Search results for: "Thought"
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- Present Kamma… The thoughts don’t destroy the breath, it’s simply a question of: Where are you focusing your attention? Focus your attention back on the breath. Ask yourself, “What kind of breathing is allowing these thoughts to come in? Maybe if I changed the way I breathe, make it more filling, more satisfying, more nourishing, I won’t be so interested in these distractions …
- A Safe Home… And when you learn to associate a sense of ease and well-being with the mindfulness, then it’s a lot easier to keep thoughts of anger from coming up. The reason we go for things like anger, greed, lust, and whatever, is the immediate sense of gratification they provide. As the Buddha once said, you can’t really abandon unskillful thoughts until you …
- Perplexity… It’s the same with unskillful thoughts. First of all, you’ve got to recognize them and then figure out, “Okay, I can’t just sit here wallowing in these thoughts. I’ve got to figure out some way of stop them.” And you can’t use just plain willpower. You’ve got to develop all the factors of the path, from right view …
- The Brahmaviharas on the Path… You can’t just sit there beaming out nice thoughts and think that that’s going to take care of the problem. If, when you get up from meditation, you see that somebody has done something outrageous, then if you haven’t really thought the matter through your immediate reaction will be to get upset again. Here it’s important to understand that goodwill …
- Calming the Breath… So the Buddha asks him, “What kind of breath meditation do you do?” And the monk says, “I put away thoughts of past, put away thoughts of future, and let my mind be equanimous toward whatever is arising in the present, as I breathe in and breathe out.” The Buddha’s response is, “Well, there is that kind of breath meditation.” But he adds …
- A Magic Set of Tools… Mindfulness turns into directed thought as it shades into the steadiness of concentration. Once concentration gets more solid, your mindfulness gets a lot steadier. When you reach the fourth jhana, the Buddha says, that’s where mindfulness becomes pure. The word jhana is related to a verb jhayati, which is a homonym for a verb to burn — to burn in a steady way, like …
- Right Next to Ignorance… You’ve got directed thought and evaluation—that’s verbal fabrication. And then you’ve got feelings and perceptions—mental fabrication. This is one of the reasons why we focus on the breath, thinking about the processes of how the breath is fabricated, and thinking about directed thought and evaluation and the perceptions we bring to the breath, because our ignorance is right next …
- Sensitivity & Strength… This is what you have to question when you get pulled away by certain thoughts. You have to ask yourself, “Why should I allow that thought to pull me away? When those thoughts come up, how do they come up?” Sometimes they move in and totally take over the mind. That should raise a question. How did it happen? This is a big gap …
- Stay… Then you try to maintain your balance there with a minimum amount of directed thought and evaluation. You don’t have to direct your thoughts anymore, because you’re there with the breath, but the evaluation, here, becomes more subtle. Subtle in the sense you have to ask yourself: How can I maintain my sense of balance here? Because it’s very easy to …
- Part V : Finding a Teacher… Thoughts come into the mind and it’s hard for us to tell, “Is this a good thought or a bad thought?” Even if part of the mind recognizes that it may be a bad thought, another part says, “Well, no, maybe it’s got its good side after all.” After all, there are so many different opinions out there, and our minds have …
- The Steps of Breath Meditation… As soon as we think, we shrink up the energy field in certain parts of the body to block them out of our awareness, which is why there’s tension in the body every time a thought occurs. This part of the body gets tense so you can think that thought; that part of the body gets tense so you can think this one …
- Mud Houses… There are your thought fabrications, starting with directed thought and evaluation: adjusting the breath and figuring out how best to use the pleasure that comes when the breath is adjusted well. Then there’s your consciousness of all these things. You try to put these things together in the best way you can. Just like the little kids making the mud houses: You want …
- Refreshing… This is what directed thought and evaluation are about. They’re the causes for your concentration. When you focus them on one object, like the breath, and you can maintain those three together—directing your thoughts to the breath, evaluating the breath, paying attention solely to the breath and mind together—then the other factors of right concentration will come in, which are a …
- Locate Your Craving… It’s called directed thought and evaluation. As you try to stay there, all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out-, those three activities—singleness of preoccupation, directed thought, and evaluation—are the causes. As for the sense of pleasure and even rapture that can come, those are the results. You don’t have to do those. You do …
- Bare Attention… In other words, instead of getting in to a thought and driving off with it, he watched it: “Where does it goes on its own? What does it lead to?” He found that thoughts imbued with sensual desire, ill-will, or cruelty caused suffering. Thoughts that were free from those qualities were skillful thoughts. Even more skillful was to get the mind to settle …
- A Home for the Mind… If you’re fully aware of the whole body, there’s no place for those thoughts to catch hold. They may come, but they just go right away, because they don’t have any spot to latch on to. This is an important skill, because the more you can fully inhabit your body, the more you’re protected from vagrant thoughts, unskillful thoughts, and …
- The Five Hindrances… You look at your thoughts as part of a cause-and-effect pattern. When you can deal with them in the proper way—with this ability to see them simply as events in the mind rather than your entering into them as worlds—then you find that the other hindrances begin to fall away as well. When you enter into your thoughts as worlds …
- Responsible for Your Goodness… All too often we nourish ourselves with thoughts of our own importance, or thoughts of sensuality, thoughts of who knows what. And that kind of food is not necessarily good for the mind because often those thoughts can poison whatever goodness we may have. The Buddha gives an example of someone who’s practicing concentration and starts thinking about how his concentration is better …
- A Positive-Sum Game… And as for thoughts that go in any other direction, just put them aside. This is a game where there are no losers. Each time you can put aside a thought, you win. As for the thought, it doesn’t lose. It just goes away. There’s no person there losing. So just keep coming back to the breath. See how long you can …
- Setbacks… You thought things were going well, everything was taken care of, and all of a sudden you’re shown an area where more work needs to be done. Well, don’t let yourself get upset. Just realize that there’s more to this than you may have thought. After all, we’re training the whole mind and not just a few random skills. We …
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