Search results for: "Thought"

  1. Page 119
  2. Fourth Truth, First Duty
     … But an important part of both right mindfulness and right concentration is that you put aside any thoughts—any aggregates—about anything else that has to do with the world. You begin to see that those are perceptions and fabrications, too. This will sensitize you to other perceptions, other fabrications, and other feelings as you go through the day. After all, the work we … 
  3. Questioning Impermanence
     … When you direct your thought to the breath and you evaluate the breath and the feelings of pleasure and pain that come with the breath, you’ve got all the raw materials for awakening all gathered together. Now, our problem is that we haven’t allowed these things to grow, to develop, to show themselves. We haven’t learned how to ask the right … 
  4. Quiet in the Midst of Turmoil
     … He realized that he wasn’t as skilled as he thought he was. So he had to go back and work on the skills of being quiet in the midst of unquiet places. The Canon talks about this a lot. It uses a lot of images. There’s the image of a man with a bowl of oil on his head. The bowl is … 
  5. Facing Pain
     … I used to hear the ajaans in Thailand saying that it would disappear into the heart and I thought they were speaking figuratively, but they were actually speaking literally. The pain goes zipping into the area of the heart and then just disappears when you drop that perception. So some of the ways of dealing with pain are defensive in the sense that you … 
  6. An Auspicious Birth
     … It wants this kind of feeling, these kinds of perceptions, thought constructs, this kind of consciousness. We talk of the first kind of birth being auspicious when you’re born into a family that’s got material comforts and you have an opportunity to meet with the Dhamma. But it’s really made auspicious by this other kind of birth, the momentary attachment, because … 
  7. Harmlessness
     … My mind’s a mess.” That’s harmfulness right there, that thought. And as Ajaan Lee once said, “If you can do harm to your own goodness, it’s very easy to let it spread out and you start thinking about doing harm to other people’s goodness, too.” It’s interesting that when the Buddha talks about benefiting others and harming them, it … 
  8. Self-esteem
     … The thought, “I am the thinker,” he says, is the root of all mental proliferation, all the creation of issues that, as soon as they get set into motion, turn around and then it assail us. In other words, we beat ourselves up with this idea of “I’m the one who’s thinking.” There’s this “I am” in there that’s doing … 
  9. Analyzing Suffering
     … We identify with a certain kind of feeling, a certain perception, a certain way of fabricating our thoughts. It’s not necessarily the case that we hold on to one particular thing as our self all the time. If you looked at the pattern of your self-identification, you would see that it constantly shifts around. Sometimes you hold on to a feeling, sometimes … 
  10. A Sense of Yourself
     … Discernment is not just a matter of having learned things or having thought them through. It means actually seeing, when you’re about to do something that’s going to be unskillful: How can you talk yourself out of it? If you feel lazy about doing something that’s skillful, how can you talk yourself into doing it? This is a real test of … 
  11. Right but Wrong
     … So when the truck driver thought that leaving his truck dirty was a sign of wisdom, understanding the inconstancy of all things, it was a misuse of the teaching. You try to be clean. One of the basic attributes of a good practitioner is that you’re clean about the place where you live, the place where you meditate, because that develops good habits … 
  12. Relating to Kamma
     … The Buddha wants you to encourage that habit, encourage that thought. The second point the Buddha is making when he says that helping other people is really worthwhile is that people don’t just end with death. There’s something that goes on, a process that goes on, and if you can help that process, you’re helping something that could have long-term … 
  13. Sensitive to Stress
     … Sensual thoughts fall away in the first jhana. Verbal fabrication falls away in the second jhana. Bodily fabrication falls away in the fourth. Ajaan Lee’s image is of smelting a piece of rock that has different types of ore in it. You get it to one temperature, the tin comes out. You get it to a higher temperature, the copper comes out. A … 
  14. Protection in all Directions
     … Things you haven’t really thought through carefully, things you’re not really sure about what your intention is: Suddenly it all gets let out. You end up saying things that are untrue or divisive or whatever. Particularly in terms of your sense of humor, you have to be very careful. Just because something is funny doesn’t mean it has to be said … 
  15. Your Actions Are Yours
     … There is a certain school of thought that says, when you’re practicing, you have to have the idea that there’s nobody there practicing. If you think that somebody’s practicing, you’re starting out with wrong view, and that’s going to skew everything. That’s what they say, but it’s obvious from the way the Buddha teaches Rahula that that … 
  16. An Auspicious Day
     … Because ultimately you’re going to be watching the mind, and it’s very easy when you’re watching the mind to get sucked into its different thought-worlds, so that you suddenly find yourself at some other place, some other time, not right here, right now. But if you’re with the breath, you know you’re in the present moment, because there … 
  17. Non-Verbal Discernment
     … Is it true or is it not true? Is it a mirage? How do you test? Whereas in Indian thought, especially prior to the Buddha, the basic paradigm was not the act of looking at something, it was the act of eating. This, they said, was the basic function of a human being, of any being: eating. The Buddha himself said that this was … 
  18. The World of the Body
     … As for other thoughts that may come to the mind, you can let them go. Try to stay in the world of the body right here. The mind is used to living in lots of different worlds. You’ve got the world of family, the world of work, the world of school, the world of the highway, the world of being a shopper. We … 
  19. To Be Worthy of the Dhamma
     … So let that thought be uplifting. It lifts your intent, lifts your heart, so that you can put even more energy into the practice.
  20. Faith as a Virtue
     … That doesn’t mean that you’re going to blame yourself for everything that shows up in the mind, but you do want to be careful about what kind of things you pick up to think about and what kind of thoughts you follow through with—or, as the Buddha says, bend your mind. Which directions do you want it to be bent in … 
  21. Endurance & Equanimity
     … That first thought—you don’t want to please the other person—is spiteful. Here you’re using spite in order to overcome the anger. At the very least, you get some control over it. Psychology has given a bad name for people who control their emotions. They think that in every case when you control an emotion it goes underground and turns into … 
  22. Load next page...