Search results for: "Thought"
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- Change… So when that thought comes up—“It doesn’t matter”—ask yourself, “It doesn’t matter in what context?” The context of quick hits? The context of apathy? Or the context of your true best interest? As the Buddha says, it’s good keep in mind that there are beings who have found the way to true happiness, who’ve attained true happiness. They …
- Things as They Function… And two, as you get quicker and quicker at stopping them, you begin to see the stages, the steps by which a thought world develops around a desire that forms the kernel, the nucleus. But you also see that you don’t have to go there. And you can see the steps from the outside and not go in. That way, you can stop …
- Understanding Aggregates… Fabrication starts out especially with directed thought and evaluation. You talk to yourself about how it’s going and then you make adjustments—that too is fabrication—until things get just right. You get the feeling you want and then you continue your work with it, you spread it around so that, eventually, you’re aware of the whole body. The sense of ease …
- Teaching Old Dogs New Selves… With your body, your thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and especially your awareness, there are aspects here that you can control, and so you say, “They’re useful for this or that purpose, and holding onto them in this way or that way I can get some happiness.” And you identify with that happiness. So you identify with the tools for getting that happiness as well …
- A Friend When You’re on Your Own… Which means the friends you want to take into the meditation are the voices that are going to be doing the directed thought and evaluation—not only evaluating the relationship of the mind to the breath but also evaluating the value of being with the breath, the value of maintaining a center as you go through life, and the value of remembering the practices …
- Three Noble Truths Versus Four… The directed thought and evaluation that adjust the breath to fit the mind, adjust the mind to fit the breath: That’s fabrication. And then there’s the consciousness that’s aware of these things. You turn those five aggregates into a state of concentration. And in doing so, you’re fighting against those three perceptions of inconstant, stressful, and not-self. You’re …
- Things as They’ve Come to Be… Right here and now as we’re meditating, verbal fabrication—what the Buddha calls directed thought and evaluation—is the way you talk to yourself about the breath. How is the breath going right now? Is it too long? Too short? Too fast? Too slow? How is the mind in relationship to the breath? Is it ready to settle down? There are times, the …
- Generosity of Spirit… You’ve got the breath, that’s your bodily fabrication; you’ve got directed thought and evaluation, verbal fabrication, and your feelings and perceptions are mental fabrication. For the most part, as we go through life—especially if we have little training in meditation—we wound ourselves by the way we fabricate the present moment. We breathe in ways that are uncomfortable. We talk …
- Ultimate Reality… your fascination with sensual thoughts. Craving for becoming: taking on an identity in a world of experience, centered on a particular thing that you want to get or want to gain. And craving for non-becoming: You’ve got a becoming — a world or a sense of self — that you want to destroy. These three kinds of craving are the cause of suffering, and …
- The Limits of Control… It changes in line with the thought. And if something is you, then it’s also going to be yours. If you’re at one with everything, then the piece of land next to ours is yours. The cars in the parking lot are yours. Everything that comes along should be yours. But it’s not. Try to go and exert your ownership over …
- Delight in Striving… Verbal being the way you talk to yourself—what the Buddha defines as direct thought and evaluation—you pick a topic, you focus on the topic, and then you ask questions about it and come up with answers. And then there’s mental fabrication, which is perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the labels you’ve put on things—that identify what they are, what …
- Life in the Buddha’s Hospital… If I let go of the desire to finish that project, things go a lot more easily.” At the same time, if I let go of my desire for him to care for his illness in the way I thought best, it made things a lot easier around the monastery. Especially for me, and — probably in no small measure — for him as well. When …
- Calm… you’re going to need to use your powers of concentration and discernment. And where are you going to develop those?” Well, by focusing on the breath—so come on back. Thoughts like that calm the mind down; feelings like that calm the mind down. As for perceptions, look at how you perceive the breath. What images do you have in mind as the …
- Cooking the Present Moment… You’re using your perceptions and you’re using your thought constructs. If you’re doing it unskillfully, there’s going to be more pain—in other words, more mental pain on top of the physical pain. So you have to learn how to perceive the pain in such a way that it’s not weighing the mind down. Then there’s the ability …
- Overcoming Complacency… How do you relate to your own thoughts? How do you relate to your perceptions? Learn how to relate in more skillful ways. You can’t let go of anything until you’ve become skillful at it, the one exception being sex: as the Buddha says, the most skillful thing you can do with sex is to let go of it. But with other …
- 1. The Entertaining Breath… Some of them are in the book Inner Strength, some are in *The Skill of Release, Food for Thought. *They basically came from seeing what the body needed, what way of conceiving the breath, what way of adjusting the breath energy, helped for that particular imbalance in the body, that particular problem in the body. He was always willing to learn, always willing to …
- Unfabricated Happiness… one, simply out of the effort to put these things together, and two, you can come up with all kinds of ideas, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, that can wreak a lot of havoc in the mind. When the mind is punishing itself this way, it’s going to suffer, and the punishment doesn’t stop there. It spreads out to other people. So follow the …
- When You Don’t Like Your Selves… Sometimes the scripts are pretty ill-thought out, and they’re put together in a very haphazard way. We’re doing a lot of this in ignorance, just grabbing hold of whatever we think we can identify with, whatever would be useful at that time, then finding out later we’ve grabbed on to burning coals. So, what are the Buddha’s recommendations? He …
- Hold on to Right View… Someone once asked me, if I wanted to put the basic message of the Buddha’s teachings into one sentence for someone who knew nothing about it, “What would you say?” I had heard another teacher say, “Your thoughts are not yours,” which didn’t strike me as especially useful. So I said, “Your actions have results, so be very careful about what you …
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