Search results for: "Thought"

  1. Page 101
  2. Right Effort
     … It’s the work of the directed thought and evaluation, evaluating the breath so that it can give rise to a sense of ease at least in some spot of the body, and then being able to work that sense of ease and fullness throughout the whole body. That requires that you understand the process of breathing, you understand how you relate to feelings … 
  3. Seeds of Becoming
     … There’s the breath, which is the physical fabrication; then there’s directed thought and evaluation, which are verbal fabrications; and then there are feelings and perceptions, which are mental fabrications. These are the basic building blocks from which you create this world, the world of a concentrated mind. You use your powers of directed thought and evaluation to work out the disturbances, to … 
  4. Wild Horses
     … Now, the term ‘further becoming’ can refer to new states of becoming in your mind as you go from one thought world to the next to the next, but it’s also his word for rebirth. Remember that image he had of how, when you’re reborn, it’s like a house afire, and the flame goes from the house, carried by the wind … 
  5. Interconnectedness
     … Some people think that interconnectedness is automatically a good thing, but when you remember that harmful actions are also part of the general web and they can have repercussions that go on for a long time, that’s a scary thought. Also, our happiness often depends on the actions of other people, many of whom we don’t even know. So how can we … 
  6. Understanding Happiness
     … If you know how to find true happiness inside—how cultivate your breath, how to cultivate your thoughts in the proper way—then you can be a good example to them. And you can actually share your knowledge with them at the appropriate times. You’ve probably noticed: People who have that kind of glow from an inner happiness—you pick up some of … 
  7. Sense Pleasures & Sensuality
     … This doesn’t mean that you have to uproot sensuality, simply that you put sensual thoughts aside. Sensuality and sensual pleasures are not the same thing. Sensuality is your fascination with thinking about sensual pleasures. We like to fantasize about sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, all the narratives that go around lust, the narratives that go around our desire for food—how you … 
  8. Sensual Passion
     … What he’s talking about when he says you’re aloof from sensuality is that you’re not thinking thoughts about sensual pleasures, planning them, going over sensual pleasures from the past. You get aloof from that so that the mind can be really quiet. Now, for a lot of us, that’s where we find our pleasures, our happiness: thoughts of nice sights … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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