Search results for: "The Mind"

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  2. Reflect
     … How is the mind reacting to it? What is the mind’s intention behind that claim of truth? And what holds on to that particular truth? What does holding on to it do to the mind? What does it inspire you to do? You have to learn how to be reflective in this way. Otherwise, the insights that come during concentration can lead you … 
  3. The Ten Priorities
     … It’s an important quality to develop in the mind. Other people respect you; you have more respect for yourself. As for renunciation, this deals specifically with learning how to renounce sensual pleasures as we look for happiness inside the mind. Most of us would like to have the sensual pleasures and the happiness inside the mind. But there are many areas where it … 
  4. Making an Effort
     … Even before we sense things, there’s an element of fabrication going on in the mind. If the mind weren’t active, if it weren’t putting effort into this, it wouldn’t be able to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch anything at all. Then there’s all the effort that goes into being happy to do this, sometimes requiring the mind to … 
  5. Dhamma Survivalism
     … Otherwise, the mind tends to go into the worlds of its thoughts. When you’re inside them, you can’t see the process by which they’re created. So as we meditate, we’re actually trying to gain a sense of the mind as something separate from its thoughts, from its perceptions, from all sensory contact, because it’s only when it’s separate … 
  6. Doing, Maintaining, Using
     … If the mind slips off, come right back. Slips off again, bring it back again. Don’t get discouraged, but you’re here. You mean business. You’re not here to think about this, that, or the other thing, what you did last week, what you’re going to do next week. You’re here to get the mind to learn how to stay … 
  7. Sensitive to the Body, Sensitive to the Mind
  8. Detail Work
     … It stirs up your interest in details, and that stirs up the energy in the mind, because it’s easy to slough through the different contemplations and go to sleep. But if you tell yourself, “I’ve got to think about this in detail, try to figure things out,” then it stirs up some energy in the mind so that the mind is ready … 
  9. Body & Food
     … The part of the mind that really wants something better get stunted, ignored, pushed away. So you have to train yourself to look back and see that it actually does offer health. That’s not the unhealthy part of the mind. That’s actually the healthy part of the mind, the part that wants freedom from all these attachments. So treasure that part of … 
  10. Four Bases of Success
     … At the same time, use effort on the mind. If the mind is wandering off, you bring it right back. It wanders off again, you bring it right back again. You’ve got to show the mind that you mean business. Otherwise, it’ll punch in the clock and then go off and sleep under a tree someplace. So look at your mind: What … 
  11. Views & Vision
     … If you’ve read any of the texts, you know that when the mind gets into deep concentration, the sentences and dialogues that go on in the mind get pared down really far to the point where there’s just a mental note, like “infinite space,” the sañña of “infinite consciousness.” That’s all the talking that’s going on in the mind. But … 
  12. The Problem Is Birth
     … The best way to understand it is to prevent the mind from going into those little worlds. This why concentration is so important. Meditation is not just a matter of following the mind wherever it wants to go. You have to put up some walls. Mindfulness is sometimes thought to be a matter of allowing the mind to go wherever it wants, just being … 
  13. Pleasing to the Noble Ones
     … You try to stay with your object as steadily as you can, because it’s when the mind is steadily focused like this that you can begin to observe it. When the mind is running around, it’s hard to see. It’s like a picture with a very long exposure: If you keep the exposure long, then when a person in the picture … 
  14. The Humble Way to Awakening
     … Particularly in the mind. Pain in the body, as it turns out, is not the issue. We make it an issue that spreads into the mind. If pain simply arose in the body without our connecting it to any suffering or disease in the mind, it wouldn’t be an issue. The problem is that the mind has laid claim to the body. After … 
  15. Cooking the Present Moment
     … So you have to learn how to perceive the pain in such a way that it’s not weighing the mind down. Then there’s the ability not to be overcome by pleasure or by pain, and this, too, has to do with your perceptions. It also has to do with your ability to get the mind into concentration despite the pain. Once the … 
  16. Focusing on the Breath to Learn about the Mind
  17. A Mental Fortress
     … That has a soothing effect on the mind, a nourishing effect on the mind, to give you the strength you need in order to keep watch over the mind, to make sure it doesn’t slip off to its old habits. Or at the very least, it brings awareness to its processes of fabrication, so that you can catch yourself when you want to … 
  18. Be Observant
     … Start with the breath because the breath is nearby, and the movements of the breath are more obvious than the movements of the mind. Ultimately, you’re going to want to turn around and look at the mind itself, but the mind is extremely subtle and fast. So you practice first with things that are a little bit slower, more blatant. Try to see … 
  19. Ripples Go Far
    We develop the sublime attitudes every evening as a way of opening up and airing out the mind. When you’re focused on your troubles, your suffering, your issues, you suffer a lot because the range is small and the pain is big. So of course it seems overwhelming. When you expand your range, you begin to realize that the pain is a lot … 
  20. Mindfulness, the Gatekeeper
     … In training the mind, there are three qualities we have to develop. This is why the word for meditation is developing: bhavana. The three qualities are right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. Our understanding the need for right effort starts with the recognition that there are skillful and unskillful qualities in the mind, and we have them all mixed together. The effort itself … 
  21. Measuring Progress
     … Because it’s only when you’re aware that you can deal with what’s going on in the mind. So much of this has to do with how much you admit to what is going on in the mind, how sensitive you are to those little voices in the mind that used to be below the radar, or used to be inaudible, and … 
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