Search results for: "Thought"

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  2. Seclusion
     … Any other thoughts, you don’t have to entertain. You don’t have to pay any attention to them at all. No matter how insistent they may be, no matter how strong they may be, tell yourself: “This is not time for them. They have plenty of opportunity to make inroads in your mind some other time. Right now is some time for some … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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