Search results for: "Thought"

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  2. Endurance
     … We think about: “Why did that person say that?” Or, “Why did that person do that? Why do they disrespect me? Why do they treat me so badly?” Those thoughts just eat away at you. If you can leave the sound at the contact, then you can tell yourself other stories. As when the Buddha has you remind yourself about unpleasant words: The nature … 
  3. Nibbana Is Better than You Think
     … You give the mind the sense of rapture, the sense of pleasure that comes simply from being secluded from sensuality, secluded from unskillful thoughts. Like we’re doing right now with the breath: There’s nothing sensual about the breath. It may feel good physically, but that’s not what the Buddha means by sensuality. Sensuality is your fascination with thinking about sensual pleasures … 
  4. Control
     … When you learn how to let go, sometimes you have to deal with a sense of its feeling really strange, because you’ve been holding on for so long, that when you let go, it feels very unusual, almost threatening, because you thought you had control over things by the way you held on. But it was probably an unskillful sense of control. When … 
  5. Generating Good Energy
     … He makes the point, though, that if you’re going to be spreading thoughts of goodwill, it has to come from a sense of well-being inside. His comparison is of opening a faucet. If there’s water coming out of the faucet, it’s cool in one way. If there’s just a lot of wind coming out of the faucet, it’s … 
  6. Holding on Strategically
     … Any thoughts that go out to pick up what that person is saying or to take it into your inside space, you can see that they’ve crossed that line. So you want to keep that line clear. Now as you’re sitting here meditating, you’re not dealing with other energies outside, but you want to have a good, strong sense that you … 
  7. Factors for Awakening
     … directing your thoughts to the breath, asking questions about it, using your discernment to get the mind in the mood to settle down and feel at home here. There’s another way, though, in which the Buddha explains the factors for awakening, and that’s for you to use whichever way your mind is tending in a particular time when you’re going to … 
  8. Overconfidence & Underconfidence
     … That’s what he thought. But he found as he was doing walking meditation and sitting meditation all the time, his mind got really frazzled, got more and more discouraged, and he ended up finding that puttering around was a way of putting himself in a good mood. Clean this up. Straighten that out. After a while, you find that cleaning this up and … 
  9. A Trained Observer
     … I always thought my approach to insight followed Ajaan Fuang. Majjhima 64 does talk about one way in which insight develops, in which you analyze your concentration. First into the different aggregates: When you’re sitting here, you’ve got form, which is the breath. Feeling, which is the feeling of pleasure you’re trying to develop. Perception, the image you hold in mind … 
  10. Treasures from the East
     … We’re putting aside all other thoughts. We have to be watchful about what we’re doing. You’re developing a habit, what the Buddha calls commitment and reflection. You commit to staying with one object and then you reflect on your mind to see how well it’s going. Then you’re ardent, trying to do this well, and resolute in the face … 
  11. Look after the Source
     … As you get wiser, you become more and more selective, and the meditation puts you in a better place to see really clearly aspects of your intentions that may not be as skillful as you thought they were. You get more refined in how you create your own internal becomings and the contributions you give to the becomings outside—the worlds and the other … 
  12. One Thing at a Time
     … Then there’s what he calls directed thought and evaluation, vitakka vicara, which is how you talk to yourself. So, here with the breath, talk to yourself in a way that’s encouraging, that helps you to stay. Finally, there are perceptions and feelings. You’re trying to create a feeling of ease, and you hold in mind whatever picture of the breath in … 
  13. Worlds to Watch Out For
     … So we work on the state of the mind to improve our intentions—to make them not just good, but skillful. “Good” is well-meaning. “Skillful” is not only well-meaning, but also involves checking up to see, when you do a well-meaning action, do the results actually come out well? If something you thought was good turns out to get bad results … 
  14. Mistakes
     … Anything that the mind might fabricate—in other words, anything that it would put together in terms of its thoughts, the way it talks to itself, the decisions it makes, the intentions it formulates—you’ve got to learn how to look at it in terms of this five-part questionnaire. That’s how you gain insight so that you’re not stuck on … 
  15. The Kamma of Meditation
     … The way you talk to yourself, what the Buddha calls directed thought and evaluation—verbal fabrication. And perceptions and feelings—mental fabrication. Those are your choices in the present moment. You can choose to breathe in different ways. You can choose to talk to yourself in different ways. You can choose your perceptions. You can choose the feelings you nurture. It’s because we … 
  16. From Dependence to Independence
     … As you get older, the body starts doing things that you never thought it would do. And it doesn’t ask for your permission. We like to think of life as having a meaning and a purpose, like a good plot in a story, with things coming to closure at the end. Well, things in life stop but they don’t come to closure … 
  17. Why We Bow Down
     … Then he said, “But then, of course, every place is sacred.” I thought to myself, “Well, no. If everything is sacred, where are you going to go to the bathroom?” Everything deserves a certain amount of respect, but some things deserve more respect than others. As you’re practicing, you want to have a sense that the path that the Buddha taught is something … 
  18. Different Minds, Different Bodies
     … how to read the mind, how to counteract any unskillful thoughts that are coming up, how to bring it into balance no matter where it’s getting tipped—forward or back, left, right, or whatever. Take that in stride as part of learning the skill of meditation. That means you learn how to translate your skill into all sorts of situations, so that you … 
  19. Four Bases of Success
     … Verbal fabrication is the way you talk to yourself—in the Buddha’s terms, it’s directed thought and evaluation. Mental fabrication has to do with perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the images by which the mind communicates with itself, either with pictures or with single words, assigning meanings to things so that you can recognize what they are. And feelings are feeling tones … 
  20. A Passion for the Path
     … We cling to our feelings, our perceptions, our thought fabrications, our consciousness. It’s because we cling to these things that we suffer. That’s what suffering is—and we’re passionate about it until we comprehend what’s going on.—in other words, we understand them to the point that we realize that they’re really not worth the passion that goes into … 
  21. The Allure of Sensuality
     … While we’re working here on concentration, one of the prerequisites for concentration is that you put aside sensuality and get your mind secluded from sensual thoughts. This doesn’t mean that you’re secluded from sensual pleasures. The pleasures themselves are not the problem. The problem is the fact that the mind keeps thinking about these things and planning how it would like … 
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