Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 87
  2. Progress & Regress
     … Of course, it’s difficult in the sense that the mind that’s overseeing the training is also the mind that needs to be trained. In other words, sometimes just as you need your powers of observation most, and you need your powers of mindfulness most, that’s when everything else seems so weak. It seems really hard to get started again, in which … 
  3. Fourth Truth, First Duty
     … Sensuality in the Buddha’s terminology deals not so much with the actual sensual pleasures themselves, but more with the mind’s fascination with thinking about them. You begin to realize that that fascination is one of the big enemies as you’re trying to get the mind into concentration. But getting the mind into concentration helps you separate yourself out from that kind … 
  4. Dhamma Medicine
    The Dhamma is medicine for diseases of the mind. These diseases are not the ones that would send you to an insane asylum necessarily. They’re the basic everyday diseases: greed, anger, and delusion. These are big troublemakers in the mind because they cause you to see things wrongly. We think something may be in our best interest, but it’s not. Greed may … 
  5. Arising & Passing Away
     … There are stages of concentration—Ajaan Lee mentions them—in which you’re not with a solid or single object but there is a sense of singleness in the mind because the mind is taking the arising and passing away as its theme of concentration. But ultimately, the insight into arising and passing away becomes so thorough and goes so deep that you actually … 
  6. Two Kinds of Middle
     … Like the rhetorical question Ajaan Chah asked, “What is the mind?” His answer: “The mind isn’t ‘is’ anything.” The answer’s not grammatical, but the fact that it’s not grammatical means you have to stop and think. What does it mean? “The mind isn’t ‘is’ anything.” Or another way of translating it: “The mind isn’t a what.” Teachers answer in … 
  7. Withstanding Pleasure & Pain
     … You’ve gotten past pain, you’ve gotten past pleasure, and the mind gets more and more into the state of equanimity. Now, it’s a nice state; it’s an enjoyable state of equanimity, but it’s much more subtle than the pleasure you’ve gotten past. This is how you get the mind deeper into concentration. You’ve got to learn how … 
  8. The Equanimity that Doesn’t Give Up
     … The mind can settle down and there’s a sense of well-being where you can observe the mind very clearly and feel at home here. And whether it’s jhana or not-jhana doesn’t matter. The fact that the mind is settled is what matters. You want the mind to be clear and mindful. Alert. So as the concentration develops, you can … 
  9. The Noble Truth of Suffering
     … There’s the physical food for the body, and then there are three kinds of food for the mind: the food of consciousness, the food of contact, and then the food of what he calls intellectual intentions, which can be translated basically as all your intentions. These are the things the mind feeds on. If you don’t have these things, the mind goes … 
  10. The Stairway Up
     … We can sit around and think about Dhamma abstractions from dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn, but the problems in the mind aren’t composed of abstractions. They’re not composed of memories. They’re composed of movements in the mind right now. Look at what the mind is doing, how it moves. Can you change the way it moves? You’ve got … 
  11. Top Priorities
     … As for anything else that comes up in the mind right now, just let it go. Whatever stories come up about what this person or that person did, or what you’re going to have to do tomorrow or what you did yesterday or today: Those can go by the wayside. They don’t have the importance of learning how to train the mind … 
  12. Discernment: Commit & Reflect
     … Yet the mind’s constantly flowing out, paying attention to things outside, and paying very little attention to itself. So we’ve got to turn that around. Of course, simply looking at the mind can get pretty depressing. This is why you also commit yourself to the practice. This is a quality of truthfulness. If you’re going to know the truth—as Ajaan … 
  13. Feeding While You Work
     … seeing what you’re doing, where you’re causing harm, where you’re causing stress, where you’re causing disturbance in the mind—and realizing you don’t have to do it. If you don’t see that active component in the mind—what you’re doing—no real discernment arises. You could be focusing on the unattractiveness of the body as your theme … 
  14. Using What You’ve Got
     … But if you can strengthen the sense of the mind’s well-being, you feel less threatened, you feel less weak, you’re more encouraged to deal with this issue: Why is there pain? Why does physical pain cause pain in the mind? That’s one of those questions that most people don’t ask. They just assume it has to be that way … 
  15. Wisdom Requires Integrity
     … That’s one of the reasons we try to get the mind really solidly in concentration. Only when the mind is very, very still can the little actions of the mind become apparent. But it’s the same principle all the way through. Be honest with yourself about what you’re doing and what the results are. If the results aren’t up to … 
  16. Specifically
     … There it hangs out with intentions, attentions, perceptions, and feelings, and contact among these things in the mind. It also appears in fabrication, where it’s hanging out with the way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself, and again with perceptions. All of this means that the factor that’s actually making the pain invade the mind right now could be any … 
  17. For the Sake of the Deathless
     … We learn to feed ourselves on this, so that the part of the mind that likes to make you hungry will be stymied, and so that you can look more clearly at the choices you’re making. It’s when you’re well-fed that you can start thinking about the long-term with some clarity. Then the long-term has power over the … 
  18. A Soiled, Oily Rag
     … And he said, “Write back and tell him to look at what it is that’s saying those things are inconstant, stressful and not-self, because the problem lies with that part of the mind.” In other words, just seeing those things in terms of those three perceptions is not enough. We have to use those perceptions within the larger context for the practice … 
  19. Look at Yourself
     … There’ll be that habit to focus outward, to slip off into some theory or to slip off into some abstract idea about things rather than really looking at the movements of the mind. Things come up in the mind, insights arise, and you get carried away by the insight instead of asking: What is the mind doing around that insight? Upasika Kee has … 
  20. Approaching Painful Memories as a Meditator
     … Part of the attitude and confidence of a meditator is that “Whatever comes up in the mind, I don’t have to go there, I don’t have to identify with that.” Instead of taking on that identity again, you step back from it, and you watch it from outside. Then you watch for the part of the mind that wants to go in … 
  21. Moods Are Not-Self
     … So the first order of business is get the mind in the right mood to be with the breath on good terms. To begin with, the Buddha recommended that you try to make your mind like earth. Think of the part of the mind that can just be with anything, no matter what, and not feel upset or elated by it—because that part … 
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