Search results for: "Thought"

  1. Page 105
  2. Sensitive to Fabrication
     … There’s bodily fabrication, which is the in-and-out breath itself; verbal fabrication, what the Buddha calls directed thought and evaluation. To put that in simple terms, it’s the mind’s conversation with itself: all the voices of the committee; all the various members of the committee that get in on the conversation. You bring a topic to the committee, and everybody … 
  3. The Equanimity of a Victor
     … You fabricate thoughts and you’re aware. These are things you’re doing, and you cling to these actions in ignorance. That’s the suffering. It’s an active verb. Most of us don’t think of it that way. It’s because we don’t think of it that way: That’s why we’re defeated by it. Ajaan Lee’s image is … 
  4. Staying Still
     … Then he thought of some of the things that Ajaan Mun had taught him. One of them was: If anything comes up in the mind that you’re not sure of, whether it’s something you should go with or not, just stay with the sense of awareness, the knower inside. In other words, don’t commit to anything. Just be aware, aware, aware … 
  5. The Taste Is Release
     … Then, to maintain that intention, you spread thoughts of goodwill: goodwill for yourself, goodwill for the people you’ve wronged, goodwill for everybody. But as for new things as you’re going through life day to day, you want to make sure you stick with the precepts. Otherwise, you start thinking about new things you did that were unskillful and you start putting up … 
  6. Dedicating Merit
     … generosity, virtue, developing thoughts of unlimited goodwill. As the Buddha said, genuine happiness comes from doing good. He says that the phrase, “acts of puñña,” is another word for happiness. And it’s a happiness that spreads around. It’s not like the happiness that comes, say, from wealth or status or praise or sensual pleasures. All too often that kind of happiness means … 
  7. The Uses of Concentration
     … You sit here with the breath and suddenly find yourself with another thought; you remind yourself, “This is not why I was here meditating” and you can pull yourself out. Well, you can do the same thing with those defilements. No matter how much they sound like you—no matter how much they seem like your true feelings, your true desires—you decide you … 
  8. The Body In & Of Itself
     … A thought may come up about something stupid you did in the past: Just let it go. You don’t have to get involved in it. If there’s something you want to get out of the world in the future, let it go. This is called putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. After all, at the moment, all those … 
  9. A Connoisseur of Happiness
     … Is there another way? And he thought of the time when he was a child, sitting under a tree, and had entered the first jhana: rapture and pleasure born of seclusion, accompanied by directed thought and evaluation. Recollecting that, he had an instinctive sense that that would be the path, but then he asked himself: “Why am I afraid of that pleasure?” And he … 
  10. The Challenge of Faith
    The story goes that after the Buddha’s awakening, after he’d been experiencing the bliss of release for seven weeks, he thought about the prospect of teaching what he had learned to other people. At first he was discouraged because what he had learned was very subtle—things like dependent co-arising and the principle of this-that conditionality. He thought it would … 
  11. No Happiness without Restraint
     … You can imagine what they would have thought of the kids now. Back in those days it was just TV and the movies. Now there’s a constant barrage from all kinds of screens all over the place. And the pace has picked up. Our generation was taught to be impatient, but the current one is taught to be even more impatient, and we … 
  12. Respect for Happiness
     … looking at your actions, looking at your words, looking at your thoughts, and seeing what results they give. We were talking this afternoon about a person who’s willing to learn from mistakes, and this is precisely how the Buddha has you learn. Of course, he warns you ahead of time that certain things are going to be mistakes. You don’t have to … 
  13. The Raft
     … directed thoughts and evaluations, the way you talk to yourself about the breath. You can ask yourself “Is the breath comfortable right now?” You watch it for a while and then you try changing it to see which type of breathing is more comfortable: the old way or the new. You have to have something to compare in order to have this conversation. So … 
  14. Questioning & Conviction
     … how a perception arises, how the perception turns into a thought, and how the thought begins to develop fangs to bite you and make you suffer. These things are all here to be observed. They’re all happening all the time. But to see them we have to change our focus. To change our focus requires a change of heart, telling ourselves that this … 
  15. Growing Up Inside
     … how to get the mind to settle down, and step back from its thoughts. This is an important part of growing more mature. You see certain identities that you’ve been taking on, and you step back from them, and say No. A while back I was reading a book by a psychologist who had focused on issues of adult development, not just child … 
  16. Respect for the Precepts
     … But if you tell them you’re hiding nothing shameful and yet they find the Jews, they’ll take the Jews out and say, “We thought you said you weren’t hiding anything,” and you say, “I said I was hiding nothing shameful; there’s nothing shameful about what I did.” Now, they may decide to arrest you then, too, but at least you … 
  17. Justice vs. Skillfulness
     … In other words, we develop goodwill for all beings, compassion for all, empathetic joy for all, and we have to learn how to apply thoughts of equanimity to all when necessary. The problem is that although our attitudes may be unlimited, our resources for actually helping people and improving the world are not. This is why we need a clear set of priorities as … 
  18. Happy for People You Don’t Like
     … You thought you would use your happiness for good purposes but something’s happened in the meantime. As for people who are happy now, who have good fortune now, you have to be equanimous about that fact. But then from equanimity, you move into a sense of dismay and dispassion. You realize that if you want happiness that’s really true, really solid, it … 
  19. Healing & Protection
     … When the mind feels soothed and calmed like this, then when the thought comes to go out and do something harmful, you see immediately that it’s disturbing. It disturbs the calm, disturbs the peace of mind you’re experiencing. You begin to ask yourself, “Why would I want to do that?” Often we do cruel and stupid and harmful things because we’re … 
  20. Becoming
     … As you watch these things even more carefully, you begin to realize that even these aggregates have an element of fabrication, an element of intention, in what you thought was their raw form. As the Buddha says, we create form for the sake of form-ness. Your sense of the form of the body is something you fashion out of sensations so that you … 
  21. A Recipe for Jhana
     … In other words, you read about how jhana has directed thought and evaluation, and pleasure and rapture and singleness of preoccupation, so you try to bring all those things together. You make them the object of your meditation. But that’s not how you get the mind to settle down. You get the mind to settle down by focusing on the breath, with some … 
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