Search results for: "Thought"

  1. Page 129
  2. Feelings Not of the Flesh
     … doesn’t bode well for me,” you should say to yourself. “I can’t bring my mind in line with the Buddha’s teachings.” The feeling that goes along with that thought is painful. It’s not a physical feeling necessarily, but there is a mental pain that goes along with it: “Why can’t I get my mind to settle down?” The Buddha … 
  3. The Pleasure of Concentration
    We start the meditation every evening with thoughts of goodwill for the entire world. So why are we sitting here with our eyes closed? Why aren’t we out there helping the world? We’re sitting here with our eyes closed helping the world. After all, everyone in the world wants happiness. Everyone in the world wants well-being. And for the most part … 
  4. Goodwill for the Whole Committee
     … We meditate so that we can have a common ground where we can start looking at them, recognizing them for what they are, and then learning how to deal with them in a more effective way, so that all of our actions in thought, word, and deed actually do conduce to happiness. That’s what this is all about. There are lots of ephemeral … 
  5. Peace of Mind
     … our efforts in life are good efforts: things we can look back on and be proud of, because they come out of the sense of peace that you work on inside. Thoughts, words, and deeds that come from this peaceful center are bound to be a good force in life. So when you’re looking for what makes life worthwhile, what makes life a … 
  6. Becoming Capable of Happiness
     … This is why you have to motivate yourself with thoughts of heedfulness, realizing that if you don’t change your actions, no improvements are going to come. So you have to keep at it, keep at it. This is why we have those reflections about aging, illness, and death, the world being swept away, the reflection the Buddha has you make every day that … 
  7. Focus on Your Intention
     … the breath that you’re focusing on; the feeling of pleasure you’re trying to create by the way you focus; the perception of the breath as a whole-body process that helps you stay with the breath and helps that feeling of pleasure to spread through the body; the fabrication, the directed thought and evaluation by which you adjust the breath, adjust the … 
  8. True Honesty
     … What does it mean to act? Where does the intention form? How does the intention move the body? How does it move speech? How does it move our thoughts? This is where we have to look. This is why the issue of skillfulness is so important. It’s not a distraction. I think I’ve told you the story about the young man at … 
  9. Meditator, Mediator
     … That’s why they had all those problems in Zen and the other teachings where they thought that we should be trying to see our true nature, and that worrying about the path would get in the way of seeing your true nature. But that’s not what the Buddha taught. You’re working a path. It’s like the gradual slope that goes … 
  10. Brahmaviharas & Noble Truths
     … The idea that you make up your own path, or that you have to adjust the path to fit to your culture, was not in the Buddha’s range of thought at all. When he taught the four noble truths, he said that each has a duty. The duty with regard to the path is to develop it. Also, there’s a right path … 
  11. Big Desire, Detailed Focus
     … If anything comes up in the mind that’s going to pull you away, you recognize that “Ah, this is a hindrance.” Thoughts that in the course of the normal day would be perfectly okay are not welcome now. You’re setting the mind on a task, which is to get it to settle down with a sense of well-being. So when you … 
  12. The Karma of Self
     … This is where thought of the self as having some control is useful in motivating you to make good use of that control. There are two other areas where the Buddha and Ven. Ananda specifically talk about the usefulness of self. In the first one, the Buddha talks about the self as what he calls a governing principle, where you’re supposed to remind … 
  13. Imagine
     … If you hold that perception in mind, it’s harder and harder to have distracting thoughts, because you’re trying to be sensitive to every cell in the body all at the same time, giving them all space to expand and contract, expand and contract. When they contract, don’t squeeze things out. Let the breath just gradually come out on its own. Think … 
  14. Delight & Beyond Delight
     … Let that thought se****e you through.
  15. Heightened Skillfulness
     … Anything that’s unskillful—in thought, word, or deed—you try to avoid. You don’t say, “Well, I have enough goodness already in me that I can afford to be lenient on some things”—in other words, to be unskillful in some areas—but who wants pain in any situation? Who wants suffering in any situation? When you really have seen the Dhamma … 
  16. From Darkness to Light
     … What I thought I liked is causing suffering. Things I hold on to: That’s suffering in and of itself.” Taking that attitude is taking a noble attitude. And that’s the attitude that will set you free.
  17. The Right Time at the Right Place
     … Right here in the state of concentration, you’ve got the form of the body, you’ve got feelings of pleasure, you’ve got the perception that holds you here, you’ve got the fabrications of directed thought and evaluation that are your internal analysis—your internal conversation on how to get the mind and the breath together well—and then there’s consciousness … 
  18. Equanimity
     … We usually don’t like to use the word “defilement” with regard to our thoughts and emotions, but that’s often what they are. They cloud the mind; they darken the mind. The equanimity that comes from concentration is useful in some cases in dealing with problems of the mind, because you begin to see that the mind has all kinds of ways of … 
  19. Training in Happiness
     … Sometimes there were times we thought we should lie to get away with something, so somebody wouldn’t punish us or get mad at us. But over the long term, we’ve learned that that doesn’t work. We don’t feel good about ourselves. We have to keep covering up a lie with more lies, and that never ends. But if you always … 
  20. Respect as a Sign of Intelligence
     … That struck me, because I thought back to my high school days, and the attitude among the kids in high school seemed to be that the smart kids were the ones who showed disrespect. But although they may have been smart in one way, they weren’t really intelligent. After all, if you show disrespect to other people, then if they have something of … 
  21. Delight in Persistence
     … I thought to myself, “If anybody needs to learn something about skillful and unskillful actions, it’s him. He’s using abstractions to avoid looking at his own behavior.” So as you’re sitting here and there’s a pain in the knee, don’t regard it simply as an obstacle. Try to understand and take joy in understanding it. “I’ve been dealing … 
  22. Load next page...