Search results for: "The Mind"
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- Chew Your Food Well… But the feeding of the mind is much more complex than the feeding of the body. The mind tries to feed on sensual things, but they don’t give any satisfaction. It tries to feed on becoming this or becoming that, and whatever it becomes doesn’t last very long. Then it gets all disgusted with the whole thing and wants to destroy everything …
- Safety… getting the mind settled in right here. It’s not totally safe yet. This island is still subject to flooding. And the floods can sometimes get really bad. But for the time being, it’s a safe place. And this is where you find your safety—in the mind—because, based on this island, you can start gaining discernment into what the mind is …
- A Trained Observer… Where does the passion and desire come from? It comes out of the mind. So whatever comes up, you want to learn how to keep the observer in control as you just watch. You don’t act on it, but you see it: “This is an event in the mind.” When you can see the events in the mind simply as that—as events …
- The Buddha’s Tools… But here again, you look inside the mind, and you see that a lot of us come with a lot of baggage. We talk about the baggage that Buddhism brings from Asia, but we have our cultural baggage as well: the way Western psychology looks at the mind, its teachings about the ego, whether the ego is a good thing, a bad thing, or …
- Pleasure Has a Price… The price, of course, is not the money that you pay for the pleasure; it’s what the pleasure does to the mind, along with its karmic consequences. So, with each pleasure, you have to ask yourself what you do in order to gain and maintain the pleasure, and what happens to your mind as a result. A lot of pleasures actually weaken the …
- A Refuge in Quiescence… You get the mind still. When the mind is still like this, it can see itself a lot more clearly, with a sense of balance—and this lies at the heart of your refuge. I was talking with a botanist a while back. He was telling me about how plants have to have a part that’s in a state of quiescence, unaffected by …
- The Noble Path to Happiness… When the mind holds onto certain things because of the craving, there’s suffering. So you learn how to let the craving go. You pursue this into more and more subtle levels in the mind. What you see as a result is what you did to cause suffering. You see how deeply this goes when you finally to get to the point where the …
- Good Eating… You can think back, “Well, I do have these good things in my background, these good actions that I’ve developed in the past.” That right there is food for the mind. It strengthens you. It gives you the conviction that you can do this, that you are a worthy person. Virtue is also a good form of food for the mind. When you …
- Mental Balance… Once the mind has that sense of stability, there’s a good place where it could rest, a sense of fullness and rapture that comes along with it as well. That rapture, the Buddha said, is food for the mind. When the mind is well fed like that, you don’t have to go out feeding on other things outside. Your mind doesn’t …
- Expand Your Expectations… Maybe the mind can go deeper than you thought. And when the mind is going really well, it might suddenly flip and start wandering all over the place. So all kinds of things can happen. This means you have to be watchful. Be heedful: Look after what you’re doing, make sure you stick with it. Then try to push yourself a little bit …
- Work & Play… If it’s just in, out, in, out, in, out, the mind is just going to go out wandering away, out of sheer boredom. Then the concentration becomes an exercise in sheer will power: How long can you force the mind to stay here in spite of its impulses to wander away? But if you can see that by staying with the breath, working …
- Pain & Distraction… It’s the same with the mind. When the mind deals with physical and mental sensations but isn’t hungry for them because it has something else that’s much better, then you can trust it to do the right thing. This is how purity of heart is attained: by putting the mind in a position where it doesn’t have to feel hunger …
- Learning from the Precepts… It’s when you act on impulses that are skillful that the mind is a lot more open to itself, more open to judging the results of acting on those impulses, to see how harmless they really are. In this way, you’re training both the heart and the mind at the same time. You’re training the heart in the desire to be …
- The Food of Feelings… If you feed on them, it’ll be toxic for the mind. Feelings of sadness, feelings of depression, feelings of anger, discouragement: All these things can really weaken the mind if you feed on them. That’s why a large part of the practice is giving us other food, better things to feel on. Conviction can be food for the mind, as can persistence …
- Second Wind… Is the body sitting in the mind? Is the mind sitting in the body? Where is your mind in relationship to the body right now? In other words, be curious of what’s going on right here, right now. Begin to take things apart so that you can see how you put it all together. When there’s distraction, we drift off in other …
- The Flamethrowing Mind… Where do the flames come from? From inside the mind. The mind is a flamethrower. It scorches everything we look at, listen to, smell, taste, touch, think about. Then we complain that things are hot. We have to look around and see: Why are we setting things on fire? Look in here for the source of the problem. If we can put out the …
- The Psychology of Harmlessness… So when the Buddha analyzes the mind, it’s all for the purpose of putting an end to suffering. When he’s analyzing suffering, he points out that it’s coming from within the mind. It’s caused by the mind, and is suffered by the mind. So a lot of his teachings about psychology—how to understand the mind—differs from Western psychology …
- Doubt… The cure for doubt, he says, is to look into the mind and apply appropriate attention to the question of which events in the mind are skillful and which are not. This means watching what’s going on in the mind when you give rein to certain states of mind. Or if you think in terms of the committee of the mind, what happens …
- A Centered but Broad Awareness… One of his terms for a mind in concentration is the mind that’s enlarged or expanded. The Pali word is mahaggata citta, the enlarged mind; the expanded mind. Having the mind expanded like this is important in several ways. One, it helps keep you from falling asleep. Sometimes it’s all too easy when the breath feels comfortable and you’re focused on …
- Questions in the Practice… We start with the breath as our basic focus as a way of developing very basic mindfulness, very basic alertness, and also to pull our basic mindfulness and alertness close to the mind itself. All too often we’re sensitive to things happening miles away but miss what we’re doing, what we ourselves are doing, right here and now. The mind has an …
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