Search results for: "Thought"

  1. Page 102
  2. Shaping Your Breath, Shaping Your Life
     … So I just thought, “Suppose the breath came in in the middle of the forehead? Suppose it came down from the top of the head? What muscles would have to be used in order to get the breath in, or to allow it in?” That thought allowed the muscles that had been doing the work to rest, while other muscles picked up the work … 
  3. Observant & Ingenious
     … I remember, on first seeing that, I thought, “How many years is this going to take?” But by the end of the first day, they had tapped down to about a foot and a half into the rock. After two days, they had holes deep enough to do the blasting. When the blasting was done, one piece of rock came out an almost perfect … 
  4. Twigs & Branches
     … There are the fabrications of directed thought and evaluation, as you direct your thinking to the breath and then evaluate how it’s going. And then there’s consciousness, which is aware of all these things. Discernment, too, involves aggregates. As you develop discernment, you’re going to be using perceptions—perceptions of things being inconstant, stressful, not-self—as a way of developing … 
  5. Truth Without Air Quotes
     … No perceptions, no thought constructs, no feelings, no sensory consciousness, no awareness of the body. As the Buddha said, it’s the ultimate happiness. And it is a state of knowing, even though you’re not engaged in the six senses. As he said, this consciousness is not experienced through the six senses. It’s something outside. The image he gives is of a … 
  6. Dhamma Medicine
     … Sometimes you sit here thinking thoughts of goodwill and you notice that your heart isn’t in it. The mind has no problem thinking thoughts of goodwill, but there’s no sense of warmth that goes along with it. Still, at the very least, you’re establishing pathways in the mind. When you learn how to think of the people you like and the … 
  7. When Attacked by Distractions
     … What are the feeling tones and perceptions you’re holding in mind that make this kind of thinking attractive? The same applies to anger, the same applies to whatever thoughts you find addictive: What perceptions do you hold in mind? The Buddha offers a few alternative perceptions, say, for sensual desire, to help you see through its allure. He says it’s like a … 
  8. The Power of Truth
     … Then he would say first you develop this concentration with directed thought and evaluation—that’s a jhana practice—then without directed thought and evaluation, with enjoyment, with equanimity. In other words, you take it through all the four jhanas. One of the basic themes of concentration practice is just this: establishing mindfulness. There are lots of passages you can cite, showing that the … 
  9. The Little Things
     … As for whether you’re going to attain concentration or not attain concentration, don’t even have that thought in your mind. You’re here totally to examine the breath. Be very careful with the breath. Pay close attention to the breath. If you come in with preconceived notions about whether it’s going to work or not tonight, whether it’s going to … 
  10. Things Aren’t as They Should Be
     … There were those who thought that to be deathless, you had to find an unending source of food. In other words, you’d be deathless in time. What the Buddha discovered, though, is that you can experience the deathless only if you step outside of time—and you can do that. It’s a possibility—a dimension where there’s no need for food … 
  11. The Context for No Context
     … You see your body as something separate, your feelings as something separate; your perceptions, your thought constructs. Even your sensory consciousness: You have to see that as something separate—separate both in the sense that these are individual events that arise and pass away, and in the sense that they’re separate from your awareness, your sense of you. You want to pare back … 
  12. The Politics of Arising & Passing Away
     … So one of the things you have to learn is that whenever a thought comes up or whenever any kind of potential for a thought world comes up, you just want to let it burst like a bubble without your getting involved in it and without your trying to make anything more out of it than that. I remember hearing someone once talking about … 
  13. Top Priorities
     … Here he had attained the state of neither perception or non-perception, a very high refined state of concentration, which many people in those days thought was the ultimate, but it wasn’t good enough for him. He wanted something better. When he lived in the palace, became dissatisfied with the pleasures of the palace, even though everyone said, “This is as good as … 
  14. Occupy Your Body
     … The factors that do the work are directed thought and evaluation: keeping your mind directed to the breath, and then evaluating how things are going as you try to settle down. Think of the image of the bathman that the Buddha uses when he talks about the first jhana, working the water through the pile of bath powder. Back in those days, they didn … 
  15. Willing to Question Yourself
     … I thought, “Gee, when I came out of my mother’s womb, did I smell that bad as well?” We all smelled pretty bad. But everything else that comes out of the body, you’ve just got to throw away. And as for the babies coming out, you have to clean them up. Then, after all that, the body grows old and it’s … 
  16. Many Desires, Many Selves
     … See where there are perceptions or thought fabrications or feelings that go together to build up this state of becoming. All kinds of things go into this. When we learn these impersonal terms, we realize that if we look at our desires impersonally, it’s a lot easier to pull ourselves out of them. That’s what we’re trying to do as we … 
  17. A Noble Path
     … As the Buddha said, even if bandits were to savagely cut off your limbs with a two-handled saw, we’re still supposed to start focusing on them with thoughts of goodwill and from there, to spread goodwill for the whole cosmos. Even in a case like that, we’re not supposed to wish ill for anybody. So it’s a noble path, and … 
  18. The Best of a Bad Situation
     … how not to go with a vagrant train of thought no matter how insistent it may be, no matter how relevant it may be to certain issues in your life. When you realize that this is not useful at this very moment, as a good meditator you should learn how to put it aside even when it’s screaming in your mind again and … 
  19. The Prison Break
     … Then when other thoughts come in, you have a good argument. Say, “Not right now. I can think about those things some other time. Right now, it’s time to get quiet.” If you’re worried about the future, tell yourself you don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but you do know you’ll need qualities like mindfulness, ardency … 
  20. Varieties of Mindfulness
     … We think somehow that the critical thoughts in our mind are more real, and that the more self-congratulatory thoughts are deluded. Well, that’s not the case. When you do something right, you should congratulate yourself on it as a means of encouragement, to give some juice to the path. Otherwise it’s very easy for things to get dry. If you criticize … 
  21. Inner Negotiating Skills
     … You look at your thoughts, you look at your words, you look at your deeds, in terms of their long-term consequences. This is the voice of the negotiator inside, pointing out that if you really want to be happy, you need to take your actions seriously—not in a grim way, but simply seeing their importance: that you really do want to have … 
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