Search results for: "Thought"

  1. Page 125
  2. Anger
     … Bodily fabrication being the in-and-out breath; verbal being directed thought and evaluation being the way you talk to yourself; and mental fabrication being perceptions—mental labels, acts of recognition, acts of imaging things to yourself—along with feelings. You use these things to create a state of concentration. But then as you go through the day, you begin to notice that you … 
  3. The Acrobat
     … It’s important to keep this thought in mind. When you’re meditating, often it seems as if you’re working only for your own good. It gets lonely, and you seem to be getting self-centered. It seems, if anything, to increase the narcissism that’s already endemic in our culture. So it’s important to remember that while you’re meditating here … 
  4. The Buddha’s Map
     … When the Buddha teaches, he has to use these aggregates to teach us, so the views he’s offering us—the perceptions and thought-fabrications he recommends that we adopt—are just a sketch. After all, everything we do has to depend on a perception of some kind. We can’t comprehend all the sensory input that’s coming in at any one moment … 
  5. Factions in the Mind
     … That takes you out of the back-and-forth of the thoughts in your mind. This separate perspective is what allows the mind to train itself. As the Buddha said, training the mind is something you have to do for yourself. Other people can’t do it for you. They can point out the way, but the actual work is something you have to … 
  6. Virtues Bright & Neither Dark nor Bright
     … But as thoughts of the day come in as you’re trying to get the mind to settle down and you realize you’ve harmed nobody—you’ve held by your principles—it’s easy for the mind to get settled down and to stay. That’s the kind of virtue the Buddha said is pleasing to the noble ones. On the one hand … 
  7. Living Honorably
     … In fact, they try to push that awareness out of their minds—because for most people, it’s too depressing a thought. They don’t know how to handle it, so they push it away. One of the marks of wisdom is that you don’t push it away. You try to figure out how to live in the presence of the possibility of … 
  8. Becoming Consummate
     … When you see a thought that would have pulled you out go out but you’re not going out with it, that’s an important milestone in the meditation. You see the flow of the mind, but you don’t flow along with it. You’re right here. That’s when your sense of observer gets more and more reliable, and becomes something you … 
  9. How Completion is Found
     … Try to put that thought out of your mind. Just say, “I’ve got this moment.” And what do you do with this moment? You do the most skillful thing. The Buddha’s path is a path of actions: physical actions, verbal actions, mental actions. Like right now while we’re meditating: Meditation is a mental action, there’s an intention involved. The intention … 
  10. Worldly Effort
     … There really is a deathless.” And you really can find it through your own efforts, purifying your thoughts, your words, and your deeds. So it’s useful to reflect on the imperfections of the world so that you don’t get stuck there. Even the goodness you do in the world has its drawbacks. You help people and all of a sudden you get … 
  11. Bless Yourself
     … You remind yourself that there are people in the world who can read minds. “What would they think if they were reading my mind when I’m thinking of giving up on the practice?” You’d be ashamed to hold on to those thoughts. Then you realize that their concern for you is based on compassion, that they’re not out there just judging … 
  12. Volunteer Spirit
     … What’s this ‘should’ in here? I thought Buddhism didn’t have any shoulds.” The “should” there is conditional. If you want to aim at the state of peace, this is what you have to do, because this is the way things are. But the choice is yours. So remember that as we go through the day, our generosity should be inspired by voluntary … 
  13. Bringing Right resolve
     … Once you have that understanding and you act on it, you resolve that you really do want to find true happiness, you want to honor your desire for true happiness, and you’re going to be very scrupulous and thoughtful about how you look for happiness. You would think that people would pay a lot more attention to what causes true happiness as opposed … 
  14. Solidly Here
     … For the time being, whatever other thoughts come up, you don’t have to deal with them. Just let them go, let them go. You’re trying to create the sense of solid center right here. It’s only when your awareness is solid and your gaze is steady that you can see things clearly in the mind. You can understand the intentions that … 
  15. Breath Energies
    An emotion is a thought that has an impact not only on the mind but also on the body. And it has that impact through the breath. Not only the in-and-out breath, but also the breath energies moving throughout the different parts of the body: along the blood vessels, along the nerves. It’s strange that some people don’t even think … 
  16. Dethinking Thinking
     … Would they know how to build a dam? Would they know how to build a lodge? So they released them into a stream, and sure enough, very quickly, the first thing they thought about was building a dam, then a lodge. It was instinctive. In the same way, our minds are very instinctive about creating states of becoming. We create little worlds, and then … 
  17. The Power is in Your Hands
     … At first, you may not see all that much, just the mind slipping off either into distracting thoughts or into sleepiness. But you can’t let that get you discouraged because there’s no other way out. You’ve got to learn how to develop a foundation here. This is going to require some ingenuity so that you can get around these ways in … 
  18. For When the World Can’t Help You
     … You always wonder what the person thought at that point when even the best doctors said, “Well, sorry we can’t help you now,” what that person was able to do. If they had a practice, they could focus on that. If they didn’t, their minds would be all over the place. It’s good to think about that. There will be a … 
  19. Energizing Your Meditation
     … So you find a calm way of breathing, and think about how to put the mind in a calm state, putting that thought of “resting” foremost in your awareness. Often, you end up putting yourself to sleep, which is not meditation at all. Meditation means developing. You’re not trying to develop sloth and torpor; you’re trying to develop alertness, ardency, mindfulness. So … 
  20. The Buddha’s Vipassana
     … So you have to ask yourself, “Why did you want to get involved?” And then you notice when whatever it was that you thought you were getting out of it no longer interests you, you let it go. That’s how it goes. And seeing that gives you some insight into what’s going on. Then the next questions are, “What’s the allure … 
  21. The Path of Questions
     … Meditation is not a matter of stopping your thought processes right away. Eventually there does come a point where thinking gets more and more attenuated until you can hardly call it thinking at all. But in the mean time, before you can get there, you have to learn how to use your thinking skillfully, so you apply it to the issue of concentration, apply … 
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