Search results for: "Thought"
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- Gradually Sudden… Insight comes when we learn to how to step back from our assumptions, getting the mind quiet, and seeing our thoughts as strange—seeing them as instances of stress arising and passing away, and asking ourselves: Is the stress worth it? In some cases it is. The thoughts that help you understand things, the thoughts that help you clear up doubts about your own …
- Open Are the Doors to the Deathless… Then he thought for a while: Who should he teach first? He thought of his two teachers who had taught him the formless jhanas, but they had entered the formless realms where they were out of touch with anybody, so he couldn’t teach them. Then he thought of the Five Brethren. These were five monks who had attended to him when he was …
- Admirable Intentions… The other is, if the mind goes wandering out to thoughts of the world—which the Buddha classifies either as greed or distress—you put those thoughts aside. That’s a formula for concentration: focused on one thing, not paying attention to other things. Here again, we have the qualities of being ardent, alert, and mindful. In this case, mindfulness means keeping in mind …
- Strong & Heedful… When something comes up, ask first, “Where are you going? Where will this thought lead?” Look at the thought not as something you want to get into, but as something that you’re standing outside of—and you want to stay outside of until you’re sure it’s safe. So, watch it first simply as an event in the mind. For instance, when …
- Slogging Through Difficulties… So take these thoughts and make them part of your pep talks, part of your way of encouraging yourself along the path, during the times when it’s difficult, when the dry patches seem awfully dry and awfully long. Drop the thought of the dryness, drop the thought of the length, and just tell yourself, “I’m just right here, right now. Can I …
- Mindreading… You can think thoughts of goodwill, thoughts of compassion, thoughts of equanimity: These are soothing. You can work with the breath in a way that feels good for the body, relaxing the tension in different parts of the body. It provides you with a sense of fullness and ease. The sense of calm, the sense of fullness is useful not only when the mind …
- The Karma that Ends Karma… It’s so easy to get entangled in the story line wherever your thoughts lead you. If the distractions come from within, a little thought bubble comes up in the mind and says, “Let’s explore this and see where it goes.” And you end up finding yourself in the Andromeda galaxy. In other words, these things can take you far, far away, into …
- What You Don’t Like About Yourself… And sometimes we feel that we’re not being responsible if we don’t complete a thought. So already in the practice of concentration, you’re learning a new value: that thoughts don’t have to be completed and you don’t have to latch onto them. They can be there in the background. Images can come up in the mind. Sentences can come …
- Not Resolved on Self… We can either be enthusiastically resolved, in the sense that we really like our self—attached to our wants, attached to our thoughts, attached to however we identify ourselves—or we can be resolved in a negative way: We look at ourselves, we don’t like our habits, we don’t like the way we interact with the world. We see how we create …
- Training in Right Resolve… When you’re here with the breath, you’re putting aside thoughts of sensuality. At the same time, you’re putting aside the other two forms of wrong resolve, which are resolve on ill will and resolve on harmfulness. The resolve to avoid those two types of thinking, regardless: That’s right resolve. So avoid sensuality, avoid thoughts of ill will, thoughts of harmfulness …
- Me, Me, Me… When a thought comes up in the mind, recognize it* as a thought.* When the thought of me, me, me comes up, tell yourself, “That’s just a perception.” You ask can yourself, “To what extent, in what way, do I hold to that perception?” You should get interested in those questions. You don’t have to take on The Self in capital letters …
- Guilt & Shame… So when you see yourself getting involved in unskillful thoughts—and the Buddha regards thoughts of guilt as unskillful—learn how to step back. You have that ability to step back. This is what makes human beings special. We’re not just embedded in instinct. We can step back and look at our actions. Even when unskillful thoughts are pretty strong and we haven …
- The Sport of Wise People… If people thought I was dumb, that was fine. If people thought I was wise because I was so quiet, well, that was fine, too. The other thing he said was when he heard me in conversation with another young monk about a point of Dhamma and I was saying “Well, I think it’s probably like this.” And he said, “If you don …
- No One in Charge… But now you want to be in a position where the thoughts may come but you don’t get into them. And that’s not simply a matter of making yourself dull to the world or dull to your thoughts. In fact, you have to be very alert to them, very quick to their nuances to see the various ways in which they might …
- Wake Up from Addiction… In other words, this urge you have to think these thoughts: What does it feel like in the body? What are the sensations accompanying it in the different parts of the body? What are the feelings, what are the thoughts that go through the mind? Instead of just running with them, tell yourself that you’re going to watch them for a bit to …
- The Middle Way… It’s going to want to think about this, and move around about that, and do all those other old things it’s been doing all along, but you say, “No, not right now, just stay right here.” Every time a thought comes up that you’d like to go someplace else, just think of that thought disbanding. The tension around that thought: Allow …
- Cornered… directed thought and evaluation. You direct your thoughts to the breath and then you evaluate it. What kind of breathing would be best right now, would be the most conducive to sitting here with a sense of ease and well-being for the whole hour? And what ways of breathing would be antithetical to that? One thing I find helpful is not to breathe …
- Four Bases of Success… Meditation does require some thought. It’s not like you’re trying to banish all thought right away. Instead, at the beginning, you’re learning how to apply your thoughts specifically to what you’re doing in the present moment and to anything that might pull you away. If you find yourself being attracted to thinking about what happened today or what you’re …
- Hope… things come in the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body; thoughts come into the mind. And we tend to miss how much we’re doing right now to turn those experiences into suffering. The early Buddhists said that this point was the one where the Buddha’s teaching differed most radically from everything else that was available at the time: pointing to what you’re …
- Moral Intelligence… You might have thought that he would align it with virtue. And on one level he does, but in a deeper sense he aligns it with concentration. This is a theme that goes way back in the forest tradition. There’s a Dhamma textbook that came out in the early twentieth century, was printed by the ecclesiastical hierarchy in Bangkok, and it identified virtue …
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