …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Protecting Your Space… It’s just a matter of noticing—when you see that focusing on certain things gives more energy to your greed or more energy to your anger—that you learn not to focus on those things. You focus on other things. Or you look at the same thing in a different way. Say there’s a picture that gives rise to lust. Think about …
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