Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 94
  2. Taming the Elephant
     … Again, this comes under directed thought and evaluation, as you learn how to adjust the mind to the breath or the breath to the mind. You all learn how to be together on good terms. So, take an interest in this. This is an important part of the meditation: learning how to listen to the needs of the body. Notice when you’re putting … 
  3. Building on Certainty
     … Look at the mind in the present moment, look what it’s doing. In other words, look for its intentions. Look to see how much stress or pain or suffering those intentions are causing and learn how to cause less. Those are the basic instructions. The test is something very immediate: your own immediate experience. And yet for most of us, immediate experience is … 
  4. The Message of Mindfulness
     … Then, as the mind begins to settle in, those fabrications grow more subtle. When you’re able to stay well with the breath, the breath feels good. There’s a sense that the mind begins to dissolve into the breath. The mind and the breath become one. Your awareness fills the body. The breath fills the body. At that point, you can drop the … 
  5. Seclusion
     … There’s what the Buddha calls our asavas, these things that flow out of the mind. The mind has a tendency to go flowing out the eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue, the body. Think of it as your brain is going out the eyes, the ears, the nose. It’s a pretty disgusting image, but that’s what the mind does. It … 
  6. Momentum Through Restraint
     … As you go through the day, you look at something, you listen to something, and if you see that the way you’re looking or listening will create greed, lust, anger, or delusion in the mind, you have to ask yourself, “Why are you looking in that way?” Restraint doesn’t mean that you put blinders on your eyes or plugs in your ears … 
  7. The Particulars of Your Suffering
     … And you find that as you try to bring the mind into oneness with its object, you have to learn how to isolate these particular functions of the mind, these aspects of your experience, so that you can adjust them skillfully. How do you adjust the form, i.e., the breath? Well, that requires fabrication and it also requires perception because some perceptions get … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. In Line with the Truth
     … That’s an expression the Buddha uses to describe the mind in concentration: the sense of well-being that’s not just in your head. It’s throughout the body. You develop alertness, watching what’s going on, to check and make sure that everything is where you want it. If it’s not, you can change. This way, the mind develops concentration, thinking … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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