Search results for: "Thought"
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- How to Leave Meditation… Spread thoughts of goodwill, reminding yourself that you’re coming from a good place and you see no need for anybody to suffer. What would you get out of their suffering, especially if you’re coming from a position of well-being? Most of the time, if we want to see other people suffer, it’s because we’re suffering. “As long as I …
- Perceptions & Potentials… The whole point of the path is that you can take your sense of the form of the body, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness, and you can turn them into something else. They don’t have to be a weight on the mind. They can be a path. You’re making something different out of them. Now, the suffering comes from wanting the potentials …
- Sensitive to Fabrication… But the Buddha says, no, comprehend it as clinging-aggregates, which is not the first thought that usually comes to our mind. But ask yourself, “Where’s the clinging? What are you feeding on here? Is it a form? Is it an image you’re holding in mind? Is it a feeling? Is it a perception? Is it a fabrication? Is it just the …
- Cut, Cut, Cut… Any other filaments of distracting thoughts: Can you just drop them, drop them, drop them away? I know one ajaan who had an image of a knife in his mind. Any strand of thought that would begin to connect in his mind, he would think of the knife cutting it. Even dealing with the body: All the sensations and assumptions that kept his sense …
- The Patience of a Hunter… What particular defilement is there in the mind? Which of the voices of the committee of the mind is running things without your realizing it? Just keep those thoughts in the back of your mind. That’s what you’re looking for. Otherwise, the signs can go right past you and you don’t see anything because they are going right past you all …
- Wisdom as a Tool… When she was told by one of her teachers to go to listen to Ajaan Lee, her first thought was: “What does he know that I don’t know? He’s been living all of his life out in the woods. And here I’ve been in Bangkok and have listened to all the great sermon-givers.” But she went and listened anyhow. And …
- Dispassion Isn’t Depression… In the beginning, there has to be a fair amount of thought: Think of the image of the bathman or the bathman’s apprentice mixing water with soap powder to make a soap dough, as they used to do in those days. You have to take care to make the mixture just right, so that none of the soap powder is left unmoistened, and …
- Unentangled Compassion… In other words, if unskillful qualities come up, if you find yourself distracted, forgetful, your mind is wandering around making plans for tomorrow or next week or whatever, the effort there is learning how to disentangle yourself from those thoughts and get back to work. And you find it’s pretty amazing. The mind is sitting here watching the breath and all of a …
- Infinite Good Humor… Sometimes I thought I had the strength of two people.” “And how about now?” “Well, now I’m 80 years old and sometimes I mean to put my foot in one place and it goes someplace else.” There you have the principles of inconstancy and aging. The world offers no shelter; there is no one in charge. Ratthapala illustrates this one with illness. It …
- To See What You’re Doing… This means any thoughts about the world right now, about how you want things to be a certain way and you’re happy or not happy that they’re the way they are. Just put those aside. You can deal with those issues some other time. Right now, you want to get in touch with this body, this breath that you’re going to …
- Close to What You Know… This is one of the reasons why the breath is so useful, because you can step outside of a lot of your thought worlds by stepping into the world of the breath. You can always tap into the breath because it’s always here as long as you’re alive. And from this perspective you can look at action and its results in a …
- Defiant Like the Buddha… And that thought can actually open your heart. The problem with grief is the sense that “It’s happening to *me. *Why is the universe dumping on me?” Try to get the “me” out of there. It does tell you that a lot that grieving for somebody else often has to do more with your sense of what you’re lacking rather than grieving …
- The Self-correcting Mind… But he also found that the path was something that had to be done within the mind—because we suffer from our lack of skill in how we handle sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and all the thoughts of the mind. No one else can make us skillful. Other people can show us by example that the skill can be mastered, they can …
- Choosing Not to Suffer… As for whatever other thoughts come up, you can just let them go, let them go, realizing that the time has come to let go, totally, and nothing is served by holding on. Then you can ask yourself: Which will end first, the awareness or the pain? The awareness will outlast the pain in every case. There’s a story in the Canon of …
- We All Start with an Impure Heart… Some people like that thought, because they think it lets them off the hook, but you see where it leads: simply to more suffering. The Buddha says there’s a way out. It starts with the assumption that your actions do make a difference. And the desire to do something skillful is skillful in and of itself. As the Buddha said, “All things are …
- Ego… realizing that your actions really do make a difference, and that what may seem like an innocent train of thought because no one else is involved, really can have consequences that harm you in the future and harm other people too. So a healthy ego is able to foresee the consequences and take them seriously. If you have a healthy ego, you can get …
- Mindfulness, the Gatekeeper… We can’t be responsible for other people’s thoughts, words, and deeds, but we can be responsible for our own. This is why any training in which we become more responsible, more skillful, less harmful, is going to be good not only for us but also for the people around us. It all has to begin here. In training the mind, there are …
- Samvega & Pasada… That’s a chastening thought. Then you can use your sensitivity to the breath as a foundation to look at other ways you pursue pleasure in your life: through relationships, through sensual pleasures, through the desire to gain this, to get that, become this, become that. You realize that you can get a lot of the sense of well-being you were searching for …
- Anger… If you carry that thought around, you make it more and more difficult to deal with your response in the present moment. So, drop any thinking about what the other person has been doing and turn around to look at what you’ve been doing and are about to do. To do this, it’s useful to divide the anger into three parts: one …
- Turning Points… Then the next question he asked himself was: “Why am I afraid of that pleasure? What’s blameworthy about it?” The more he thought about it, the more he realized that that kind of pleasure had nothing blameworthy. That’s how he got started on the path. He had to start eating again so that he would have enough physical strength to get the …
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