Search results for: "Dhamma"

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  2. Right Speech, Inside & Out
     … Ajaan Lee once said that if the people you’re talking to are not ready to hear what you have to say, even if it’s great Dhamma, if it has nothing to do with what their actual practice is right here and now, then it’s idle chatter. It’s talk about the practice over there someplace else. It’s not really focused … 
  3. Ripples Go Far
     … The purpose of the meditation is to sort them out, so that you can realize that these are the ones you can’t trust, as in that Dhamma talk by Ajaan Lee: How do you know that every thought that comes popping up into your mind actually comes from you? Maybe it comes from the germs in your bloodstream. Maybe it comes from spirits … 
  4. Practicing Meditation to Perform at Death
     … It is possible on some levels of the deva realms to practice the Dhamma, but it’s so easy to get carried away with the bliss. You get these pleasures you never had before, and part of the mind says, “Well, let me enjoy them for a while and then I’ll practice.” But then you forget. So, it’s good to reflect on … 
  5. Doubt
     … Remember, one of the reasons for fearing death that the Buddha cited was that you haven’t seen the true Dhamma—in other words, you haven’t gained stream-entry. But at the very least, even if you don’t get to stream-entry, you can minimize your doubts by being very observant about your own mind to see what in it is skillful … 
  6. Gratification
     … In the same way, when you practice the Dhamma, it’s not always the case that mindfulness or alertness comes easily. Concentration, discernment: These things are often very hard, yet they’re the skills we need to develop if we don’t want to suffer. So a second level of skill is learning how to develop skills in areas where it’s hard. That … 
  7. Inner Civil War
     … This helps you gain some insight into what’s driving it, why even though you’ve heard the Dhamma again and again and again, you’d still go for these unskillful things. Maintaining that line is what allows all of the Buddha’s other techniques to work. For instance, the Buddha talks about replacing an unskillful thought with something more skillful. So you bring … 
  8. Concentration Nurtured by Virtue
    Toward the end of his life, the Buddha gave a Dhamma talk that he repeated many times, and it started with the phrase, “Concentration nurtured by virtue is of great fruit, great benefit.” Notice what he’s saying there. He’s not saying that you can’t get into concentration without virtue, although many people have misinterpreted his words in that way, and in … 
  9. Duties
     … When the Buddha taught the Dhamma wheel, he laid these things out. In fact, that’s what the wheel is in that sutta. In the old days, when they would give lists of variables, they called it a wheel—like today, when we draw what we call a table of variables on a piece of paper. You have one set of variables on one … 
  10. The Rewards of Cleanliness
     … There’s a theme of Dhamma talks that you sometimes hear in Thailand, not so much in the forest tradition, but in ordinary everyday monasteries, of what they call the rewards of merit. Ajaan Fuang used to make a few snide comments about them, because the rewards seemed awfully large in comparison with the little deeds of merit. But one of the rewards touches … 
  11. Tranquility, Insight, & Concentration
     … As the Buddha said, the highest of all fabricated dhammas is the noble eightfold path. And the heart of that path is right concentration. So it is something you put together, and you try to do it well. If there’s any disturbance in the mind, ask yourself, “Is it coming from within or without?” Things coming from outside you’re going to let … 
  12. Patient & Inquisitive
     … The purpose of the Dhamma as the Buddha set it out is to point your attention toward the right spots, and to get you to start asking the right questions. A famous author once said if they can get you asking the wrong questions, it doesn’t matter what answers you come up with. But if someone like the Buddha gets you answering the … 
  13. The Right to Repair Your Mind
     … And I’ll teach that person the Dhamma. Those are the two qualities you want to bring into the practice. You can take the Buddha’s repair manual and you can actually make good use of it—developing your own skill as a repair person for your mind.
  14. Training Your Intentions
     … the brahmavihāras, contemplation of the body, recollection of the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Saṅgha—anything that gives rise to a sense of enjoyment in being here. You need that sense of enjoyment because you’re going to be doing some serious work but you don’t want to be grim about it. And you don’t want to be defeated by the fact that … 
  15. The Buddha’s Cure
     … In the practice of the Dhamma and in meditation, we have the same two steps. Symptom management comes with working with the breath. As we were saying this afternoon, your mind is like a committee—and it’s a pretty raucous one: lots of different opinions, good and bad, and the discussion can get pretty unruly. Some of the committee members simply use force … 
  16. Commit Yourself
     … You want concentration but you also want to think about this, think about that, contemplate this Dhamma teaching, contemplate that, whatever you’ve read. It doesn’t work. You can’t hold all those things in the mind at the same time. You’ve got to drop one thing in order to pick up another. And if you don’t hang on to any … 
  17. Faith in the Buddha’s Awakening
     … All the qualities you develop are good qualities of mind, noble qualities of mind, which is why they say that the Dhamma is good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end. The quality of ardency is especially important. It’s what helps the other good qualities of the mind grow. It’s part of right effort. Right effort involves three … 
  18. Cooking the Mind
     … Ajaan Phut gave a Dhamma talk that I listened to one time: He told us what it was like to stay with Ajaan Sao. When Ajaan Sao would give meditation instructions, people would ask, “When I follow your instructions, what should I expect?” And he said, “Just follow the instructions.” Because if you focus on what you expect, you’re not going to be … 
  19. Genuine Happiness
     … The time arrived when he was supposed to get up in the Dhamma seat and he wasn’t there yet. We got a phone call from him saying that he was stuck in traffic, asking that we invite someone else to give the talk instead. So we invited another ajaan, a monk from the forest. He got up and he talked about how the … 
  20. The Graduated Discourse
     … Sariputta said, “All the Dhamma is contained in the four noble truths in the same way that the footprints of all animals are contained in the footprint of the elephant.” But from a personal point of view, beginning with the four noble truths doesn’t necessarily make all that much sense. Not everybody’s ready for them, or open to receiving them in the … 
  21. Precarious Knowledge
     … 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 your brain start misfiring, or you just simply forget. In some cases, it’s better to forget totally … 
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