Search results for: "Thought"

  1. Page 112
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. Admen Inside
     … So you have to develop a strong sense that your thoughts, words, and deeds all have consequences, and you really do care about yourself down the line. It’s not just a matter of being in the present, thinking that that will solve your problems. What you do in the present has consequences in the present, but also down the line into the future … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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