Search results for: "The Mind"
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- Patience Is a Skill… You’re trying to get the mind still, and it won’t get still. You give yourself encouragement. Tell yourself: You focus on the causes, and you keep coming back to them, coming back to them, coming back to them, and after a while they will begin to have an imprint on the mind, an influence on the mind. We can’t tell beforehand …
- Single-minded… And the activities are an essential part of getting the mind to even deeper states of oneness, more solid states of oneness. Sometimes you hear them described as a wavering or wobbling of the mind because it hasn’t settled in solidly yet. But if it is a wavering and a wobbling, it’s wavering and wobbling with a purpose: putting the mind and …
- Subduing Greed & Distress… These are the stages in how the mind wanders off. You learn them by thwarting them, by just bringing the mind right back. And then you get to see not only the arising of the hindrance, but also the fact that it’s got several causes, or causes in several stages. Something was wrong, there was something lacking in the mind, and then part …
- Persistence… Externally it doesn’t look like much at all—here we are sitting with our eyes closed, not doing much—but there’s a lot going on in the mind. At the same time, you’re giving the mind something really simple to do, and that should be easy—you might think. But then the mind makes things very complicated. It seems to be …
- False Friends… Remind yourself that if it’s something important to think through, it’s best to think it through when the mind is clear. So wait until you’ve had a good long hour just to be very still, to get the mind in good shape. Then, if you have to use it to think through some difficult problem, you’ll be in proper shape …
- Scribe Knowledge, Warrior Knowledge… But when he boiled down the basic teachings, the ones he said were really important, he focused on the wings to awakening, which are lists of qualities of the mind that are going to be needed as you take on your battle with your defilements—all the unskillful things going on in the mind. What this means is that warriors do need a certain …
- Virtue, Concentration, Discernment… After a while, you get more, and more interested in, “Who is this commentator? Who’s talking to whom in here? Why does the mind need to be sending messages like this?” That’s when things get really interesting. It’s when you get this inner commentator on friendly terms with everybody else in the mind that you can really look into it—not …
- The Power of Intention… We work on concentration so that we can see the mind more clearly. Why do we want to see the mind? We want to see what it’s doing as it forms an intention. All the qualities that are to be brought to bear on getting the mind into concentration—mindfulness, alertness, ardency—are focused on your actions, your intentional actions. Mindfulness keeps things …
- Mindfulness of Death & the Deathless… That’s what the mindfulness part is. One is the fact that death could happen at any time. That’s to give rise to a sense of urgency, realizing there’s work to be done. The work, of course depends on the other thing you have to keep in mind, which is the Buddha’s explanation of what happens at death. The mind latches …
- The Path is Fabricated… And in the same way, as you’re settling in, you try to take this ease and rapture and work it through the body, so that the body feels just right, giving the mind a really comfortable place to stay, a place where it can stay solidly, without any sense of hunger, any sense of lack All of this is something you do. The …
- Make the Most of What You’ve Got… So we bring the mind into a state of concentration, which is the best sort of becoming for observing the processes of becoming in the mind, and that’s for several reasons. It’s creating a state of stillness. You’re letting go of unskillful qualities. You got the mind to a point where it’s not interested in sensuality. It’s not interested …
- Lift Your Mind… On the one hand, you’re alert to make sure that the mind actually does stay with the breath. And you’re alert to what’s going on in the breath, what’s going on in the mind that might pull them apart. And then you’re ardent. You try to do this well. The ardency is what makes the mindfulness right, makes the …
- Not Getting What You Want… He has you break these things down into impersonal activities to help try to get* you* out of the way so you can see clearly: “Okay, there is this movement in the mind. And as soon as there’s this movement in the mind, there’s going to be suffering. When the movement stops, the stress and the suffering stop.” Then you’ve got …
- Right Effort… In other words, when you see greed or anger or delusion arising in the mind, ask yourself, “How is the breath going right now?” See if you can change the mind state by changing the way you breathe. That, of course, will involve verbal fabrications: directed thought and evaluation. Instead of chattering on to yourself about how much you want something, how much you …
- What’s Worth Doing?… Sensuality, of course, is the mind’s fascination with thinking about sensual pleasures—lustful thoughts or simply thoughts about food, clothing, shelter, how you’d like this to be that way or that to be this way. The amount of time we spend fantasizing about these things, dressing them up before and after, keeps pulling the mind in the wrong direction. It gives us …
- Think Calmly about Death… Train the mind so that it’s not shaken by things. Every day, he said, when the sun sets, remind yourself, “This could be the last time you see the sun. Are you ready to go?” And usually the answer is No. So, okay, what’s going to get in the way? What unskillful qualities are going to be burdens on the mind? What …
- Be Bigger Than Your Pains… It’s free; it’s going to be here as long as the body’s alive; and it’s something very intimate with the mind. It’s the part of your awareness or the part of the world that’s as close to the mind as you can get without actually being in the mind. And because there’s only the present breath that …
- Desires Have Their Reasons… Well, here’s a desire to settle down, just be very still, so you can see these movements of the mind. The ajaans talk about them a lot. Luang Puu Dune talks about how the mind goes flowing out. That’s the cause of suffering. Ajaan Lee identifies these outflows with the effluents. There’s a desire that arises in the mind and then …
- Cutting Through the Hype… This sensitivity to cause and effect is going to go deeper and deeper in the practice as you get more sensitive even to vagrant thoughts coming through the mind. When your sensitivity gets really focused, really subtle, you can see a little bit of craving coming and then going away. Or you can see a particular perception coming into the mind and going away …
- Borrowed Wealth… What really is there of solid value? You’ve got the mind, and you’ve got the qualities of the mind, and these qualities can be of solid value not only for you, but also for people around you. So you want to invest in those. These are some things to keep in mind as you’re struggling with staying with the breath. It …
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