Search results for: "Thought"

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  2. Jhana & Insight
     … There’s bodily fabrication, the breath; verbal fabrication, which is your directed thought and evaluation—the way you pose a topic to your mind and then you comment on it; and then there’s mental fabrication: feelings and perceptions. You bring all those things together to create a state of concentration. You evaluate your breath, you think about the breath, you have a perception … 
  3. Preparing for Death
     … They develop a sense of Oneness, especially as you can drop the directed thought and evaluation. You’re just there with that sense of perceiving the breath, aware of the breath, and the mind and its object seem to become one. But the paradox here is that as they become one, eventually they will separate out again, but this time they separate out not … 
  4. Rooted in Heedful Desire
     … We suffer because we lack skill in dealing with the greed, aversion, and delusion that can so easily slip in and influence our thoughts, our words, and our deeds. Which is why the image of the soldier is so appropriate. The soldier doesn’t get by simply by knowing how to shoot a gun or shoot an arrow or whatever. The soldier has to … 
  5. Four Mountains Moving In
     … Well, the “anything” can include a lot of unskillful thoughts, words, and deeds. In that way, they unwittingly create a lot more danger for themselves and the people around them. So remember the proper response to interconnectedness—realizing that we’re connected through our actions and those connections can be good or bad: The proper response is heedfulness, circumspection, uncomplacency, based on keeping the … 
  6. Equanimity Isn’t Nibbana
     … We’re hungry for form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness. We suffer because we cling to these things. The word for “clinging”— upadana—also means to take sustenance from something. You feed on things, and it’s because you feed that you suffer. The Buddha’s solution is not simply to say, “Well, just stop feeding because there’s no really good food … 
  7. The Languages of the Mind
     … In this way, the habit we have of forming concepts—what the Buddha calls directed thought and evaluation, which are verbal saṅkhāras—instead of being the problem, actually become part of the solution. When you find the mind wandering off, chattering about other things, just realize that those other things are not the issue right now. It’s not that you’ll never be … 
  8. Like an Athlete in Training
     … The thoughts that go out looking for trouble: Watch out for them. And, of course, with all this coming in and going out, you’ve got to make sure that what does come in meets with something good going out, so even if bad things come in, you don’t have to suffer. You can keep them right at the edge. Keep them right … 
  9. Your Inner Coach
     … So she thought that they should be on the ski team at the school. Well, it turned out that the coach of the ski team was extremely discouraging, constantly criticizing the kids, telling them they were hopeless. So they gave up. Something that should have been fun became no fun at all. So you have to make sure that your internal coach, at the … 
  10. In Accordance with the Dhamma
     … We cling to form, we cling to feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, consciousness, which means we feed on them, hoping to get some satisfaction out of them. As the Buddha points out, that’s why we’re suffering. So he wants us to gain a sense of having had enough of this kind of feeding. It’s through having had enough that we gain release … 
  11. Determined on Goodwill
     … We open our minds to the possibility that there may be opportunities in our lives that we hadn’t thought of before, or hadn’t noticed before, for giving ourselves space to practice that, at the same time, are being a help to others. Once you’ve made up your mind in that direction, you have to be true to it. That’s the … 
  12. Right Exertion at Play
     … You direct your thoughts to a particular topic and then you make comments on it, you question it. You develop your understanding around it. You also get more sensitive to mental fabrications—the feelings that arise with the breath—and what you can do with them. You realize that feelings are fabrications. You’re not just stuck with a pleasant feeling or an unpleasant … 
  13. In Control
     … In other words, the breath becomes your path to the end of suffering, the body becomes part of your path to the end of suffering, your thoughts all become devoted to the end of suffering. You can make that choice and you don’t want anybody else to come and unmake it. You don’t want any random emotions or old habits to come … 
  14. Customs of the Noble Ones
    We spread thoughts of goodwill to put our minds in the right frame to practice: “May I be happy; may all beings be happy.” This means we want a happiness that doesn’t cause harm to anyone, and we want them to find a happiness that doesn’t cause harm to anybody else either. Where are you going to find that happiness? You’ve … 
  15. People Who Think Too Much
     … It’s the same world over and over again, just that they had to go back and look more carefully at their basic assumptions, the things they thought they understood. They had to go back and look again, and look again, and look again. Sometimes we’re too clever for our own good. As Ajaan Lee says, there are times when you have to … 
  16. Even Common Animals Can Be Trained
     … She thought, “Even elephants, even common animals, can be trained. Why not me?” That’s a good image to keep in mind.
  17. When Your Will Is Ill
     … During my first year in particular, when I was meditating on the top of the hill there at Wat Dhammasathit, the thoughts that would destroy my concentration more than anything else came from thinking back on some injustice, where somebody had done something wrong or was doing something wrong and getting away with it. I could get worked up about that for hours at … 
  18. Obstacles to Full-body Awareness
     … There’s one perception that’s very common, which is that the parts that are tense or tight or painful tend to be the parts that you use a lot to bring the breath in because of your subconscious thoughts about what needs to be tightened up for the breath to come in, or about where it gets pulled in. See if you can … 
  19. Your Game Leg
     … So as you look at your practice, what is your game leg? In other words, what are the unskillful thoughts, attitudes, the excuses that you give to yourself for not putting more effort into the practice? A lot of the practice is simply learning how to drop the excuses and just do it. I think it was Ajaan Singthong who once said that there … 
  20. Surveying the World
     … So he directed his thoughts to the passing away and the re-arising of beings throughout the cosmos, and he saw that their re-arising was based on their actions, and their actions were based on their views. The actions, of course, were intentions. So, in the third watch of his night, he looked at his intentions, to see whether there was an intention … 
  21. Comfortable With the Truth
     … The compulsion to go after a particular idea or a particular thought—or particular sight, smell, taste, tactile sensation, whatever—gets a lot weaker when you have a good comfortable place to stay. It’s like the difference of having a good home to stay in as opposed to a really harsh and punishing home or a narrow, miserable home. The kids from the … 
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