Search results for: "Thought"

  1. Page 103
  2. The Goldsmith
    Start with thoughts of goodwill—a wish for happiness, your happiness, the happiness of others. As we all know, goodwill is the first of the brahmaviharas, and the last is equanimity. Sometimes people interpret that as meaning that equanimity is the highest of them, the one you’re trying to get to. But the Buddha never taught equanimity on its own. It always has … 
  3. Tranquility & Insight
     … Our whole experience of the form of the body, our feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, even our consciousness, has an element of intention in it. We’re doing it for a particular purpose. We want happiness out of these things, in line with whatever we conceive the happiness to be. And we shape these things because of our passion for the happiness. It’s a … 
  4. The Riddle of Freedom
     … Whether it’s in terms of your thoughts, your words, or your deeds, there’s always a skillful option. It may not be easiest option, it may require a lot of sacrifice, but the skillful option is always there. And as you choose the skillful option more and more, you’re creating the conditions for greater and greater freedom. In other words, you develop … 
  5. A Sense of Yourself
     … The monk says, “How could I have thought of those analogies because I’ve never heard of them before, and I don’t have the ingenuity to think them up.” That gives you one idea what ingenuity can do: You look at things and see parallels. You see patterns. And then you play with the patterns: This is the pattern of this particular problem … 
  6. Overwhelmed by Freedom
     … So use these thoughts to focus your mind on the present moment. You’ve got this moment right now. Don’t waste it, because you don’t know how many more present moments you’re going to have. You sit down and think about a whole day with nothing to do, and the mind begins to fill up the day with all of its … 
  7. Strength in Humor
     … You restrain your thoughts from leaving your safe territory, the breath in and of itself. Then there’s compassion, which corresponds to altruism. This sense of compassion is closely related to discernment. You really do want to find a type of happiness that doesn’t harm yourself and doesn’t harm others. If it harms yourself or others, what good is it? You put … 
  8. The Skill of Letting Go
     … Then when he wasn’t leaping up at the idea of abandoning directed thought and evaluation, he’d looked at the drawbacks of directed thought and evaluation until he was ready to let them go. So even just getting into concentration requires that you see drawbacks, and you ask yourself, of course, the opposite question: “Where’s the allure?” In this way, you get … 
  9. A Healthy Attitude Toward Happiness
     … We feed off the thoughts we put together. We feed off our awareness of these things. And simply the fact that we have to be feeding all the time creates a lot of stress, because the things we’re feeding on don’t last. So we have to keep looking for new sources of food all the time. What we’re trying to do … 
  10. Insight Is Seeing What’s Worth Doing
     … It’s the same with thoughts of goodwill. You begin to realize you’re living in the world without having any ill will for anyone, and you can base a genuine sense of self-esteem on that. Of course, it takes time to develop that attitude. It’s not like we’re born with limitless goodwill, but you can practice. You can ask yourself … 
  11. Time & Place
     … When we’ve thought it through, we put it into practice. That way, our discernment will grow, get more refined and more specific, sharper and sharper. So, even though you might say that all feelings are painful and actions lead to feelings, you can’t say that all actions lead to pain. That’s a case where the three characteristics don’t apply. They … 
  12. Strength Training
     … When you need to crush your distracting thoughts, you can crush them in the same way that a strong man crushes down a weaker man. And some of the similes the Buddha gives have to do with strength training. Back in those days, they didn’t have strength training the way we do, but they did have archery, which was the basic strength training … 
  13. Preparing to Die Well
     … As you see the mind flickering off to yet another thought—which develops into a little thought world, a little becoming—you learn how to catch it and stop the process more and more quickly. Then you realize that this skill is not just a matter of mindfulness and alertness but also of your sense of values: You have to undo the desire to … 
  14. Relationships
     … As for any other thoughts that may come by, just let them go past. You don’t have to get involved with them. You don’t have to straighten them out. You don’t have to remember them no matter how wonderful or fantastic or useful they may seem. At the moment, they’re of no use. Just let them go. Let them go … 
  15. Horror Stories
     … Don’t expect everything to be explained to you.” I thought about that. How does a thief think? Suppose you were a thief and you wanted to rob somebody’s house. Would you go to the front step and knock on the door and say, “Excuse me, when are you going to be away from home, and, by the way, where do you keep … 
  16. Suffering Is a Feeding Addiction
     … You’ve got a whole hour free, you could think about whatever.” How do you protect the mind? If you’ve had some experience with meditating, you can remember things you’ve done in the past that helped you to shed those thoughts. If you’ve read something about meditation, bring your memory of what you’ve read to bear on what you’re … 
  17. Mastery
     … As long as you find that you can control things like form, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, and consciousness—the five aggregates—you do exert control over them. You do develop a sense of self around them on the path: the self as its own mainstay, the self as its governing principle. But you try to develop it, not in the sense of trying to … 
  18. Quality
     … Use this as your razor to shave off all the extraneous thoughts that can get in the way. All too often, when you sit and meditate, all your anticipations that you want things to be like this, you want things to be like that, how much longer you’re going to be able to take this meditation: All these things are unknowable. So shave … 
  19. Getting Yourself
     … The kids had never thought of those things, but once the strategy was taught, they could master it. They could wait long periods of time. So the principle of delayed gratification can be taught. And once you start suggesting to kids like that that they can think in different ways, they begin to observe their own minds. This is why the Buddha taught after … 
  20. Clinging-Aggregates in Context
     … We cling to fabrications, the way the mind puts thoughts together intentionally, and we cling to consciousness. And in clinging to these things, we make ourselves into a being. Why do we do that? Because of craving. That’s the second noble truth, the cause of suffering. We crave sensuality. We fantasize about pleasures that we’d like to get, and to get those … 
  21. Remembering Ajaan Fuang
     … How about when he was alive, anything amazing then?” I said, “What I thought was amazing was that even though he was Thai and I was a Westerner, during my time with him I never had the feeling that that was a barrier between us. The communication was heart to heart. Even though I had to learn Thai ways of doing things, still I … 
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