Search results for: "Thought"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
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