Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 71
  2. Straightening the Arrow
     … In other words, as long as the mind is still untrained, as long as it still has its defilements, with unskillful states arising, there are times when you have to practice with pain. You have to practice with restrictions. You have to make an effort. But then when you’ve freed the mind from those unskillful states, you don’t have to put so … 
  3. Insights
    To get the mind to settle down, you have to do some surveying first. It’s like figuring out where to build a house. You go and sit in one spot on your property, see what it would feel like to have the house there. Maybe you like it, maybe you don’t. So you try another spot and then another spot. Then you … 
  4. The Mind’s Ostinato
     … But as long as you’ve established your priorities clearly, then the mind will feel more at ease. You’ll be at ease to think about the breath, evaluate the breath, make the most of whatever sense of well-being you can develop through the breath. The fact that all those activities are centered around one thing gives the mind a greater sense of … 
  5. Building a Home for the Mind
    The texts often talk about concentration as being a home for the mind—*vihāra-dhamma: *the place where the mind can settle in. Before you can settle in, though, you have to build a house. As Ajaan Lee said, the work in building this house is in the directed thought and evaluation. You find a topic that you like to think about, and then … 
  6. Potentials for Rapture
     … It’s the same with the mind. The mind has lots of potentials right now. It has the potential for the hindrances and it has the potentials for the factors for awakening. All the difference as to which side gets developed lies in the quality the Buddha calls appropriate attention. For instance, there are parts of the body right now that are relatively pleasant … 
  7. Equanimity & Endurance
     … the ability to step back and rely on that part of the mind that’s not affected by anything. We talk about the committee of the mind, and there is one member of the committee that tends to get overlooked: the part that just knows and can bear it. Whatever comes up, it knows and bears. It can endure. And usually it’s not … 
  8. Lighter & Stronger
     … The truths teach you to get the mind into concentration, and one of the things you’ll learn as you begin to do that is that you need a lot of activities. We talked today about how concentration is fabricated. In the beginning, to counteract all the streams of the mind that would head off in different directions, you have to protect your focus … 
  9. Alone with Your Mind
     … One is simply the mind’s ability to think. Often it becomes our enemy. It’s wandering off, worrying about this, wondering about that, thinking about the past, regretting this, regretting that. It’s another one of those companions you don’t want when you find yourself alone with the mind. You want to be able to turn off unskillful thoughts and replace them … 
  10. Don’t Focus on Jhana, Focus on the Breath
     … It takes a while for all the chatter in the mind to settle down. But you just stay with that one thing as much as you can. When the mind is one and still, then your shadow is going to be one and it’s going to be still. But if you go checking, looking over your shoulder all the time to see how … 
  11. It’s Good to Talk to Yourself
     … So when we sit down to focus on the breath, we get frustrated when we see that the mind is still talking to itself about the breath. Then it wanders off and talks to itself about something else. Then it comes back and talks about the breath. It’s important to realize that talking to yourself is a necessary part of getting the mind … 
  12. Dhamma is Timeless
     … But there’s a part of the mind that realizes that not practicing goes very strongly against another grain, which is the part of the mind that really wants to be free, that’s tired of the ways in which it has been making itself suffer. That’s the side of the mind you want to encourage. You want to make sure that it … 
  13. To Comprehend Suffering
     … So try to get the mind into a good solid place. As the Buddha said, it’s when the mind is in concentration that it can see things as they’ve come into being, i.e., before you’ve manipulated them and dressed them up into something else. Just see the raw materials as they are. The mind in concentration can see them. The … 
  14. Sticking with an Intention
     … The insights are not nearly as important as the ability to put the mind in a position where it can produce insights and evaluate them in terms of what they do in the present. That’s why we’re trying to get the mind in concentration. Try to be very, very alert to cause and effect here in the present moment. When you can … 
  15. Fence Me In
    One of the Thai ajahans has spoken of virtue as a fence for your actions and concentration practice as a fence for the mind, something that keeps you within bounds. And of course, here in America, we don’t like fences. The old song, “Don’t Fence Me In,” seems to typify most of our attitudes. But the purpose of having that fence is … 
  16. To Be Sure
     … So this quality of the mind that’s so unreliable is really scary. You can make up your mind to do a lot of good because you want to help the world. But if the mind switches on you, what are you going to do then? We see this with a lot of people who are very corrupt, and yet they seem to have … 
  17. The Roles of Equanimity
     … What this means is that sometimes you make up your mind you want the mind to do this, you want the mind to do that, and it’s just not working. So you get as still as you can and watch whatever is unstill in the mind. And you begin to see little things you didn’t see before. That’s where the equanimity … 
  18. Approaching the four noble truths
     … You find that as the mind stays really solidly still, it begins to shed, shed, shed different activities. And you see that because you notice that certain activities add a little extra stress to the quietness of the mind. The important thing is seeing that they’re unnecessary. As long as they’re necessary—in other words, if you drop them and the mind … 
  19. The Dhamma Eye
     … Then toward morning, he realized that the real problem in the mind wasn’t things outside, it was the mind’s own misunderstandings of what’s going on inside. In particular, not understanding why there is suffering, what the mind does to create suffering, and if there’s a way to practice that puts an end to it. These were what he called the … 
  20. Alert
    The purpose of getting the mind into concentration is so that it can see itself, both in the sense that it’s quiet enough that it’s not creating disturbances, so anything subtle that shows up in the mind will be very clear, and also in the sense that there should be a feeling of well-being so that it’s willing to observe … 
  21. The Easy Way Out
     … easy for the good side of the mind. It’s asking you to do things that are honorable, things that are noble, things that feel really good deep down inside when you do them. So ask yourself, “What obstacles are you putting in your own way?” And be patient but persistent in learning how to put them aside. The difficulty, of course, is that … 
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