Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 75
  2. Potentials for Awakening
     … Whatever pleasure you can get from concentration is going to be a good thing, because unlike sensual pleasure or the pleasures of sensual fantasies, the pleasure of concentration puts you in a state where you can actually see the mind clearly and feel nourished as you’re looking at what’s going on in the mind. That would be a bright quality or a … 
  3. Factors for Awakening
     … This puts you in a better position to look at the mind. Again, your basic foundation is the breath, and you watch the mind from the position of a very comfortable, very refreshing, very fulfilling way of breathing. You see the mind in a very different light than if you were looking at it from a feeling of being all tensed, tight, and wound … 
  4. Alone & with Others
     … They’re there to do something to the mind. So you want to see: What do they do? What do they help you let go? And when you’ve let go, what happens next? Does the mind jump in and build a lot of pride around it? Or is there a string of letting goes? This ability to hold back judgment and be a … 
  5. The Uses of Pleasure
     … So what are the uses of this pleasure? One is to give the mind a place to rest. When you’re doing your work of analyzing what’s going on in the mind, there come times when the analysis gets dull. The traditional image is of a knife. If you use it again and again and again, it’s going to get dull. You … 
  6. Breath Energies
     … It’s not just that you get the mind still and then you start seeing things. As you get the mind still and then learn how to ask questions in that stillness, you learn how to keep re-framing the questions. Starting with simple things like the breath and then moving on to pain: Why is there pain in the mind? And what do … 
  7. Commit Yourself
     … The hard part is staying there, because the mind has a tendency not to hang out with things for very long. It stays a little bit and then gets bored, or it doesn’t like what it’s focusing on, and so moves to something else. Or else something else grabs its attention, forces itself on the mind. But even then, the mind has … 
  8. Large-hearted Goodness
    When you settle down with the breath, and the mind is willing to stay here watching the breath consistently, making it smooth all the way in, all the way out, it’s food for the mind. And it’s good food. It’s food inside, not food out in the world. You get a sense of well-being, a sense of ease, of being … 
  9. The Unity of the Path
     … It’s from here that you start going into the mind directly, because you realize that all your actions come from—where? They come from the qualities of the mind. Right effort starts with generating desire to prevent unskillful qualities from arising, as we chanted just now; to abandon them if they have arisen; to give rise to skillful qualities; and when skillful qualities … 
  10. A Pleasure Not to Be Feared
    Once your body is in position—sitting up straight, facing forward, your eyes closed, your hands in your lap, right hand on top of the left—the next step is to get the mind in position. Think thoughts of goodwill: a wish for happiness, true happiness, your own true happiness and the true happiness of all the beings. That’s the good thing about … 
  11. The Size of Your Eyes
     … Not every sensory input has a bad impact on the mind, but if it’s developing bad qualities in the mind, then it’s going to get in the way of your meditation. Ajaan Lee has a nice image. He says sometimes our eyes are too big for the things we see, and sometimes they’re too small for the things we see. When … 
  12. Boxed Stories
     … There’s a part of the mind that, when certain feelings come up in the body, immediately says, “Okay, you need a hit of pleasure right now, and the only way you’re going to get that is if you do this thing.” But you know it’s unskillful. Well, put yourself in another box. Question those voices. Remind yourself that the mind goes … 
  13. Advice for a New Monk
     … This kind of awareness, once it settles down and is very still, is a healing awareness for the mind. So give the mind a chance to settle down and be by itself. You don’t have to listen to the Dhamma talk. Just focus on the sensation of the breathing. Allow the breathing to be comfortable. Think of good breath energy filling every cell … 
  14. The Fetter of Perceptions
     … Pain does happen in the body, but it doesn’t have to make inroads into the mind. And by “mind” here, we don’t mean just the part of the mind that’s talking about it. It’s also our awareness. There’s a filter of perceptions between the actual sensation of pain and how it registers in the mind. That filter is going … 
  15. Breath vs. Distraction
     … You’ve got this body, and you’ve got the mind that’s aware. What are they doing here together? How do they relate to each other? A famous Zen master, Dogen, recommended asking questions like this: Is the body sitting in the mind, or is the mind sitting in the body? Which is the container for the other one? Or does there have … 
  16. Switzerland Inside
     … You need both activities to get the mind into concentration. The first is the actual concentration. For instance, at the moment, you’re keeping focused on the breath, in and of itself, i.e., without making reference to anything else: just the experience of the breath right here, right now. Then the second activity protects that. If you find the mind is wandering off … 
  17. Precarious Knowledge
     … We learn things because they do have an effect on the mind, a beneficial effect on the mind. We’re not gathering up knowledge of the Dhamma just to decorate our minds, like a library in a den, because when you start opening up the books, you realize that the ink is running off the pages. The message gets all garbled, the nerves in … 
  18. The Choice Not to Suffer
     … So with that realization, he learned to bring the mind into concentration as a way of giving the mind a place to rest, and giving it a standpoint from which he could watch those thoughts. Because the only way you’re going to be able to see thoughts as events is if you’re able to step outside them and not get sucked into … 
  19. Mindfulness & Perception
     … It develops in the direction of getting stronger and more refined concentration, until the insight comes, not simply in learning how to get the mind to meditate, or learning how to get the mind to settle down into the meditation, but also learning how to gain insight while you’re in concentration. As Ajaan Fuang used to say, there comes a point when you … 
  20. The Focus on Suffering
     … But as for whether the mind needs energizing or whether it needs calming down, you have to use the mindfulness and alertness to figure that out. And then apply whatever’s appropriate. In this way, your right view and your discernment gets refined through practice, through developing the mind. The path is something you do, something you work on. Your ability to look at … 
  21. The Noble Truths Come First
     … We’re going to work directly on our minds, because the problem is in the mind. It’s not out there. So focus on what your mind is doing. See if you can bring the mind to a state of stillness, so that you can have a sense of satisfaction being here. One of the reasons we feel so hungry for everything and so … 
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