Search results for: "Thought"
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- Mindful, Alert, & Ardent… Where does this thought go? Most of your thoughts don’t go anywhere. Or they may go to something that’s really unskillful. Seeing that helps you let go of them. Then there is what’s called mental effort, which means learning how to hold certain perceptions in mind. How do you perceive the breath in a way that makes it interesting? Think of …
- Delight… Other thoughts will come in that’ll try to pull you away. Sometimes they’re neutral thoughts, sometimes they’re relatively okay—they might be thoughts about generosity or thoughts about other good things—but sometimes they’re just downright embarrassing. You wouldn’t want to think that that kind of thought could be going to go through your head. And so one of …
- A Heart Set on Goodwill… So you think these thoughts as ways of helping you to fabricate thoughts of goodwill. And what are the thoughts you think about the other people? Well, you remind yourself that they’re going to be happy based on their actions. So you’re extending thoughts of goodwill to them when you think, “May they act skillfully.” Now, you look at some people and …
- Strong Through Mindfulness… For the people who couldn’t memorize a whole talk, he would often summarize the main points at the very end with a verse—so that you could remember the verse, and then as you thought about the verse, you could remember bits and pieces of what the Buddha had to say in the talk. When the Buddha talks about mindfulness as a strength …
- Practical Wisdom… But if you know it’s going to be harmful down the line, just assume that maybe it’s somebody else’s thought. Maybe it’s a thought from the parasites in your blood or the worms in your stomach. In other words, just because a thought comes into the mind and begins to take over the body doesn’t mean that you have …
- A Room of Your Own… At the same time, you try to engage in some restraint in terms of what thoughts are going to come in, what things you’re going to welcome in from the outside. That’s because, in the beginning, this place that you’re going to make a room of your own is a bus station. All kinds of people come in, all kinds of …
- Wilderness Wealth… Even just these thoughts of wilderness, thoughts of elements, are the beginning of the Buddha’s teachings on how to induce a lack of disturbance in the mind. You go to more and more refined perceptions: from the physical properties, you go to infinite space; from space to infinite consciousness, consciousness permeating everything; from there to nothingness; and then on to neither perception nor …
- Lean into the Present… Think of the breath—who would have thought that you could find awakening by staying with the breath? But it is possible. The Buddha did it, many other members of the noble Sangha in the past have done it, and what’s the difference between your breath and their breath? It’s the same thing—the difference is in the attention they paid to …
- Expand Your Expectations… And your first thought isn’t what you’re going get out of this. Your first thought should be, “What do I give?” To begin with, you have to give up some of your preconceived notions. As you find out, you have to give up a lot of your preconceived notions about yourself. That can be interpreted in a lot of ways. One of …
- Noble Right Concentration… The mindfulness relates to directed thought. And those two qualities, directed thought and evaluation—together with singleness of preoccupation, where you’re staying with one thing—are the causal factors that get you into right concentration. When you do things right, then the other factors come: a sense of refreshment, a sense of pleasure. The refreshment in some cases can be really strong, one …
- Respect for Suffering… So you want to get used to being right here right now, not running off after your thoughts in other directions. Actually, awareness is always right here right now. It’s a question of where its focus goes. Sometimes the focus goes into thought-constructs: You think about your next meal, you think about home, you think about school, you think about work. Your …
- The Food of Feelings… They require your ability to push aside any thoughts of doubt or discouragement or frustration or self-recrimination. Thoughts like that don’t serve any useful purpose, so don’t feed on them. Try to feed on thoughts of encouragement. You’ve got all the raw materials that you need here for the path. It’s simply a matter of putting them together and …
- Two Kinds of Cross-Questioning… What are you doing right now and what are the results? The Buddha has you carry this into meditation when you look at your thoughts: What kind of thoughts lead the mind to distraction? What kind of thoughts lead it into stillness? If the mind’s getting distracted, how do you deal with it to get away from that distraction? He gives lots of …
- There’s Work to Be Done… At the same time, you put aside any greed and distress—any thoughts, really—with reference to the world. So there are two activities you’ve got to do here: trying to maintain focus on one topic like the breath, and fending off all the other thoughts that might pull you away. You can start out with a strong intention, but the intention needs …
- The Strength of Heedfulness… And when the mind picks them up again, you ask yourself, “Why? What’s the allure?” This is going to take some digging down because the mind is often very dishonest with itself about why it goes for a particular thought, especially if it knows the thought is unskillful. Then you compare the allure with the drawbacks. And when you finally get to the …
- Elemental Normalcy… Where do these thoughts lead? They lead to more stress, more stress, more stress. You start out, and the thought seems to be under your control. But then, as the thought-world develops, it gets out of your control. That’s the not-self part. It’s going to do things that you didn’t want. And when you can anticipate that, that helps …
- Equanimity in Action, Equanimity at Rest… When directed thought and evaluation are listed as a factor of jhana, they seem exotic and strange. Some people say, “How do I start directing my thoughts, and how do I evaluate?” Well, you’re doing these things all the time. You think about a topic: That’s directing your thoughts. You make comments on it: That’s evaluating it. In concentration, it’s …
- The Buddha Respects Your Potential… He realized that if he pushed himself any further, he wouldn’t gain anything, so he had to ask himself, “Is there any other way?” He thought of a time when he was young. He had been sitting under a tree, and his mind had spontaneously entered the first jhana, a state of seclusion with no thoughts of sensuality at all, but the mind …
- Ignorance… In other words, he learned how to look at his thoughts not so much in terms of their content, but in terms of the causes behind them and the results to which they lead. He looked at his thoughts as events in a causal pattern. This is why, when we meditate, we learn how to step outside of our thoughts. Focus on the breath …
- Strategic Thinking… There’s also the perception of the breath, there are fabrications, in other words, directed thought and evaluation—verbal fabrication—and finally there’s consciousness of all this. So you’ve got the aggregates here, and you’re going to cling to them for a while. It’s not that you strip them free of clinging right away. You’re going to want to …
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