Search results for: "Thought"
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- Pain & the Middle Way… In this case, the people below are all the thoughts in the mind that are rushing around: worried about pain; worried about pleasure. Up here you can look at them. You don’t have to identify with them. Ajaan Lee’s comment is interesting. Learn to get to the position where you can see the words “pleasure” and “pain” as things that people say …
- Healing Awareness… They would be met with goodwill and love, they thought. So the rocket landed, and they saw these little furry creatures running around on the ground and up the side of the rocket. The sensor on the rocket was pegging out: high level of love; high level of goodwill. So they opened the doors to the rocket, and the little creatures came in and …
- Listening to the Body… And as far as anticipating the results, or getting anxious about the results, wondering when they’re going to appear, just let those thoughts go. You’ve only got one thing you’ve got to do right now, and that’s to allow the breathing to feel good on the left side of the abdomen. It’s not much. Just one step at a …
- Take Heart… You get used to cultivating thoughts of, “How can I be generous? How can I hold to the precepts more consistently? How can I have goodwill for larger and larger numbers of people more consistently?” If you have a mind that’s thinking in those directions, it’s a lot easier to watch that mind, observe that mind. That’s how insight is based …
- Against Your Type… Sometimes thinking thoughts of goodwill can help provide that sense of inspiration. Or you can recollect the Buddha and what a wonderful teacher he was. Here was someone who, after his awakening, had no need for anything from anybody, and yet he spent 45 years walking all over Northern India to teach anyone who was ready to be taught. And he taught not because …
- The Noble Truths of the Breath… One time he recommended breath meditation to the monks, and one of them said, “Well, I do breath meditation already.” And the Buddha said, “Oh? What kind of breath meditation do you do?” The monk said, “I put aside all thoughts of the past and all hopes for the future, and just stay equanimous about what’s happening in the present as I breathe …
- Goodwill, Gratitude, No Guilt… In some systems of thought, the idea is that good actions come from putting other people ahead of yourself, and that one way of putting them ahead of yourself is to make yourself feel miserable about yourself—that you’re an unworthy person, you’re not worthy of being happy. Other people somehow are. But that’s not a healthy way of approaching the …
- Modest, Unentangled, Unburdensome… His predominant thought is, ‘Let nobody find out about me.’” That’s the kind of attitude you should have as a practitioner. People don’t have to know. This is directly related to one of the internal qualities that we develop in the practice, which is shedding: shedding your pride, shedding the need to look good in the eyes of others. If you have …
- Battling the Hindrances… Can’t meditate so late tonight.” When you’re worried, the things that have you worried really are worthy of worry, even though five minutes ago you hadn’t even thought about them, and ten minutes from now you may not again. But right now, these hindrances seem so convincing that you don’t even see them as hindrances. So you have to learn …
- Observing the Mind at the Breath… If thoughts of sensuality are disturbing the mind, how do you cut them out so that you can settle down? That’s abandoning the cause of stress. If the mind has settled down but it’s still talking to itself about the breath, talking to itself about adjusting the breath, how do you know when to stop? A fair amount of that is necessary …
- The Endurance of a Long-distance Runner… We endure them as they happen to us in the body, in our ears, but we don’t allow unskillful thoughts to develop around them in the mind. Here again, it’s a matter of what the Buddha calls the three kinds of fabrication. The first factor in dependent co-arising, after ignorance, you get fabrication. Fabrication is what shapes your experience of the …
- Dissolving Distress… Any thoughts having to do with the world, even you in the world, you want to put aside. And to do that, you have to make the world uninteresting. And for most of us all of our interest in life has to do with stories around the world: things we want out of it, things that have happened in the past, memories that are …
- Choices that Matter… He realized that the worst thought that came to him as he was going through the accident was: He hoped nobody would see him doing the stupid move that caused the accident. And he observed, “Oh yes, I have a problem with vanity.” Then he talked about another incident forty years later that again showed his vanity—as if it were just a constant …
- Ānāpānasati Day… You can release the mind from whatever thoughts oppress it as you breathe in, breathe out. The important thing is you get a sense of what your mind needs in order to stay with the breath. With these first three tetrads, it’s not the case that you do the first and then the second and then the third. You’re doing all three …
- Our Sense of Self… Sometimes you identify with specific thoughts in the mind. So your sense of self shuffles around a lot. If you could take a picture of it, it would be like an amoeba, spreading out a little pseudopod here, a little pseudopod there, changing shape all the time. And it’s a strategy that’s worked for us, to some extent. If it hadn’t …
- A Genius about Your own Mind… I’m not going forth for sensual pleasures, because I see the dangers in sensuality.” Here, “sensuality” means not just your indulgence in sensual pleasures, but also the mind’s fascination with thinking sensual thoughts, making sensual plans. And the Buddha saw it’s right there that there’s a danger. Most people don’t see that. There was a writer a while back …
- A Legacy of Strengths… There’s directed thought, where you keep reminding yourself to stick with the breath. And then evaluation: You ask yourself, “Does the breath feel good? If not, what can I do to make it feel better?” You can change the rhythm of the breath or the texture of the breath. Or you can change the image you have in mind about what the breath …
- The Adventure in the Present… Other things you experience through your senses, random thoughts popping up in the mind: Those things come from past actions. You can’t do much about your past actions, but you can make a difference in what you’re doing in the present, what your intentions are in the present. That fact should attract your attention: Why is it that your intentions are potentially …
- A Connoisseur of the Breath… Anything else that may come up, whether it’s a thought or 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. In other words, when you’re talking with someone else, notice how your body is reacting during the talking. When you …
- Choices in the Present… In other words, if a particular thought keeps coming back at you again and again and again, think about it in such way that you realize you don’t need to go there. This is where the analysis is helpful. As they say, sometimes discernment fosters concentration. Remind yourself, this is the human condition. Nobody paid you to be born as human being. You …
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