Search results for: "Thought"

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  2. Other People
     … It’s through our own actions that we take what they did, what they said, or even what we think they thought, and turn it into our own private heaven or our own private hell. We have to watch out for that, because if our moods depend on other people’s actions, we’re in really bad shape. There’s nothing constant about what … 
  3. Dhamma Opportunism
     … He said, “Well, I still have to work on my perfections.” I thought to myself, “If he has to work on his perfections, what about me?” So that changed my attitude. Fortunately, I didn’t have to get too involved in the construction. But it was hard for there not to be a lot of activity that infringed on my peace and quiet. I … 
  4. Immediate Knowledge
     … Try not to let your thoughts wander too far away from here, because when they wander away, they wander into uncertainty. Try to familiarize yourself with this spot right here. This is where the mind and the body meet: right at the breath. This is where intention and feeling and attention and perception—all those factors of name and form—all meet. Even though … 
  5. The Veils of Delusion
     … Whatever vagrant thoughts may come wandering into the mind, you don’t have to pay them any attention at all. Just let them pass. And don’t get involved in them, even to the point of trying to chase them away. They’ll go away on their own. You’ve got work to do here. Just try to keep your gaze as steady and … 
  6. The Arrow in the Heart
     … So drop all your other thoughts. Come to find rest right here: the breath coming in, the breath going out. Even though there’s still clinging and craving in the process of staying with the breath, it’s the kind of clinging and craving that will lead you out. As we create a sense of concentration, a sense of being settled and established here … 
  7. The Desire to Do Well
     … If, on the other hand, you really want to act skillfully, you tell yourself, “Oh, I thought this was going to be skillful, but while I’m doing it, I can see this harm is being done. I’ve got to stop.” Or maybe you didn’t see the harm while you were doing it, but it comes out later. “I’ve learned.” Then … 
  8. A Wealthy Memory
     … What this means is having memorized the teachings of the Buddha, having thought them through, and keeping them in your memory bank so that when a situation comes up, you can apply the right attitude. This is why, in the past, people memorized a lot, memorized the Dhammapada and a lot of the basic chants. There’s a story of a woman in the … 
  9. The Best of a Bad Situation
     … You can’t imagine relating to your thoughts, your feelings, your perceptions, even your acts of consciousness in any other way aside from clinging to them. But the Buddha is saying there are other ways, to expand your imagination. One way of expanding your imagination is to start with something really simple: generosity. I used to read stories of explorers going to the Arctic … 
  10. Progress & Regress
     … So keep these thoughts in mind. It’s not just the technique. It’s also the attitude. It comes down to your maturity, your ability to deal with difficulty, to work your way through the troughs, so you can get back up on the crests again and not be carried away either by the troughs or by the crests, keeping the mind on an … 
  11. Self-Knowledge
     … seeing where you are and getting a sense of the possibilities of where you can go in causing less suffering, less harm, through your thoughts, your words, and your deeds. That’s a task you can tackle and actually get results.
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. What’s Constant, What’s Not
     … So you can suffer because of the thought that the future may provide too little time. Then there’s the other side. You realize this is a long practice we have, and you wonder if you’re up for it. Are you going to have the stamina? Will you last? Will you have the endurance to see it through? That’s a future with … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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