Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 93
  2. Learning by Doing
     … All phenomena are preceded by the mind. It’s what’s going on in the mind prior to sensory contact that determines whether you’re going to suffer from it or not. It’s because of what’s going on in the mind that you can suffer from really negative things, and even from really positive things that come into the senses. But when … 
  3. Encouraging Perceptions
     … So, the next question is, is it beneficial? Is it really good to say these things? Is it really good to hold these perceptions? What use do they have? What impact do they have on the mind? Even though they may be true, if they’re not having a beneficial impact on the mind, you might want to let them go. But even if … 
  4. Large Perspective, Small Focus
     … But the Buddha was able to see that the real suffering that weighs down the mind is not what’s going on out there in the world, it’s what the mind piles on itself in addition. That was his insight: that what was driving everything out there were these forces within the mind. He was able to identify them—certain views and certain … 
  5. Right Speech, Inside & Out
     … You find the mind chatting away about all kinds of things: attitudes about yourself, attitudes about the practice. You particularly have to be wary of attitudes that tear you down. We were talking earlier today about low self-esteem and how sometimes that’s the mind’s way of sabotaging itself. If you lower your expectations, you feel that less is going to be … 
  6. Inner Civil War
     … They’ve moved in and invaded the mind, and we’ve got to do something about them. We can’t just sit there and let them take over. At the very least, we want to maintain one part of the mind that recognizes that they aren’t skillful and is determined not to give in. In Ajaan Mun’s final sermon, he compares the … 
  7. Stress
     … This is reflected in one of the suttas where the Buddha talks about getting the mind into deeper and deeper stages of concentration by looking for the disturbance that’s there in whatever concentration you’ve got. You work with the breath, think about the breath, adjust the breath. Once you’ve got something good, you try to maintain it. Once you’ve maintained … 
  8. Being Your Own Teacher
     … And learn which of these exercises the mind enjoys the most so that when one of them starts getting dry and the practice as a whole starts getting dry, you can switch to the exercises you enjoy. In other words, recess here isn’t totally recess. You’re not just allowing the mind to run around and do as it likes. You give it … 
  9. Dissolving Your Thoughts
     … You’ve got to learn to take a fairly matter-of-fact attitude toward them, that there’s this aspect of the mind, it’s unskillful, and you don’t have to be embarrassed about the fact there are thoughts like this in the mind. But at the same time, learn how to deal with them as quickly and efficiently as possible. When you … 
  10. Blessings
     … Even if the mind doesn’t settle down right away, still, if you stick with it, you’ll find that you get better and better at it. This is a skill that you can develop, keeping those three qualities in mind—mindfulness, alertness, ardency—so that the mind can gather into one. Then you find that what you need for the sake of true … 
  11. Slings and Arrows of Ordinary Fortunes
     … This is why we train the mind so that it can see things and just leave them be, hear things and just leave them be. Of course, the mind has the tendency to go out and run after these things, so we have got to give it something better to run after. This is why we turn around and work with the breath. Create … 
  12. Don’t Practice in a Row
    One of the favorite teachings of the ajaans is that things in the mind don’t come lined up the way they do in the texts. This applies both to your defilements and to the factors of the path. It’s not the case that you first have gross defilements and then subtler ones. They come in a mixture, willy-nilly. It’s not … 
  13. Delight
     … We’re training the mind. We’re developing the mind’s good qualities and learning how to let go of its bad qualities. Because the mind has both. You see this clearly as soon as you try to focus on the breath. Other thoughts will come in that’ll try to pull you away. Sometimes they’re neutral thoughts, sometimes they’re relatively okay … 
  14. Thinking About Rebirth
     … So we tend to get impatient when the mind is not ready to settle down. Sometimes we think we’re not supposed to think at all, that the only way we can get the mind to settle down is by forcing it down. But that’s not the case. Sometimes you have to go back and dig up some of those narratives, the ones … 
  15. The Seven Treasures
     … Observing the precepts, developing all sorts of good qualities in the mind: These are all part of the practice. When the Buddha gave his summary of the teachings—“The non-doing of any evil, the full development of skillfulness, the cleansing of the mind: these are the Buddha’s teachings”—all of those things are part of the practice. All those things are part … 
  16. Three Parts of Right View
     … Anything that comes from being put together by causes is going to have an element of stress, but that’s not the stress that weighs down the mind. The mind is weighed down by the stress that comes from craving and clinging. So the four noble truths keep pointing us back into the mind itself. This is where the problems lie, but the solution … 
  17. Worlds Inside & Out
     … How does a thought-world begin? What’s the discussion, what’s the back-and-forth that goes on in the mind before you decide, “Yes, I’m going to go with this”? How do you create tension in the breath energy that allows that thought-world to take hold—its little footpad. How much of the process is intentional? When the mind is … 
  18. Strength of Body, Strength of Mind
     … And where do the things we do come from? They come from the mind. So our actions have value and our mind has a value as a result, because the mind has an influence on the pleasure and pain we meet with in life. As for the issues of the body, those have to be secondary. We don’t want the body to take … 
  19. A Well-Thatched Roof
     … The theme of his meditation was, “The body may be wet but the mind isn’t wet. The body may be wet but the mind isn’t wet.” And staying with that theme, he was able to get the mind to settle down and be still: to stay “not wet” throughout the night. In other words, he didn’t dwell on the theme of … 
  20. A Blameless Happiness
     … You’ve got potentials for pleasure and pain in the mind, skillful and unskillful qualities in the mind. And it’s the way you attend to these things and the way you take delight in some of them: That’s what develops those potentials. The Buddha says it’s like water that you sprinkle on seeds. The seeds are there, and some seeds from … 
  21. Multi-Dimensional Dhamma
     … learning dispassion, learning to free the mind from the ways in which it fetters itself. These two qualities are closely connected. The passion that we feel for the objects of the senses, including objects of the mind, is the fetter that keeps us tied. The objects themselves don’t tie us down. We’re the ones who latch on to them, and our clinging … 
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