Search results for: "Thought"

  1. Page 135
  2. Training the Mind
     … But there’s also just the samsara of the mind wandering around, checking this out and checking that out, thinking about this, thinking about that—going off in all kinds of thought worlds like little bubbles that float away and then pop. Then you have to come back. You’ve been doing this for a long time, so it’s going to take a … 
  3. Attachment to Views
     … There are times when he talks about papañca as being a bad thing, but you actually see him using a papañca-type thought, the thinking that deals in terms of people’s identities: who you are in the world in which you live, the level of being which you’re occupying right now. He talks in those terms to motivate people to practice. There … 
  4. The Buddha’s Conventions
     … In other words, the Buddha is going to condition us as to what kind of perceptions are useful, what kind of thought constructs are useful, what ways of fabricating our experience will be helpful in that direction. He teaches us how to use these things as tools, knowing that at some point we’ll have to put our tools aside. It’s like being … 
  5. Good Fundamentals
     … We straighten ourselves out in thought, word, and deed, set a good example for others, share our knowledge when we can, and stop causing suffering both for ourselves and for all other beings, This, the Buddha said, is one of the greatest gifts you can give to others, if not the greatest gift of all.
  6. The Humane Quality of the Path
     … It’s just that your actions sometimes get the desired results, or sometimes they get the good results you desired, but they turn out to be not as good as you thought they’d be. But a lot of times they get totally undesired results, not what you wanted at all. So the practice is a matter of learning how to retrain yourself. When … 
  7. What Am I Becoming?
     … We’ve got the breath; we’ve got directed thought and evaluation. These are things we’re doing all the time: breathing in, breathing out; thinking about this, evaluating that. So we take these things we’re doing all the time and we point them in the right direction. We’ve got perceptions and images in the mind; feelings that we develop through the … 
  8. The Whole Elephant
     … What he thought was valuable was not. The gaining of sight, of course, is the gaining of the Dhamma eye, when you see that there is really something deathless; and it can be obtained through the path. So we’re here to get over our blindness. And we have to take as our encouragement the principle that it is possible to get over our … 
  9. Skills of the Dhamma Wheel
     … It also meant to bring the right framework, the right framework of thought and questioning, to see how you can get the most out of what he has to say. Then you take that framework and apply it to your practice. For instance, as you’re sitting here right now: Where in the breath is stress? What quality of mind can you bring to … 
  10. Purity
     … This is how people purify themselves, purify their thoughts, their words, their deeds. And that kind of purity also leads to a pure happiness: pure not only in the sense of being totally harmless, but also in the sense of being totally unalloyed, with not the least bit of conditionality touching it. In some spots the Buddha calls it living the holy life pure … 
  11. Terror & Revulsion
     … We cling to form, feeling, perceptions, thought-constructs, and consciousness because we think we’ll get some nourishment out of them. For the most part, though, they’re like junk food—they give pleasure, but no real nourishment, and can actually be harmful. But once we’ve turned them into the health food of the path, and they’ve strengthened us as much as … 
  12. Cook Your Mind
     … You get hands-on practice in using those aggregates to develop skillful thoughts, to calm the mind down, to create a state of concentration. Then when the mind is in concentration, you begin to see the aggregates even more clearly—and you can see that they really are stressful. They really are not worth holding on to, as long as you keep in mind … 
  13. sBeyond Acceptance
     … All of those thoughts count as fabrication. Then there’s the consciousness that’s aware of these things. So the Buddha says to develop this, which means to take these aggregates you’ve got and make them into something useful—like that image of the raft going across the river. You don’t just dump twigs and branches and leaves and vines into the … 
  14. Xtreme Drama
     … There is also extremism in our thoughts. If it’s not total sensual indulgence, it’s total abstinence. When the mind looks at abstinence as wrong, so it goes running to the indulgence without really realizing that there is a middle way. There are sensual pleasures that are innocent, that are harmless. Mahakassapa, who was one of the strictest of the Buddha’s monks … 
  15. The Brightness of Life
     … Even the five aggregates—form, feeling, perception, thought-fabrications, and consciousness: The Buddha says that they do have their pleasant side. They’re not all suffering. So his understanding of life, his understanding of the world, had a lot more nuance—and was a lot more useful. He didn’t say life is suffering. When he made his shortest explanation of suffering, he says … 
  16. The Breath Soufflé
     … Because what happens? What is a past or future thought? You basically lose the context of the body and you create another world. As long as you keep reinforcing, “whole body, whole body, whole body,” it’s very hard to slip into those other worlds. As you become more aware of the breathing energies in the different parts of the body, that moves you … 
  17. Over the Pass
     … He says, “The Buddha made himself large in terms of his thoughts, his words, and his deeds. But before he made himself large, he had to make himself very small.” Think of him out in the forest, first suffering through all those austerities, and who was there? There were just five other people who cared about him. Nobody else cared. And then there came … 
  18. The Not-Self Discourse
     … Your perceptions and thoughts can turn on you, and even your consciousness of good things passes away. So the first argument is that these things don’t lie under your control. The argument about control shows up only a few more times in the Canon. There’s one great passage where a professional debater is coming to attack the Buddha on the question of … 
  19. The Treasure of Equanimity
     … But there was one point after we thought that he wasn’t going to be sitting up anymore, when a group of people came up the back of the mountain, moving in on the property of the monastery, cutting down some of our trees, burning what they had cut down, and laying claim to the property as if it were their own. The old … 
  20. Lessons in Happiness
     … Once you have that sense of pleasure, that sense of well-being, then it’s a lot easier to spread thoughts of goodwill in an unlimited way. Because if you’re feeling put upon, feeling simply the desire to run away, it’s hard to wish happiness for anybody, much less happiness for all living beings unconditionally. Once you develop the sense of pleasure … 
  21. Right Mindfulness
     … As for anything else that may come up—whether it’s a thought, a feeling, or an interaction—try to see how it relates to the body. This is how you strengthen your frame of reference and turn it into an object of concentration. When you’re talking with someone else, notice how your body is reacting during the talking. When you’re working … 
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