Search results for: "Thought"

  1. Page 138
  2. Victory
     … I can’t see your perceptions; your feelings; your thought constructs. I can’t see your suffering. And you can’t see mine. It’s on this internal level where all the important work is, because as the Buddha said, the causes for suffering are also on this level of awareness. But the solution lies here as well. It’s work that you do … 
  3. A Victory that Matters
     … One of the major fallacies that you hear repeatedly is that the Buddha just picked up the idea of rebirth from his culture because that’s what everybody believed, and nobody thought to question it. People were questioning it. “Is the life force the same thing as the body or is it something else, separate from the body, something different from the body?” That … 
  4. A Post by the Ocean
     … You’re sitting here with your eyes closed focusing on your breath, ignoring your responsibilities.” You’ve got to learn how to be able to argue with those thoughts so that they don’t overcome the mind. So remember the post at the edge of the sea. If it’s just lying down there on the sand, the waves will come up, and the … 
  5. Return of Wisdom for Dummies
     … If it turns out that even though you thought it would be harmless and you didn’t see any harm while you were doing it, but it did cause long-term harm, then you make up your mind not to repeat that mistake. You recognize it as a mistake and you go talk it over with someone else who knows more about the path … 
  6. Sources of Lasting Happiness
     … As soon as you catch it, just drop the thought. You don’t have to tie up the loose ends into a neat bow. Just drop it. Come right back to the breath. When you come back to the breath, don’t engage in a lot of recrimination; don’t come down hard on yourself. Just remind yourself, okay, you want to stay here … 
  7. Shelter
     … Verbal fabrication is the way you direct your thought to something and then evaluate it. Mental fabrication covers perceptions—the labels the mind applies—and the feelings that go along with whatever you’re experiencing. You want to learn how to adjust these to make your inner home just right. Adjusting feelings may seem the strangest of the group, but as you work with … 
  8. Complaining Rights
     … One of the reasons we not only get the mind still but also make its awareness all-around is because sometimes the connection is not immediately obvious, or it’s not right in the place where we thought we should look. But if you develop an all-around awareness in your concentration, you begin to see, “Oh. This little movement of the mind, which … 
  9. Changing Your Mind
     … Other times, you have to sit back and think, “Why would I want to think this thought? Why would I want to go along with this emotion? Why would I want to have this fantasy? What do I think I’m getting out of it?” Sometimes the allue is the immediate visceral pleasure, especially if the mind is feeling starved of pleasure. That’s … 
  10. Inner Discontent
     … He has you look at your actions, he has you look at your words, he has you look at your thoughts for their potential to cause pain, suffering, stress. As you keep your focus right here—as long as the work is not done, as long as you haven’t learned to weed out every form of unskillful behavior—he has you acknowledge the … 
  11. In the Elephant’s Footprint
     … Directed thought and evaluation are your fabrications. The intentions that hold you in the higher levels of jhana are also fabrications. You’re also conscious of these things. So there are the five aggregates in the path, which means you don’t want to throw away your aggregates too quickly. You don’t want to throw away your sense of self too quickly. These … 
  12. Work & Play
     … Where is your present attachment? As you develop the different forms of fabrication that go into meditation, into concentration—the bodily fabrication of the breath, the verbal fabrication of directing your thoughts to the breath and evaluating the breath, and then the mental fabrication of the feelings that arise from the breath and the perceptions that you use to stay with the breath—you … 
  13. A Game of Chess
     … There’s directed thought and evaluation. That’s fabrication. There are feelings of pleasure. That’s feeling. There’s the perception of whatever object you’re focused on. As the Buddha said, all concentration states, up through the dimension of nothingness, are all perception-attainments. They’re based on a perception that you keep in mind—as when you focus on just “breath, breath … 
  14. Attachment to the Body
     … What to do? She thought of space. That’s another element. So she focused on space as her object. If the body was going to go, it was going to go, but she could hang out in space. It turned out she didn’t die that night, but she learned a good lesson. If you really get to know the sensations of the body … 
  15. Insight Is a Judgment Call
     … But that’s okay, because that attachment allows you to let go of attachments, say, to sensuality, to unskillful thoughts, or even to weaker and less subtle states of concentration. You finally get to the point where the level of concentration is the best thing that fabrication can offer. And you begin to see that this, too, has its drawbacks. That’s when the … 
  16. Investing in Noble Wealth
     … It’s not saying that you’re ashamed at yourself for thinking of it, or that you’re a bad person because you may have thought of it. But you realize that it’s beneath you. This kind of shame requires a certain sense of self esteem, a certain sense of your own honor. Compunction is when you think about the results that’ll … 
  17. Discernment on the Path
     … Sometimes an insight will come into how you’ve been carrying something really dumb around with you—some idea, some thought, some assumption. You begin to see that it doesn’t really help you in any way and you drop it. There’s a great sense of relief that comes with that. But then there can also be a sense of “Wow! I’ve … 
  18. Warrior Knowledge
     … That’s something we can work on in the meditation, learning how to deal more skillfully with issues as they arise, recognizing which patterns of thought are skillful and don’t lead to suffering, which ones are unskillful and do lead to suffering, learning how to stop acting, thinking, and speaking in unskillful ways. That’s what our practice is all about. When we … 
  19. Head, Heart, & Gut
     … There’s a lot less conflict between your well-being and the well-being of others than you may have thought. He’s also not saying that the search for happiness is a bad thing. After all, look at what he did. He spent all his life looking for true happiness and then, once he found it, teaching everybody how to do it—how … 
  20. Hedgehog Knowledge
     … Allow the mind to get more and more absorbed in that sensation, and the whole issue of what happened to evaluation, what happened to directed thought: You don’t have to think about it. Just focus on in. Zero on in on the breath and this full sense of breath throughout the body. As you stay with it, you’ll begin to get more … 
  21. A Centered but Broad Awareness
     … You let go of the thought and the stress disappears as well. It’s like going into a room and seeing that it’s full of smoke. You can’t put out the smoke. You go and try to find the fire. You put out the fire and that takes care of the smoke. Most of us, however, try to put out the smoke … 
  22. Load next page...