Search results for: "Thought"

  1. Page 110
  2. You Contain Multitudes
     … My first thought was that she did a really good impersonation of an adult. In her professional life, she was very much together. Of course, this is what a lot of humor is all about: how inconsistent people are, very particular about some things, usually minor things, but very sloppy about major issues in life. Or making up their mind to do one thing … 
  3. Training Your Minds
     … If you followed a particular line of thought, where would it lead you? Do you really want to identify with that? Another way to deal with these things is to focus on a meditation topic you find interesting. One of the reasons I liked the Ajaan Lee method was because it made the breath interesting. Prior to that, the breath was just in out … 
  4. What Should I Do?
     … That thought brings you back here, working on your concentration, trying to bring it into balance so that your mindfulness is strong, your alertness is sharp. The sense of ease and well-being that you gain from being right here can provide you with nourishment, can strengthen you, so that as you meditate, you’re being responsible, both in creating a refuge for yourself … 
  5. The Uses of Pleasure
     … Notice, when the mind is thinking, what is it doing? What is it picking up? Why? What’s the allure? What sparks a particular emotion, a particular thought? When you’ve been still, it’s a lot easier to see these things. It’s like listening for the noises of the mice in the walls here. If you want to hear where they are … 
  6. The First Noble Truth
     … Your thought fabrications, your consciousness: All these things are very, very arbitrary. They arise according to causes and pass away according to causes. Sometimes you feed the ones that you like and they turn around to bite you. You’re feeding them because you want to feed off them, but they turn into difficult or impossible animals to have around. So learn how to … 
  7. Take Care
     … What this required was that I read Ajaan Lee a lot more carefully then I’d read him before, paying attention to the little phrases that I’d originally thought were little throw-away phrases, idiomatic, a peculiarity of Thai that didn’t really have much meaning. I began to realize that in some cases there was a deeper meaning there. Then I had … 
  8. Contentment
     … But in terms of the mind, he said, you don’t tolerate unskillful thoughts. When they come up in the mind, you’ve got to find some way to get around them. Anything in the mind that causes suffering within, you’ve got to work on it. And even though the end of the path is to put an end to desire, you have … 
  9. Ready for the Truth
     … Then when the insights come into the ways in which you’re being unskillful in your thoughts or your words or your deeds, you’re willing to listen, you’re willing to take note of that fact and not deny it. If you go into denial about your mistakes, you’re never going to learn from them. But when the mind is in a … 
  10. The Need for Right View
     … They’re useful for different levels of thought and levels of practice, but they all come together. The more blatant version leads to the more intermediate version, and the intermediate version leads to the more refined version. So in one sense, they’re all of a piece. They give you some ideas of how you might apply the basic principles while you’re meditating … 
  11. Opting Out
     … You could be sitting here for the hour, thinking sensual thoughts and enjoying them, but you tell yourself, “No,” and you stick with that decision. It’s honorable, and it’s noble when you realize that there’s a greater happiness that comes from abandoning the lesser happiness, and you’re not going to try to find some grubbing way to combine the two … 
  12. Between Right & Wrong
     … You may have thought, “Well, this is good enough,” but if someone, says, “No, it’s not good enough,” it’s not because they have ill will. It’s because they care. After all, this is a skill that really is life-and-death—the life and death of your goodness; the life and death of the well-being of the mind. So the … 
  13. Respect for the Training
     … Or areas where you thought every reasonable person would see an exception: What’s life like if you don’t take that exception? As the Buddha said, once a person has gained awakening, that person wouldn’t break any of the basic rules in the precepts. As for the more minor rules, awakened people may break them, but here we’re talking about the … 
  14. The Walls of Ignorance
     … These principles apply not only to your physical actions, but also to your words and thoughts. They also apply to your meditation. You intend to stay with the breath, to breathe and to focus on the breath in a certain way. Check to see the results: “Is it going to cause harm? Is it causing harm, is it causing pain or stress right now … 
  15. The Noble Search Makes Us Human
     … That psychologist who thought that life in a monastery was just very detached and cut off from the human race, didn’t know anything about monasteries. As you can see here, we have a lot of contact with human beings of all kinds. And we’re all coming together in a voluntary way to help one another deal with a very specific and important … 
  16. Taking an Active Role
     … This can be an image for your own thoughts: Greed, anger, and delusion can take root pretty easily if you’re not filling your awareness with mindfulness, mindfulness of the whole body. Other people’s energies can enter into your space as well if you’re not fully inhabiting it. Sometimes you’ll notice as you go to somebody’s house, you go to … 
  17. Crossing the River
     … Or you can focus on thoughts of goodwill—anything you find is easy for the mind to stay with, congenial, and gives you a sense of being firmly supported in the present. Even before you get to the meditation, there’s the teaching on refuge. We’ve got the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha as our refuge in the sense that we have … 
  18. Learn from the Ants
     … Other times, though, you have to think through why you shouldn’t want to follow that thought. When you decide that it’s really not worth it, then you come back. The point is, you don’t just give in and you don’t just accept, “Well, this is the way my mind is tonight, so I’ll just sit with it the way … 
  19. The Search for Something of Substance
     … When you tell yourself you’re not going to follow any random thoughts that come in that would pull you away from the breath, you really do have to stick with that determination. Now, that requires a certain amount of ingenuity. How do you make the breath interesting enough so that you can withstand the pull of whatever else that could come barging in … 
  20. Integrity — In Memory of Luang Loong
     … So it’s not all that consoling a thought, because all the things that you shore up here on this earth in this lifetime to provide for yourself in the future: Once you leave the body, you don’t have any guarantee that that stuff is going to go with you. In fact, you’re going to have to leave it behind. It’s … 
  21. At Ease with the Breath
     … Then there are the four sublime attitudes, contemplation of food, all kinds of things you can focus on that are congenial for getting the mind to settle in and stay in the present moment and not go chasing off after its thoughts. So the important principle while you’re meditating is to feel at ease with your topic. The breath is a topic congenial … 
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