Search results for: "Thought"
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- Making Yourself Worthy of Trust… We want it so much that you’d think people would actually be serious about how they go about looking for it—not serious in a grim way, but really putting some thought into it. You’d look around, see who really is happy, and how they got there. All too often, though, we simply go by our impulses, but if something is so …
- Remembering Ajaan Lee… This ties in with Ajaan Lee’s teachings on concentration, in particular the role that directed thought and evaluation play in helping you to settle down. As he says, evaluation is the beginning of discernment. You take your thinking processes and you actually put them to use. You don’t try to just shove them out of the mind. You figure out which thoughts …
- A Committed Relationship… You have to give your time, you have to give your energy, you have to put a lot of thought and pay a lot of attention into what you’re doing. You can’t just be taking all the time. This also means making sacrifices. You have to sacrifice the time that you could have been devoting to something else. And as you’re …
- Reinvest Your Noble Treasures… Even when giving is just an ornament of the mind, without any thought of any return, you reach the level of non-return. That’s a big reward. There’s a famous story in the Buddhist tradition about Vessantara, the king who gives up the rain-giving elephant, gives up a few other amazing things, and the people in his kingdom are upset with …
- Endurance with a Purpose… In technical terms, it’s called directed thought and evaluation, as when you direct your thoughts to a topic and then talk to yourself about it, make comments about it. And then finally, mental fabrication: perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the labels you put on things, to identify this as this, and that as that. The feelings, of course, are feeling tones of pleasure …
- Questions in the Practice… Our feelings, our thoughts, our sense perceptions make up this world, and they’re very different from person to person. Your actions really do shape this world; actions from the past and actions from the present are combining right now to shape what you experience. So that’s why the Buddha said it’s important to focus on your actions, what you’re doing …
- Fear of Death… They will manifest themselves outside — in your thoughts, words, and deeds — but they come from within, so that’s where the main effort is focused. This is why the section of the noble eightfold path that deals with concentration starts with right effort: the effort to give rise to skillful qualities, like mindfulness, alertness, discernment. These are the things that are really going to …
- Intelligent about Change… Even if the project goes more slowly than you would hope, you can’t say, “Well, I'll just give up on this for the time being and pursue something else,” because this thought will then be constantly nagging away at the back of the mind, trying to pull you off the path. You’ve got to have conviction that the Buddha could do …
- The Third Frame of Reference… Imagine yourself already dead and looking back at this lifetime, to see: “Am I happy that I am worried about x for two hours that night when I could’ve been meditating?” Thinking like this helps give you a sense of distance from the thoughts that disturb you. One of Ajaan Fuang’s students—an old woman who had started meditating late in life …
- Potentials for Awakening… The same with thoughts of non-ill will: You learn either to have goodwill for others or at least to be equanimous about them. The same with harmfulness: You’re not here to punish anybody. You’re here to look into your own mind, understand what’s going wrong in the mind, and learn how to change it. This is how analysis of qualities …
- Heedfulness & Confidence… They had been reading a little bit about what the Buddha taught about aging, illness, death, suffering, suffering, suffering, and they thought everybody who was a true Buddhist should be very depressed. And they concluded that the Thais and other Asians didn’t even know their own religion well. Of course, it was the other way around. It was the Western scholars who didn …
- The Path to the Top… They thought they’d get the Buddha either way, because if he said that he would say something displeasing to others, then they could say, “What’s the difference between you and everyday normal people? What’s so enlightened about you?” If he claimed to not say anything displeasing to anybody, they’d say, “What about those comments you made about Devadatta, that he …
- A Touchstone at the Breath… How are you breathing right now? How do you feel the breath in your body? If it feels constricted, if your awareness of the body feels tight and limited, what thoughts are limiting it? What other concerns do you have? We’ve talked about using perception to reframe the issues in your mind. It’s not just an intellectual exercise. It’s also a …
- Fabricating Around Pain… As we chanted just now, in the first jhana there’s directed thought and evaluation. That’s what this internal chatter is. When you get to the higher levels of concentration, you can drop that. But to get the mind to settle down, you need to do some adjusting. So you’re learning to use verbal fabrication in a way that’s skillful, to …
- Timeless Practice… Any thoughts that relate to the world right now, just put them aside. If they come up again, you put them aside again. They come up again, you put them aside again. This is what the developing is all about. You’re changing your habits. You’re developing a new state of mind. If you think of the mind as a committee, you’re …
- Food for Consciousness… On the one hand, we’re trying to create a sense of inhabiting this world inside the body; but on the other, we can also see little thoughts running off and it’s easy to get sucked into their worlds and go running along with them. The Buddha has a long description of the various ways in which we create suffering within, called dependent …
- The Allure of Self… How old are you now?” The king’s eighty. “And when you were young, were you strong?” “Yes, sometimes,” the king says, “I thought I had the strength of two people.” “How about now?” “Oh no, now that I’m eighty, sometimes I mean to put my foot in one place, and it goes someplace else.” Aging, inconstancy. The next summary is: “The world …
- Of Essential Worth… Anybody who thought they had jhana— to say nothing of nibbana—was just deluded. If you believe that, then it really discourages you. You think that if you were to put in a lot of effort, it would all be in vain—a very discouraging idea. But then he met Ajaan Mun. And just seeing Ajaan Mun, he said he was convinced: There is …
- Hold on to Your Frame of Reference… Then you can strengthen it, he says, by developing thoughts of goodwill. Remind yourself that you really do want to be happy. You want a genuine happiness, and you wish genuine happiness for others. Whether the world will all find genuine happiness or not, that’s not the issue, but you want that desire to help other people find true happiness. You want that …
- The World Is Swept Away… How could he say he hadn’t accomplished anything? I thought I was a pretty good son, and he had two other good sons. That was an accomplishment. But it also made me reflect that if you look for your success in life in things outside, you’re looking in the wrong place, because it’s so easy for people to come along and …
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