Search results for: "Thought"

  1. Page 106
  2. Worldly Equanimity & Its Uses
     … The thoughts that would run rampant and go up and down the scales, you learn to keep them in check because they’re not going to do you any good. You want to keep things on one single tone, because then you’ll be in a better position to figure out what’s gone wrong and what can be done to fix it. And … 
  3. The Big Picture
     … Verbal fabrication is the way you talk to yourself, what the Buddha calls directed thought and evaluation. You choose a topic to think about, and then you make comments, ask questions. Pay attention to that, too. Keep it focused on the breath. And there’s mental fabrication, perceptions—the labels you put on things—and then feelings: feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure … 
  4. In Debt to Generosity
     … Spread thoughts of goodwill to all the beings who’ve helped you practice. If there was any meat in your meal today, dedicate your merit of your practice to the animals who died. Dedicate the merit of your practice to the people who gave the food, who gave the clothing, the shelter, the medicine, all the things we have here, because without their help … 
  5. The Joy of Heedfulness
     … Think thoughts of goodwill for everybody. That should be a source of joy. Learn to behave in ways that avoid harm. That’s a source of joy. So there’s a joy in being heedful. And the more you appreciate that, the better your practice will go.
  6. Training Your Selves
     … You latch on to something—to form, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, fabrications, consciousness. In latching on to these things, you make yourself subject to things that you don’t want. So there is a way out that doesn’t involve just being accepting or resigning yourself to the way things are. We were talking today about the translation of dukkha sometimes as unsatisfactoriness. It … 
  7. Breath Meditation: The First Tetrad
     … Is this something you would have thought up on your own? It’s good to remember that we owe these teachings to the exploration of other people, people like the Buddha, who put his life on the line trying to find a true happiness. He tried various paths, studying with other teachers, realizing that their teachings didn’t lead to anything deathless. That was … 
  8. A Willingness to Learn
     … the side of the stillness or the side of the directed thought and evaluation. Because you’re not only treating your illness, you’re also training your doctor. And fortunately as a meditator, no matter what you do to the illness, the patient doesn’t die. He or she keeps coming back. Death here would be that you totally abandon meditation. But as long … 
  9. Don’t Believe Everything You Think
     … When you’re with the breath, you can watch the thoughts coming into the mind and not get sucked into them—unless, of course, you leave the breath, in which case you’re going to need mindfulness to remind you to get out if it’s a bad place to be. So try to keep the breath as your anchor. Remember that this is … 
  10. Stay
     … And you’ve got to learn how to stick with the breath, not only in terms of obvious distractions like thoughts of the past, thoughts of the future, but also in terms of things that come up in the meditation that are sometimes the result of the concentration. States of pleasure, states of rapture, can arise. Visions can arise. You can take these as … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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