Search results for: "Thought"

  1. Page 133
  2. Listening to the True Dhamma
     … But the people who listened to them with the thought, “Well, even though they’re poor, there’s always the possibility that they may know something I don’t know”: Those were the ones who benefitted from listening. Second, you don’t look down on the content of the talk. You want to think about how it fits in with what you already know … 
  3. The Buddha’s Cure
     … Sometimes you mean well, but if you’re acting out of ignorance, or you haven’t really thought the issue through carefully, that would count as an unskillful intention. So, as the Buddha said, you look at your intentions and try to act only in cases where you think that your intentions are harmless. Then, as you’re following through with those harmless intentions … 
  4. Commit Yourself
     … When other thoughts come up in the mind. you’re not going to go there. Once you’ve made up your mind that way, you have to stick with it. This is the only way your momentary concentration is going to turn into anything stronger, what they call access concentration, when you finally do let go of other things. You’re not yet totally … 
  5. A Pleasure Not to Be Feared
     … Think thoughts of goodwill: a wish for happiness, true happiness, your own true happiness and the true happiness of all the beings. That’s the good thing about true happiness: Your true happiness doesn’t have to take anything away from anyone else’s true happiness, doesn’t conflict with it, because it comes from within. That’s why we’re meditating, to find … 
  6. Mending the Social Fabric
     … Spread thoughts of goodwill around. You create a good energy around yourself that way. And the world needs more good energy of this sort. It’s what helps to mend the social fabric. After all, if human society were not based on goodwill, it wouldn’t be a very desirable society to live in. People tend to forget that when they have other things … 
  7. Guarding the Truth
     … There’s directed thought and evaluation. The Buddha calls that verbal fabrication. You’re working with the breath. That’s bodily fabrication. You have a perception of how the breath comes in and out of the body, and you’re creating feelings of pleasure as best you can. Those are mental fabrications. You’re doing this by maintaining that intention to stay with the … 
  8. Calming Mental Fabrication
     … That’s directed thought and evaluation. There’s a conscious effort to open things up. But once you get past that, think of the spring water coming into the lake. The spring water doesn’t have any intention. Just the fact that everything is wide open allows it to flow. That stands for the flow of rapture. Now, there are passages where Ajaan Lee … 
  9. Making a Refuge
     … In this way, you can take advantage of the protection that comes from being with good people, picking up their habits and having those habits firmly developed in your mind—in your thoughts and your words and your deeds.
  10. Bases of Power
     … As you start dealing with your sense of the body as you feel it from within, you begin to realize that there are certain things that you thought were in back but are actually in front. There are a lot of parts of our body that we’ve mislabeled. So if there’s a pain in the back, ask yourself, “What if this is … 
  11. The Buddha’s Narrative
     … Are you going to go running for the pleasures? What kinds of pleasures? What kind of happiness are you going to go running for? As the Buddha said, the desire for happiness is something to be honored, something you should take seriously—not in a grim way, but in a concerted, thoughtful, and intelligent way. What kind of happiness will satisfy you? When we … 
  12. Genuine Goodness
    Think thoughts of goodwill: goodwill for yourself, goodwill for others. Goodwill as a wish for happiness, but what we want here is a special kind of goodwill—a wish for true happiness, a happiness that doesn’t change, that’s not affected by time, not affected by any conditions at all. That’s a special kind of happiness, and this is a special kind … 
  13. Bringing Daily Life into the Practice
     … directed thought and evaluation. Every time you speak, you first have to choose a topic and then make a mental comment on it. You’ll be bringing those two activities, or those two skills, into your concentration, so make sure they’re well trained before you apply them to concentration. You’ll find that your practice will go a lot more smoothly. The fourth … 
  14. A Good Independent Self
     … It’s a good practice when, for example, you’re suffering from a disease, and there are a lot of things you can’t do, you can still think thoughts of goodwill. That way, the goodness and happiness of your mind don’t have to depend on the health of your body. Think of the case of the Buddha. Devadatta had rolled a stone … 
  15. Mastering Pleasure & Pain
     … You learn how to be a connoisseur of the pleasure, learning to appreciate how really nice it can be to breathe, with a sense of fullness in the body, how refreshing that can be, because you’re going to need that appreciation to deal with your thoughts of sensuality. So appreciate the breath. Savor the breath. As the Buddha says, when the mind settles … 
  16. Many I’s, Many Eyes
     … The more of these eyes you have working with you, the more quickly you’ll be able to see when the mind has slipped off and, if it has slipped off, how you can drop that thought even if it’s in mid-sentence or mid-word. Just bring it right back. Then keep watch again. This way, you have a system of checks … 
  17. The Source of Goodness
     … what’s going on in the mind, because the breath does mirror the events in the mind. That puts you a lot more in touch with what’s going on inside. Thoughts and emotions will show up in the breath. You can use the skills we’ve been talking about: learning to breathe through the tension, finding the parts that are the comfortable, letting … 
  18. Unskillful Voices
     … As I said, when you start to be mindful of your feelings, mindful of your thoughts and emotions, you start seeing things that you don’t like. Some of us try to put them out of mind, and in doing so we can create a little area of the mind where everything gets shoved away. Of course, those things are going to eventually come … 
  19. Vows
     … As you learn to push yourself a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more than you thought possible, you find that each little bit becomes quite a lot. It all adds up, and you find that the practice can take you to places that you otherwise wouldn’t have imagined.
  20. The Story-telling Mind
     … One of the basic ways of doing this is to reflect on the passage we chanted just now, developing thoughts of goodwill, compassion, appreciation, and equanimity. Try to develop these attitudes with respect to those stories so that you can tell yourself new stories that are easier to let go of in a liberating way. In other words, you don’t just push the … 
  21. Artillery All Around
     … You’re dealing with your directed thoughts, evaluations, and perceptions. If you’re feeling lazy, it’s good to think about death, realizing that death can come at any time. You may feel that we’re living in a safe environment here, and it is relatively safe, but it’s not absolutely. You go out at night and there are snakes. We’ve had … 
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