Search results for: "Thought"

  1. Page 144
  2. Trust in Heedfulness
     … So you learn how to drop that, realizing that it wasn’t the underlying principle of the nature of — the underlying awareness of — reality that you thought it was. To see this requires that you be wary about what’s going on. That’s another translation of appamada: wariness. Not so wary that you’re not willing to get into the concentration and work … 
  3. Bases of Success
     … That thought gives rise to a sense of what’s called *pasada, *or confidence. There is a way out, and this is it. And how do you work with your actions? You train your mind, which is the source of your actions. That’s what we’re doing right here, right now. So that’s one quality we’re working on: pasada, or confidence … 
  4. Trading Up
     … As you go through the different stages of concentration, you get so that you can drop the evaluation and directed thought\ when they’ve done their work, and there’s an even greater sense of pleasure, a greater sense of rapture. Then eventually the rapture becomes unpleasant, maybe even disturbing—because your sensitivity has grown greater, so that what seemed really nice to begin … 
  5. Limitations
     … They have thoughts. There may be people you’ve wronged in the past. They may be hovering around in ways that you can’t see. So, you’re dealing with all kinds of things. The important thing is to recognize that if there’s a sense of feeling oppressed by the limitlessness of the path, the limitlessness of the goal, that’s nothing you … 
  6. Dharma Medicine
     … Meanwhile, you apply the perceptions of inconstancy, stress and not-self to any thoughts that would pull you away—and also, when it’s appropriate, to give yourself a sense of patience. You can’t totally control this. You’ve got to learn how to figure out how cause and effect work right now, and what limits they place on you. How can you … 
  7. The Fabrication of Pain
     … Verbal fabrication—directed thought and evaluation, in other words, the way you talk to yourself about something. Then mental fabrication, which are feelings themselves and perceptions. So when a pain is bothering you, ask yourself, “How am I breathing around it?” And here it’s good to also ask yourself, “How am I talking to myself about this?” Because the way you talk to … 
  8. Smoothing It
     … Then, there’s mental seclusion, when you get the mind quiet in a state of right concentration, secluded from its unskillful thoughts. Learn how to appreciate that—the quietness of the mind. Delight in the fact that you get the mind to a state where you can begin to see really subtle things inside. You’re not just getting quiet for quiet’s sake … 
  9. Mindfulness of Death
     … So mindfulness of death isn’t just thinking, “Die, die, die, I’m going to die.” Sometimes those thoughts are useful when you find yourself sitting here meditating and thinking about the pleasures you’re missing right now. You can remind yourself, “Well, I could die at any moment. This is not a good time to be thinking about those things. And the fact … 
  10. Conviction in Charge
     … Sometimes it’s thought that the Buddha said we’re all innately good. He never said that. And there’s nothing in his teachings that depends on our being innately good. But he’s got a teaching for people who want to find true happiness and want to know: Can their efforts lead to it? For those people, he said, the answer is Yes … 
  11. Right Resolve in Real Life
     … You want to have the wherewithal in terms of your virtue and your concentration and your discernment to protect your path, i.e., to protect your thoughts, your words, and your deeds to keep them in line with what you know will ultimately lead to true happiness, to the true end of suffering. When you keep that goal in mind, you realize that a … 
  12. Shaping the Present
     … Any thoughts come up with regard to the world outside, you want to be equanimous toward them right now. In other words, you don’t get involved; just leave them there. They’re not what you want right now. Then, as the mind gets deeper and deeper into concentration, you find that there’s less you have to do in order to urge the … 
  13. Start by Relaxing Your Hands
     … You find that its thoughts change, its moods change because it’s not being squeezed by tension in the body. So the effort here is purely a mental effort. When the Buddha talks about right effort, it has nothing do with how many hours you sit or how many hours of walking meditation you do. Right effort is simply noticing which attitudes of the … 
  14. Relationships
     … So where is the clinging in your relationship? Where is your clinging in your thoughts about the relationship? That’s what you’ve got to look into. Now, we’ve got a problem here that in English we talk about feeling attachment for someone, and we tend to equate the attachment with the clinging. But that’s not necessarily the case. When you feel … 
  15. The Path to Stream Entry
     … You begin to see a thought form that could pull you away, but if your mindfulness and alertness are good, you realize you don’t have to go there. But you can see the steps by which it happens. Then you turn around and reflect on the concentration itself. It’s the same sort of thing: This is how fabrication happens, this is how … 
  16. The Buddha’s Last Word
     … I’ve been thinking about it for three days and can’t make heads or tails of it.” Ajaan Mun would smile a little bit and say, “Oh, so there’s someone actually thinking about what I say?” And Ajaan Maha Boowa would say, “Yes, not with any intelligence, but doing my best.” And then he’d tell Ajaan Mun what he thought the … 
  17. The Meaning of the Body
     … It also shows you the power of your perceptions, that what you thought was a given was actually something you had glued together yourself. This makes you want to turn around and look at the whole process of labeling things in the mind in other areas as well. So in all these cases you’re using the body as an aid in the practice … 
  18. The Dhamma Wheel Shakes Up the World
     … It’s a question of making sure that twisting the horn and doing nothing don’t get presented as the Dhamma, because otherwise people will get confused—and will feel cheated if they spend their lives twisting the horn because they thought that that was what the Buddha taught. We get different results from different actions, which is why some actions are right in … 
  19. Respect, Confidence, & Patience
     … You can be more realistic about what you’re undertaking here, which is the total re-training of the mind, learning radically new habits in how you relate to the body, how you relate to your feelings, how you relate to your perceptions, your thought- constructs, even how you relate to consciousness. The Buddha points out that we tend to relate to these things … 
  20. Effective Self-Discipline
     … worlds, and an important part of meditation is learning to step back from our worlds and not believe them. Just stay with the sensation of the breath coming in going out. Thought worlds come along and they can tell you all kinds of things, using all kinds of voices—shouting voices, whispering voices, seductive voices, harsh voices—that in normal circumstances gets you running … 
  21. A Private Matter
     … Simply being with the sensation of breathing helps pull you out of a lot of your thoughts, that ongoing committee discussion in the mind. If you’re with the breath, you’re like an outside observer on the committee meeting. You’re not necessarily pushed around by the voices in the committee. In that way, you’re in a better position to see, “Is … 
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