Search results for: middle way

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  2. Staying Power
     … And was there a continent behind the mountains, or were they simply a chain set in the middle of the sea? A lot of things they didn’t know at all. Just finding a path through the mountains was quite an endeavor. But they learned about the mountains in two ways. One was through their initial forays, just trying to find a path through … 
  3. The Karma of Ideas
     … There are skillful actions on the worldly level, in other words, there are skillful ideas that help you live in the world in a happy and pleasant way. There are unskillful ones, which make you live in an unpleasant or unhappy way. There are mixed ones, and then there are the ideas that take you beyond ideas, take you beyond action entirely. Those ideas … 
  4. Not Getting What You Want
     … Then you hold onto the raft as you use your hands and feet to make your way across the river. When you get to the other side, okay, *that’s *when you let go. Don’t let go before you’ve gotten to the other side, though. If you let go in the middle of the river, you just get washed away. So, as … 
  5. Acceptance
     … The gradual slope is the practice of getting more and more sensitive to what’s actually happening right here, and also getting more and more sensitive to what it means to practice the middle way, to know when you’re putting too much pressure on things and when you’re not put enough pressure on things. That sort of sensitivity you can develop only … 
  6. You Are Not Powerless
     … You look for ways in which you can improve your life around you, the life of the people around you, and you work at it. You look for ways in which to improve things. Try to find some form of right livelihood and engage in it. The second quality is that once you’ve gained your livelihood in a good way, you try to … 
  7. Diagnosing the Mind
     … This way, you learn how to become your own doctor. There’s nobody who can stand over your shoulder and say, “Now you breathe this way, now you breathe that way, now you focus on this, you’d better drop that.” If there were somebody doing that and they were accurate, they would scare you—that somebody could read your mind that accurately. What … 
  8. The Karma of Pain
     … If there’s a pleasant feeling, say, in the middle of the chest, try to breathe in a way that keeps that pleasant feeling going all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out, without any breaks in-between. Don’t let the in-and-out of the breath disturb the ease and spaciousness and pleasure that come with that … 
  9. Why We Train the Mind
     … So right effort doesn’t mean just a middling effort, it means appropriate effort, appropriate to what you can handle—and appropriate to the task. As I said earlier, as the Buddha pointed out, there are some problems in the mind and all you have to do is to look at them and they go way. Others require a lot of effort. You have … 
  10. Even Animals Can Be Trained
     … You’ll have to learn how to stop clinging to them, but first you have to cling to them in a way that gets you across. In this way, you’re taking the ordinary, everyday functions in the mind, where it has feelings and perceptions—the labels you put on things—thought constructs or thought fabrications, where you put thoughts together, and your consciousness … 
  11. The Duties of Happiness
     … That’s at the end of the path, when you’ve taken care of all the members of the mind, and the mind gets more and more unified in its agreement that this is the way you want to find happiness, based on this path of virtue, concentration, and discernment, with concentration the big middle ground that gets the mind right here in the … 
  12. Healing & Protection
     … a magical way of protecting himself so that no matter how much you spear the middle of his chest, you can’t get to his heart, so you can’t kill him. What they do is to go out and find the tree where the heart is, and all they have to do is squeeze it, and he dies. It’s the same with … 
  13. A Warrior’s Strengths
     … Well, the martial arts expert finally comes around, he sees a donkey, he walks way around the donkey, stays away from it. You need concentration as that ability to walk your way around things. When the storms in your mind are blowing and they seem really strong, just say, “I’m going to stay right here with the breath and focus on that and … 
  14. Book search result icon The Craft of the Heart The Nine Stages of Liberating Insight
     … trying to figure out a way to escape from all fabrications that appear, in the same way that a caged quail keeps looking for a way to escape from its cage. h. Equanimity with regard to fabrications (saṅkhārupekkhā-ñāṇa): viewing all fabrications with a sense of indifference, just as a husband and wife might feel indifferent to each other’s activities after they have … 
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  15. Dhamma Warrior
     … Ajaan Fuang would often say, “Don’t let the external wat get in the way of your internal wat.” In other words, the concerns of making things nice outside, nice food, nice place to stay, nice whatever: If they start getting in the way of your meditation, you’ve got to cut back. So you have to look all around you. As Ajaan Lee … 
  16. Remembering Ajaan Lee
     … You find yourself facing a wall, you’ve got to figure out, “Well, maybe there’s some way around the wall. Maybe I’ve created the wall. How can I un-create it? How can I stop doing the things that create the wall?” Because remember, look at things as actions. That’s one of the most useful ways of looking at the problems … 
  17. Creating Your Environment
     … all the time, but it very rarely works out that way. That’s why we have to learn how to create our own environment. Ajaan Fuang once noted that even though the place where he taught in Bangkok was not especially conducive—it was fairly noisy, it was right down in the middle of the city—the fact that he was there made it … 
  18. Book search result icon Straight from the Heart The Conventional Mind, the Mind Released
     … Whatever is a matter of convention follows these conventional ways. But whatever is a matter of release—of purity—cannot be made to follow those ways, because it is not the same sort of thing. To take release or a released mind and confuse or compound it with the five khandhas, which are an affair of conventional reality, is wrong. It can’t be … 
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  19. The Same but Different, but the Same
     … He starved himself until he was skin and bones, but then he had the good sense to realize that that wasn’t the way out, either. You can’t starve the mind of its suffering simply by avoiding sensuality. It just begins to suffer in different ways. It starts feeding in different ways. The person who engages in the self-denial of that sort … 
  20. Homage Through the Practice
     … If you didn’t stop, you’d think this was the normal way the mind has to be. Look around you: This is the way everybody else’s minds are, so you begin to think, “Well this is the way it has to be.” But it doesn’t have to be. As you get the mind more and more still, you begin to realize … 
  21. The Path to the Top
     … We look at the Buddha, the way he behaved, the way he talked. He doesn’t fit into some of our preconceived notions about what a teacher should be. There are some portraits of the Buddha where he’s just all sweetness and light, very gentle, very kind, who would never say anything harsh to anybody. But if you look at the record in … 
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