Search results for: "Thought"

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  2. Buddhist Engineering
     … And it’s interesting to note that even though he was not the sort of person who’d ordinarily go out and pick fights with people, he would go out to confront people who were teaching views about causality that he thought were detrimental. He argued with people who, on the one hand, taught determinism, that everything was totally determined by the past, in … 
  3. The Science of Meditation
     … When that’s the case, what can you do to get it to settle down? If it’s burdened by a particular assumption, if it’s burdened by a particular thought, what can you do to get it out from under the burden? That’s using the mind as your frame of reference. You’re still there with the breath, but you’re looking … 
  4. A Slave to Craving
     … They say that he didn’t really mean those thoughts, he was just being coy because he wanted an invitation to teach. Which he got, but I think that the story points to fact that because he was fully awakened, he didn’t owe anything anymore to anybody else. He was under no compulsion, which means that the fact that he did teach is … 
  5. Self-Control
     … Another is to develop your strength of mind so that it can withstand the push of thoughts and emotions that would make you do or say or think unskillful things. When you’ve developed these strengths, when you’ve learned how to pare down your belongings, then you’re ready to wander in the world without being affected by the world. Then you can … 
  6. A Greater Happiness
     … That was how I thought. And one of the ones I memorized was just that: “If you see a greater happiness that comes from abandoning a lesser happiness, be willing to abandon the lesser one for the sake of the greater one.” That’s a principle that underlies everything in our lives. The Buddha once said that when you go to visit a wise … 
  7. Interested in the Breath
     … You’re not slipping off into thoughts of the past or the future. That’s one of the advantages in training the mind with the breath, but there are other advantages as well. In terms of your body, if you can get the breath to be comfortable, you get more and more sensitive to the flow of the breath energy in different parts of … 
  8. Animals in the Mind
     … If you leave the body and allow your attention to go flowing out after things outside or thoughts of the past and thoughts of the future, remember that if you leave your space, you’re in danger. If you stay in your space, you’re okay. You begin to see to what extent things outside come invading your space, and to what extent you … 
  9. Skills to Make a Difference
     … You direct your thoughts to the breath, then you evaluate it, and then you make changes based on your evaluation. That’s the beginning of both concentration and discernment. As Ajaan Lee notices, the more refined your evaluation, the better the results are going to be. Try to be really sensitive to how the breath feels. He says it’s like sifting flour to … 
  10. Dhamma Medicine
     … When do these things arise? And when they arise, what makes them arise? All too often, we’re aware of them only when they’re in the mind in full-grown or full-blown states, but you want to be able to check when is the first time that, say, a little thought of greed moves into the mind and plants a little germ … 
  11. As Days & Nights Fly Past
     … Can you resist that pull? This is one of the reasons why we have the contemplation of the parts of the body, the contemplation of all the different diseases that any body is subject to, the contemplation on the undesirability of any world that you could go to, and a sense of dispassion for fabrications, any thoughts in the mind. So when you find … 
  12. Habits & Practices
     … First, to get familiar with how you experience clinging, and then to realize that what you thought you were clinging to was actually just these very ephemeral aggregates. Altogether, there are four types of clinging: clinging to sensuality, clinging to views, clinging to habits and practices, and clinging to views or doctrines about the self—what you are. Of those four, the one we … 
  13. You Can Make a Difference
     … One, for sensuality, in other words, our fascination with thinking sensual thoughts. Two, for becoming, in other words, focusing on a desire and then developing a sense of you as the person who wants that, and you as the person who may be able to attain that, and then the world in which that desired object can be found—and then you enter into … 
  14. To Strengthen the Path
     … In other words, any thoughts that go outside of the body, just let them be. You don’t have to continue them. As they say in Thai, you don’t have to continue the weave. Lots will come up. That’s normal. But you don’t have to get involved with everything that comes up. Instead, you want to have a sense of being … 
  15. The Stakes Are High
     … But karma is actually a scary kind of thought. It has its potentials, but also has its pitfalls. So we have to work at doing the best we can. As the Buddha said, the secret to his awakening was, one, the effort he put in and, two, the sense of not resting content with the skillful qualities he had developed. He didn’t stop … 
  16. Strong-hearted
     … There are pleasures that the Buddha calls “pleasures of the flesh”—nice sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, thoughts about these things—and there are “pleasures not of the flesh,” which are the pleasures that come from getting the mind concentrated. Those, he says, you want to develop. So we’re mindful to develop them, give rise to them, and then maintain them. This … 
  17. Outside the Box
     … In fact, Ajaan Maha Boowa would tell his students, “Try to prove the Buddha wrong.” So they thought for themselves. This means that the meditation they teach is not an indoctrination. You’re not told that if you see that there is no self, then you’ve gained awakening. Anybody can force him or herself to contemplate things until they decide, yes, there is … 
  18. Ajaan Fuang’s Stories
     … He said he thought of that line in the Canon that talks about the monk who is content with his belongings. “Just as a bird, wherever it goes, has only its wings as its burden, in the same way the monk has his robes and bowl as his only burden.” Another time, they were at Wat Asokaram, near Bangkok, and they were going to … 
  19. One Step at a Time
     … And when I thought about the whole hour and a half I was going to be out there, slogging through mud, it was difficult to get up the energy just to take the first step. But then I realized, of course, that if I didn’t go on my alms round I wouldn’t get to eat that day. So I took it one … 
  20. Understanding Pain
     … But if you think of the energy going through it, you begin to realize that it’s porous—it’s not as solid as you thought it was. And sometimes when you do this, the pain actually goes away. There was pain caused by tension and by bad circulation, and when you’ve improved the circulation with the breath and the blood, the pain … 
  21. Mature Strategies
     … You do anything you can to put the thought of suffering out of your mind — the idea being that if you avoid thinking about it, pay it no attention, ignore it, it’ll go away. And there may be a few cases in life where that works — where focusing on your pains makes them worse — yet there are so many cases where it works … 
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