Search results for: "Thought"

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  2. Refuge in the Dhamma
     … Watch out that your thoughts don’t kill you, that they don’t conspire against you. Learn how to step out of them. It’s when you step out of them that they lose their power. As long as you’re in the state of becoming created by those thoughts and you see everything in the world in line with that state of becoming … 
  3. The Focus on Suffering
     … After all, there are many times when you can hear something and understand it and think about it, and your thoughts are reasonable. But when you actually try to apply what you’ve thought through, it doesn’t work. What you thought you knew you didn’t know clearly enough or precisely enough, or you didn’t have a sense of the right time … 
  4. Awe
     … When I first saw the fire that forced us to evacuate the monastery three years ago, my first thought was: “Nature’s trying to kill us.” There’ve been earthquakes. These things happen all over the world. When we see the results of, say, an earthquake, it’s shocking, realizing that we live on an earth that, with a small shrug, can do this … 
  5. A Divine Seat
     … What does it need right now? To be gladdened? To be made steadier? Does it need gentle reminders to stay with the breath? Or does it need more forceful ones? You find that, in using directed thought and evaluation, you’re working with three things here. Bodily fabrication, as I said, and then verbal fabrication: directed thought and evaluation itself. That’s the Buddha … 
  6. Meditation as a Skill
     … You’re mindful, alert, or as the passage says in terms of right concentration, you have directed thought and evaluation. You direct your thoughts to the breath and you evaluate how things are going. Then the results are going to come: a sense of ease, a sense of well-being, a sense of refreshment. You don’t have to create those. Those come as … 
  7. Here to Learn
     … And you have the choice to think those thoughts or not, as you like. When you realize that it’s extraneous to the actual physical pain, it’s not necessary and you have the choice not to think them, then why would you want to think those thoughts? So we’re here to learn. Over the course of time, we’ll learn with greater … 
  8. In the Mood
     … Sometimes simply sitting and taking stock of things for a few minutes, learning how to use our powers of thought — not to destroy ourselves as many of us do, but as an assistance to the meditation — can make all the difference. We often think that to meditate is to stop thinking. Well, you have to learn how to think properly before your thoughts can … 
  9. Blessings
     … If a thought comes in right now that’s not related to the breath, you don’t have to catch it. Don’t pay any attention to it. Just let it flow through. If you do find yourself wandering away from the breath, just drop whatever that thought is. You don’t have to finish the thought, just leave it dangling. Come back to … 
  10. The Desire for Things to Be Different
     … It’s a painful thought, but it’s a thought that can motivate you to practice. In fact, you can’t practice without that thought. That kind of desire for things to be different should be encouraged. The kind of desire that shouldn’t be encouraged is the desire for the principles of cause and effect to be different from what they are. There … 
  11. The Kamma of Concentration
     … So when you’re thinking thoughts of goodwill for yourself, you’re basically thinking: “May I act in a skillful way so I can create the causes for happiness.” And you think the same for other people: “May they act in skillful ways, too.” And that’s a thought you can have even for people who have been destructive, horrible, and cruel. Your goodwill … 
  12. Controlling
     … This includes bodily fabrication, the breath; verbal fabrication, directed thought and evaluation; and mental fabrication, perceptions and feelings. You have some control over all those things. You can change the way you breathe. You can change the way you talk to yourself, which is what directed thought and evaluation are all about. You can change your perceptions, and even your feelings. Remember the two … 
  13. Pleasure & Pain
     … A similar principle applies to sitting with unskillful thoughts that are causing stress or pain in the mind. Simply sitting with the thoughts and bearing with them isn’t going to do anything. You have to be inquisitive, to figure out: “What is it about this thought that keeps me attracted to it?” Sometimes people think that “If I think unskillful thoughts enough, I … 
  14. Worlds Inside & Out
     … How does a thought-world begin? What’s the discussion, what’s the back-and-forth that goes on in the mind before you decide, “Yes, I’m going to go with this”? How do you create tension in the breath energy that allows that thought-world to take hold—its little footpad. How much of the process is intentional? When the mind is … 
  15. The Gatekeeper’s Duties
    It’s good to start the meditation with thoughts of goodwill. Goodwill means a wish for happiness—a wish for true happiness if the goodwill is sincere. When you stop to think about where true happiness comes from, you realize that it has to come from your actions. This means that when you have genuine goodwill for yourself, you want to act in a … 
  16. Fear of Concentration
    Some of the problems we have in getting the mind into concentration come simply from an inability or unwillingness to let our thoughts subside. We find our thoughts interesting. We find our inner mental chatter interesting. We’d be hard put to know what it would be like to have a mind where this chatter wasn’t going on all the time. So we … 
  17. The Five Aggregates
     … Direct your thoughts and your evaluation to the breath: Directed thought and evaluation are *sankharas, *fabrications. And be conscious of what you’re doing. In other words, you take these five khandhas, these five aggregates that you’ve got sitting here and you put them to good use. You turn them away from being piles of “you” or “yours”—things to weigh you down … 
  18. The Brahmavihāras Aren’t Enough
     … But there’s another passage where the Buddha talks about developing each of the brahmavihāras with directed thought and evaluation; with no directed thought and a modicum of evaluation; with no directed thought and no evaluation; with rapture; without rapture; with enjoyment; with equanimity. That’s taking you to the fourth jhāna with any of the four—but concentration is as far as they … 
  19. Dedicating Goodness, Spreading Goodwill
     … It starts out with the type of life you live, then thoughts of goodwill, and then further meditations based on goodwill. So there’s kind of a commitment that goes with goodwill. You want this to be the attitude you bring out of the meditation as you deal with the people immediately around you. We spread thoughts of goodwill to all beings. The beings … 
  20. Evaluation
     … In everyday language, they say it means evaluation, but in the course of meditation you don’t evaluate anything, they say; you just stick your thoughts on one topic and then you maintain your thought on that one topic, and the thought—according to the Commentary—doesn’t involve any evaluation at all. You just keep on thinking the same thought, applying the perception … 
  21. Infinity
     … That’s a scary thought, too. Do you want to go back there? Well, no. So watch out for any thoughts of your mind that would go in that direction. Ajaan Mun once said that he, on recollecting his past lives, could remember a period where for 500 lives he was reborn as a dog because his mind was satisfied with the pleasures of … 
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