Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 72
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. Caring Without Clinging
     … We can sort out the various emotions in the mind, but it does require the skill of learning to get the mind to be centered and still, really centered, really stilled—feeding first on its concentration, on that equanimity based on singleness, then finally getting the mind to the place where doesn’t need to feed at all. That really is liberating. As Ajaan … 
  19. Timeless
     … When your discernment gets really strong, then even when the body is weak, the mind can maintain its determination: It’s not going to go there. When you see this happening in the mind—something that would ordinarily spark lust, or anger, or greed, or fear, jealousy, resentment, whatever, but it doesn’t spark the emotion it used to spark—then you can say … 
  20. Breath Energy
     … being with the breath, being with the body, having a sense that the mind and the body fit together snugly and with a sense of ease. When the mind has a sense of ease, it can look at things with a lot more dispassion, a lot more objectivity. If everything in the body feels frazzled, your thoughts will get frazzled, too. And if you … 
  21. The Joy of Growing
     … What part of the mind wanted to forget—wanted to go out and travel around? You’re dealing with a lot of minds in here, a lot of voices. We talk about training the mind, but it’s more like training the minds. So on the one hand, you have to be strict with anything that wanders away, and you have to encourage the … 
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