Search results for: "Thought"

  1. Page 134
  2. Lessons from the Buddha’s Awakening
     … His reflection on how it’d be hard to meet someone who hadn’t been a mother father, daughter, sister, son, or brother was not meant to encourage thoughts of goodwill for everybody, because after all, we know what family life is like. It has its positive and its negative side. But just the fact that you’ve had those close relationships so many … 
  3. Remembering Ajaan Lee
     … When you get into concentration, starting with the factors of the first jhāna—directed thought, evaluation, singleness of preoccupation, pleasure, and rapture—the ardency and alertness that get you from the practice of mindfulness into the practice of concentration get embodied in the evaluation. And here, Ajaan has a really good explanation for evaluation in this state of concentration—another one of the big … 
  4. The Six Properties
     … When your sense of the body is reduced to what the French would call pointillism, it’s a lot easier, simply with a thought, to emphasize either the heaviness or the lightness, the movement, the warmth or the coolness of those sensations, the sensation-potentials you’ve got there. This way you accomplish two things at once. On the one hand you balance out … 
  5. An Issue of Control
     … Some people thought that karma was deterministic: Something you’d done in the past was going to totally shape what you’re experiencing right now. Others would say it’s all irrelevant; what you’re doing has no impact on anything. But from the Buddha’s point of view, things that come in from the past have an influence, but you have choices in … 
  6. Victory
     … But with victories out there in the world, one side wins and the other side that lost is determined to come back some day with the thought, “We’ll see what we can do the next time around.” It goes on and on and on, like that story of the two women. Apparently, in a previous lifetime, one of them had been a major … 
  7. Appreciating Merit
     … of being generous, being virtuous, developing thoughts of goodwill. In that formula for the Sanghadana, the gifts given to the Sangha, at the very end it says, “Please may the Sangha accept this for our long-term welfare and happiness”—i.e., so that we can do the act of merit and find the happiness in that action. But merit doesn’t mean you … 
  8. The Buddha’s Medicine
     … Maybe you thought there might be a little bit of food film left over on the counter. But there were all those germs there as well. So the first thing you’ve got to do is to feed the mind properly. A sense of well-being with the breath helps an awful lot in that way. You breathe in, breathe out, and try to … 
  9. Pleasant Practice, Painful Practice
     … So we bring the other factors that shape our experience—our ways of directing our thoughts to a topic and evaluating it—and we apply them to the breath in a way that also gives rise to the way we shape the mind through feelings and perceptions. In other words, we have labels we place on the breath, and we have perceptions that tell … 
  10. Feeding on Open Wounds
     … One unskillful thought feeds off of another, off of another. That can take it in strange directions. But when we do have sensory contact, we open ourselves to all kinds of things. We live in a world where all kinds of things can happen: all kinds of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, ideas, good or bad. And we’re constantly exposed. The Buddha … 
  11. Abandoning Effluents (2)
     … our thoughts of getting upset around the pain, the things we tell ourselves about the pain, the perceptions we have—in other words, the way we fabricate around the pain. Those added arrows are the ones that really go into the heart. The first arrow only goes as far as the body, yet we don’t realize that because we’re pulling it in … 
  12. Different Paths Go Different Places
     … They thought that he was reflecting on how happy he’d been as a king and was now missing his kingly pleasures. So they informed the Buddha. The Buddha called the monk into his presence and asked him, “Why is it that you’re sitting under a tree exclaiming, ‘What bliss! What bliss!’ What do you have in mind?” And the monk said, “Well … 
  13. Safety in an Uncertain World
     … Verbal is directed thought and evaluation, how you talk to yourself. Mental is perceptions and feelings: the labels you put on things and the feeling tones you focus on. Your emotions are composed of these things, and you want to learn how to see them that way. They may be old habits. We may say that something we’ve done since childhood is really … 
  14. Truth as Medicine
     … Learn to look at your own thoughts in the same way, because everything you know about the Buddha’s teachings is filtered through your own point of view, your own way of thinking. You’ve got to look at your own point of view and your own way of thinking to see where it’s helpful, where it’s harmful. As we often discover … 
  15. Dependent Co-arising Right Now
     … directed thought and evaluation, and there are perceptions that hold identify the breath, and then the feelings that come as you stay with the breath or don’t stay with the breath: feelings of pleasure or feelings of dis-ease. But you can convert them to more feelings of pleasure if you use the right perceptions. So here’s an immediate way of dealing … 
  16. Merit: Actively Happy
     … So thoughts of goodwill are nourishment for your generosity and nourishment for your virtue. The Buddha also calls them a kind of restraint, in the sense that if you have goodwill for someone, it’ll restrain you from harming them. The Buddha also calls goodwill a resolution and a form of mindfulness. It’s something we have to make up our mind to do … 
  17. Customs of the Noble Ones
     … You might be focused on feelings around these things, perceptions around these things, thoughts, acts of evaluation, even craving for these things—you can crave the craving. So when you think you crave one thing, ask yourself: Is it really that thing? Is that where your craving is located? Maybe it’s in the perception you have about this thing, an association you have … 
  18. A Meditation Karma Checklist
     … And be very clear on the fact that even though we’re here trying to get the mind into right concentration, you can have all kinds of thoughts about jhana—this level of jhana, that level of jhana—don’t make the jhana the object of your meditation. The object is going to be the breath. So don’t just sit there engaging in … 
  19. If at First You Don’t Succeed
     … For instance, you’re sitting here meditating, other thoughts come up, and you realize that there will come a point where you just watch them come and watch them go so that you can understand them, but first you’ve got to learn how to step out of them. It’s like when they teach Thai boxing. I took lessons in Thai boxing when … 
  20. Fear of Death
     … You take the precepts and develop thoughts of goodwill, for yourself, for the people you’ve wronged, for everybody. That can change your course. One of the Buddh’as insights into the workings of karma is that it’s not the case that everybody who does something wrong in this lifetime is going to have to be punished in the next lifetime. If you … 
  21. As Days & Nights Fly Past, Fly Past
     … the way you talk to yourself; the thoughts that you latch on to. To what extent are you dwelling in the past? It’s very easy during a lockdown like this, where you find yourself spending more and more time with yourself, with fewer and fewer opportunities for doing other things to distract yourself. You start digging up old issues. Remember: Those days and … 
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