Search results for: "Thought"

  1. Page 139
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. Your True Responsibility
     … Your inner landscape becomes a lot more malleable than you thought it could be. When you ask the right questions, everything gets turned around for the better. We’re working on these two qualities needed to learn: intention and attention. The intention right now is to be mindful. Get the mind to settle down. Attention is watching: is the intention really working or not … 
  6. Values
     … As he said, once you’ve learned the Dhamma, you’ve thought it through, and it makes sense, then you give rise to a willingness, a desire to practice. Then you judge what’s going on in your mind, what’s going on in your behavior, against the standards of the Dhamma. Actually, the teachings themselves as a whole are one judgment after another … 
  7. The Allure of the Hindrances
     … What it actually says is, “Given that you don’t know, what’s the best way of going about coming to know?” You start, at the very least, with thoughts of goodwill. You know that this is a good practice. It’s good in and of itself, even if there is no such thing as karma or rebirth. The practice itself is an honorable … 
  8. Developing the Path
     … Or you stomp all over whatever mindfulness or concentration you may have because it doesn’t fit in line with what you thought concentration should be like. I suffered from that myself in the very beginning. I was pretty sure that if your mind got concentrated, you had to have visions. But there were no visions. I told myself that I must have wrong … 
  9. Use Your Defilements
     … You direct your thoughts and you evaluate the breath. You take those potentials that are here in the in-breath, in the out-breath, and in the breath energy throughout the body, and you learn how to maximize the good things, minimize the bad ones. Once you’ve got something good, then you maintain it. Remember that the duty of mindfulness as a governing … 
  10. A Concentration Diet
     … That’s because you have to be very careful not to be overcome by the pleasure in order to hold on to the perception of the breath, which gets you more and more sensitive to the process of perception and thought-fabrication in the mind. You can also begin to see how these things can contribute a little bit of stress to the mind … 
  11. Anchored by Skillful Roots
     … You sit here focusing on the breath, and learn to pry the mind away from the distracting thoughts that fly off in all directions. You sit here learning how not to get involved in them, in the worlds of that the mind creates, that pull it here, pull it there. Then, as the mind finally settles down, you find that it’s like an … 
  12. Outside the Box
     … When you first read them, they sound kind of strange, such as, “Is the pain the same thing as your knee?” But then you begin to realize, part of your mind actually believes that it is, and you wouldn’t have thought about that unless you’d asked the question. So learn to ask yourself unexpected questions. When the food is not up to … 
  13. Admirable Friendship, Inside & Out
     … That’s when the discernment we learn from our admirable friends becomes appropriate attention within us, so that both principles—the foremost outside practice and the foremost inside principle—become one in our thoughts, words, and deeds. That’s why we have that fifth reflection. It teaches us to look in the right place, to look in our actions and to reflect on the … 
  14. Right View: Feeding Instructions
     … So as we sit here and meditate, try to keep these thoughts in mind and keep in mind the Buddha’s priorities. We make them our own priorities so that we can benefit from his teaching that the way we feed is important. We want to feed a lot more skillfully, and here’s the breath to feed on. It’s available all day … 
  15. Encouragement
     … Why stay just with the breath? What does it have to offer? This is a thought that’ll occur to you not only at the beginning of your meditative career but also many times throughout it. There’ll come a point when you’ll say, “This is really stupid. I’m not using any intelligence. I’m just staying here with this very basic … 
  16. Visakha Puja
     … There has to come a point where you get disenchanted with the way you identify with your body, the way you identify with your feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, even your sensory consciousness, seeing that these things are inconstant. You can’t really depend on them. They’re stressful. They can’t provide the true happiness you want. And they’re not-self: They’re … 
  17. Technique & Attitude
     … Once you know that you want to stay with the breath, any thought that pulls you away from the breath is automatically something you want to drop. You don’t have to sit and think about it, “Should you follow this, should you follow that?” This makes things a lot easier, because you’re very clear-cut with your sense of which is the … 
  18. The Power of Present Karma
     … A lot of your thoughts are just that. He says, “Learn to see them as alien, an emptiness,” to take some of their heavy reality away. At the same time, you want to develop factors of the path. So which factors are you able to put together right now? As long as you can hold on to right view, you’ve got the potential … 
  19. Question Your Perceptions
     … Use those thoughts to develop some heedfulness. Turn around and look at your perceptions and ask yourself: “How many times have you been fooled by your perceptions?” Learn to see them as arbitrary. Learn to see them as cartoon sketches. We’re often so impressed by how accurate our perceptions of the world can be, and yet there’s so much we don’t … 
  20. A Good-natured Attitude
     … Now, thought, the phrases turn into one continuous long ride down the breath through time. This is where the mind becomes really one. And you didn’t have to think about when you were going to stop evaluating the breath, it just seemed like the right thing to do. This comes from learning to listen both to the body and to the mind. That … 
  21. Tranquility & Insight Together
     … If something’s not worth thinking about, what can you do to disperse those thoughts? Those are some of the skills you learn as you meditate. We’ve already got the tools, we’re already using them, so we might as well learn how to use them with knowledge, clearly, aware of what we’re doing, so that we can do the work well.
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