Search results for: middle way
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- Look at Yourself… Yet you can look at the rest of the world and try to straighten out the rest of the world as much as you like, but, one, the world refuses to be straightened out in a lot of ways; and two, you can develop a lot of unskillful qualities that way. So you’ve got to turn around and look at yourself. Some people …
- All-around Alertness… Messages get sent up through the bureaucracy and some of them get blocked, say, at middle-level management. Others make their way all the way through to the president of the corporation. But when they get blocked half-way up, you have to wonder: “Is there a good reason for blocking them, or is there a bad reason for blocking them?” If you’re …
The Heart a Flowing Stream
Thinking about Jhāna
… So, just as the Buddha’s path to the end of suffering follows a middle way in general, his teachings on the practice of right concentration teach a middle way, too. Of course, the middle here is not simply a matter of finding a halfway point between two extremes. It requires that you be sensitive to where you are in the practice and to …Show 2 additional results in this book- Perfect Breathing Isn’t the Goal… You try to create that well-being by focusing on the breath, by adjusting the way you breathe, by adjusting your perceptions of the breath, and adjusting the ways you talk to yourself about the breath. You can try different rhythms of breathing. You can try different images in the mind of how the breath comes into the body, how it goes out, and …
- The Mind’s Ostinato… You see that you have a habitual way of thinking about the world, a habitual way of thinking about yourself, a habitual way of looking for pleasure in sensuality, and that reduces everything to kamma. And there are better habits—the habits of the noble eightfold path, which are things you do. You develop the habits of right action, right speech, right livelihood, the …
- Courage… There had to be another way. And so he kept looking for another way—and then he finally came across the middle way. Notice here that courage doesn’t necessarily mean stubbornness. It means facing down difficulties, not letting yourself get waylaid, not letting yourself get discouraged by those difficulties. When the Buddha met up with pain, it took a lot of courage to …
- Firm in Your Intent… We really want to be happy, and there is a way to find true happiness that doesn’t cause any harm at all. So he’s not the sort of person who says to forget about your desire for happiness, just accept things as they are, or try to submerge your desire for happiness in working for the happiness of others. After all, if …
- Samvega First… But then you remind yourself that the Buddha found a way out that’s not just a sour-grapes way out. He says that there is an ultimate happiness that we can find through our own efforts. And, fortunately, there’s nobody to prevent us from trying to find it. Nobody in the cosmos has a bigger plan, saying, “This is where you’ve …
- Question Your Actions… One of the other ways we suffer is, once we’ve got an identity of that sort, we don’t like it. We want to destroy it or see it destroyed. So we go back and forth, dropping one identity, taking on another, not liking that, trying another, trying another. The Buddha says, one of the ways to get out of this dilemma is …
- A Blameless Happiness… There was a period when he actually thought the best way to find true well-being was to deny yourself all kinds of pleasures He finally realized, however, that that’s not the way. And he found the middle way because he was able to realize there was more to life than just pain and sensual pleasure. There were other kinds of pleasure, other …
- Skillful Attachments… Try to notice what way of breathing feels good, what way of breathing doesn’t feel good, and realize that you have the choice. If you want to breathe in a painful way, you can go ahead and do it, but it doesn’t really help anything. It’s much more productive to find a comfortable way of breathing, a way of breathing that …
- Imagine Your Breath… Ajaan Fuang once recommended a perception where you have a cord of energy running down through the middle of the torso. As you breathe in, the breath comes into that cord from all directions, and it goes out from that cord in all directions. You just hold that perception in mind. You don’t have to do anything to force the breath that way …
- Inquisitive… Other times, it feels like there’s a column of energy running down the middle of the torso, and the breath comes in to and out from that column in all directions. You wonder why it is that you can experience the breath energy in so many different ways. Well, look into that, because in some cases it’s because the breath is already …
- The Noble Truth about Craving… a life that’s devoted to finding true happiness rather than just muddling around the way we’ve been doing in our wanton ways for who knows how long. You can make something noble out of yourself. That’s the message of the noble truths, all of them. So take that message to heart.
- Commit & Reflect All Around… What you need is what the Buddha calls, “penetrative” knowledge, in which you understand some activity of the mind, good or bad; notice what’s causing it; notice its diversity—as the Buddha calls it—which means seeing what ways it’s good, what ways it’s bad; what’s the range of suffering or happiness that this particular phenomenon—like feelings or perceptions …
- Reading & Meditating… There are lots of ways of using what you’ve read that are going to get in the way, but there are also ways that can actually be helpful. One of the prime uses of reading the Dhamma is that it gives you a vocabulary. It’s like the vocabulary that professional tasters and professional scent experts develop for their work. The more refined …
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Refuge
Sangha
… And you, monks, are very helpful to householders, as you teach them the Dhamma admirable in the beginning, admirable in the middle, and admirable in the end, as you expound the holy life both in its particulars and in its essence, entirely complete, surpassingly pure. In this way the holy life is lived in mutual dependence, for the purpose of crossing over the flood …Show 3 additional results in this book
- Honest & Observant… We’re looking for patterns—patterns in our behavior that are unskillful—and for ways in which we can change our behavior so it’s more skillful. For that, you have to look at your actions over time and try to do them well, which is why there’s the ardency in there. There’s a strange passage in the Commentary, where it tries …
- Emptiness… But the question is, where does the teaching actually make a difference? Where does it really help? Probably the most useful formulation of emptiness is one of the earliest ones, where the Buddha talks about emptiness being a way of perceiving in which you don’t add to or take anything away from what’s really right here, right now. We spend most of …
- Deconstructing Anger… There’s a certain way of breathing that goes with the anger: Do you enjoy that? A certain way of thinking that goes with the anger: Do you enjoy that? Do you enjoy the perceptions? What kick do you get out of the perceptions or the feelings that go with the anger? These are the things about which you’ve got to be very …
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