Search results for: "The Mind"

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  2. Sowing Good Seeds
     … If you’re not comfortable with it, the mind is not going to want to stay. Like pushing an inflated ball down under some water: As soon as your grip relaxes just a little bit, the ball comes shooting up out of the water and into the air. The same with the mind: If the mind is uncomfortable with the breath, it’s going … 
  3. Outside of the Box
     … What are you doing right now that’s putting a burden on the mind? You’re making choices that are putting a burden on the mind totally unnecessarily. So get the mind quiet to see if you can watch that happening. Until you watch it happening, it sounds pretty abstract. But when you can actually see the movements of the mind, that’s when … 
  4. Doing
    One of the purposes of the meditation is to get to see what the mind is doing, because what the mind is doing can either create happiness or create suffering. In fact, as the Buddha pointed out, that’s the big problem in life: the fact that the mind usually acts for the purpose of creating happiness, but it ends up creating just the … 
  5. Concentration: A Balancing Act
     … That induces us to want to get the mind to settle down. So you focus on the breath. You try to get the mind in a state where it fills the body. Concentration is sometimes defined as cittass’ekaggata: singleness of mind. That ekaggata is a term with a lot of controversy around it—as is the term samadhi, which we translate as “concentration … 
  6. The Dhamma Eye
     … It gives the mind some rest, allows the mind to be stable. Only when the mind is really stable can it see things clearly for what they are. The quieter the mind, the subtler things you’re able to see happening in the mind. You begin to understand the way in which the mind begins to deceive itself. Because that’s the big problem … 
  7. The Desire to End All Desires
     … This is why, when we meditate, we focus on the mind in the present moment. Now, you can’t focus directly on the mind as you start out, so you focus on something that’s really close: the breath. You do what you can to get the mind to stay with the breath. Sometimes you need to use a meditation word; sometimes you use … 
  8. Protection
     … So you’ve got to be careful, you’ve got to be vigilant, not to pick up diseases from outside, and to watch out for any tendency in the mind to go for those diseases. Sometimes you hear that the problem of the mind is that we’re subject to social conditioning, and if it weren’t for that social conditioning, the mind would … 
  9. Well-being Despite It All
     … And then you’ve got to find the way to train the mind so it can find a happiness that takes these things into account as well. This is what we’re doing as we meditate. Given that our hops lies in our actions, what is the source of our actions if not the mind? It’s through our intentions that we act. And … 
  10. A Real Education
     … exerting some control over the mind. We don’t just let it follow wherever it wants to go. We give it something good to focus on, like the breath, because the breath can be comfortable. Not only that, it’s your guarantee that you’re staying in the present moment so that you can watch the mind in action. You’re not concerned with … 
  11. Respect
     … You’ve got the body and the breath, the feelings, and then the mind states. When the Buddha describes how you develop that third frame of reference, It’s not just watching whatever comes up. You actually try to notice: What does the mind need right now? If the mind has trouble settling down, what’s wrong? Is there something wrong with the breath … 
  12. Remarkable Qualities
     … The whole purpose of this is to improve your powers of observation, your powers of perception, your powers of judgment, your powers of evaluation, because ultimately you want to turn them on to the mind, to evaluate what’s going on in the mind. But the mind is a lot subtler than the breath. So first you exercise your powers of observation with the … 
  13. Dhammacentric
     … When feelings calm down, they let you look directly at the mind. You want to get the mind energized so that it feels good inside, gladdened inside. When the mind’s gladdened, it’s easier to settle down. Then you get it concentrated, and from there you go through the stages of concentration. You release it from the lower ones to get it as … 
  14. Chickens from Hell
     … One of the purposes of getting the mind into concentration is to step back from the whole process and learn to see it as it’s happening. At the same time, we practice concentration to give the mind an alternative place to feed. Otherwise, we’ll just keep feeding on whatever the chickens produce. When the Buddha provides analogies for different parts of the … 
  15. The Awful Truth
     … What are these things that pull you away? We build up this stillness inside so that we can use it as a foundation to look at these tendencies in the mind. In the Buddha’s terminology, they’re called asavas—effluents, things that flow out of the mind: sensual desires, states of becoming, views, ignorance. These things keep fermenting in the mind, bubbling up … 
  16. Bases for Success
     … You have to like the object you’re doing, and like the activity of trying to get the mind to settle down. So as you’re practicing, you want to do your best to overcome any dislike, any disinclination you might have to get the mind to settle with the breath, to settle with the meditation word, whatever the object is that you’re … 
  17. Victory over Death
     … One of our strengths, of course, is meditation, training the mind, based on generosity, based on virtue. You develop good qualities of the heart and mind. It’s good to remember when training the mind that the Pali word for “mind,” citta, also means “heart.” So we’re not just training the thinking side of the mind. We’re also training the part of … 
  18. Mindful of Death
    Breathe deeply to energize the body and to wake up the mind. This is a necessary step in the breath meditation because if you start out with a very relaxed breath, it’s easy to drift off. So energize things a little bit. Breathe deeply. Think of the breath going all the way down through your torso, waking up the different elements in the … 
  19. Thoughts, Wanted and Unwanted
     … learning how to step back and observe what’s going on in the mind with a sense of detachment, trying to be as mature and observant as you can in evaluating what’s going on in the mind. This way, the mind becomes your friend. It helps you as you go through life, as you face all the issues in life. That way, it … 
  20. At the Door of the Cage
     … The next stage is for the mind to incline to the Deathless. Normally the mind will not incline to the Deathless unless it feels that that’s the only way out. Otherwise it’s always going to find some other place to go, some other corner to hide in. So you need to remember that the teachings on, say, the three characteristics — inconstancy, stress … 
  21. Choiceful Awareness
     … We’ve heard about all the wonderful things that happen when you gain discernment and insight arises, and so we want to be right there, right now, without building the foundation, without mastering the skills that are needed for that insight really to have an impact on the mind, to have the really desired effect—which is to train the mind not to create … 
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