Search results for: "Thought"
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- You’ve Got Friends… This way, you have a place not only to step out from your thoughts but also to step out into a sense of well-being. You’re going to need that sense of well-being because you’ll be looking at your mind to gain some insight into how the mind is creating suffering. You have to remember, it’s doing it out of …
- Intelligence of the Heart… Which means that your thoughts of goodwill are not just thoughts. They also inform your actions, and when you can see that your actions and your thoughts are harmless, a sense of well-being should come. And it’s good to remember that, so that when you extend thoughts of goodwill, it’s not a chore. Some of the later texts recommend that you …
- Immersed in the Body… But the mind does identify with these things — sometimes with the body, sometimes with feelings, perceptions, thought-formations, sometimes with sensory consciousness, sometimes different combinations, sometimes all of the above. If you could take a movie of the mind’s sense of itself, it would be erratic and mercurial, like a reflection on water — slithering here and there, identifying with this, identifying with that …
- Mindfulness as Refuge… And that requires strength, because it’s so easy to go for thoughts of sensual desire, thoughts of ill will, thoughts of restlessness and anxiety. These things can consume the mind, and there’s a part of the mind that really likes them. It takes strength to say, “No.” Part of the strength comes from your conviction that what inhabits your mind really is …
- Insight from Jhana… thoughts about your work, thoughts about home, thoughts about what other people have said and done. All the different hindrances—you want to clear those away. Once they’re gone, the mind gets into concentration, but even then it’s not fully settled down. You still need to use some directed thought and evaluation to, on the one hand, fend off any distractions, and …
- A Home of Your Own… When you’re living outside, some thoughts may be necessary for you to think. But right now, thoughts that leave the sense of the body are off-limits. Once you’ve made up that decision, of course, you begin to see how often the mind does go streaming out after other things. You have to see: Where does that current come from? How do …
- Stay Centered… how unskillful thoughts get connected, how skillful thoughts get connected, how that continuous sense of the center can get connected. As Ajaan Lee said, “When you see cause and effect, that’s when you have real insight.” If you just see causes but without the effects, that’s not insight. Or, just the effects but not the causes: That doesn’t count, either. Real …
- When You Care… You don’t have to put up with the suffering that comes from acting on unskillful thoughts. Like right now, as you’re meditating: Nobody’s policing your thoughts. You could be thinking about anything at all. But you yourself realize, “Okay, if I allow myself to waste this time, when am I going to finally get serious about the meditation?” You’ve got …
- How Right Mindfulness Leads to Right Concentration… Other times, those thoughts have more pull, in which case you want to look at their drawbacks. If you stayed with that thought for a long period of time, what would it lead you to do? Usually something unskillful. Well, why think about it at all? We don’t know how much time we have, but we do have this time right now, so …
- True Friends & False… It’s bad enough that you have unskillful thoughts in your mind, but if you hang around with other people with unskillful thoughts, those unskillful thoughts become stereo. They’re all around you. That makes them seem even more real. We see books on meditation, CDs on meditation, these talks you’re listening to make it sound like meditation is just something you can …
- A Good Mood to Meditate… An emotion is basically a thought that’s gotten lodged in the body and has affected the hormones in the body one way or another, which is why it seems so much more insistent, so much more important and real than mere thoughts. This is why we tend to identify with our moods much more than we identify with thoughts, because the moods have …
- Categorical Truths… You’re in charge of your thoughts. So, right now, you want to focus on staying with the breath. Any other thoughts that come in right now that are not related to the breath, you just put them aside. In fact, one of the best ways of putting them aside is simply not paying attention to them. If you pay attention to them, they …
- The Range of Our Responsibility… And you’ve also got thoughts coming through the mind. Which are you going to focus on? You do have the choice. Some thoughts coming through the mind are actually helpful in encouraging you to stay with the present moment. They can be anything from the thoughts that direct your thinking to the breath or your attention to the breath, or the thoughts that …
- Fabricating the Present… Where are those points when the mind begins to label things? “Ah — this is a thought of the future; this is a thought of the past. This is your arm. This is your leg. This is warmth. This is coolness. This is energy. This is solidity.” The mind can choose these things — choose what to focus on, how to label it. And once it …
- Dhamma Medicine for Free… So if thoughts come up in the mind, you don’t have to chase them away. Just stay right here with the breath. After all, those thoughts don’t destroy your experience of the breath. And the breath is your anchor to the present moment. It keeps you in the body, keeps you right here, right now. If you spend your time chasing down …
- Keep It Simple… For the time being, any other thought that comes along not related to the breath can be dropped as an unskillful thought. So you’re staying with the breath, mindful and alert: that’s right effort right there. It shades into right mindfulness: just being with the breath in and of itself. That gives you three qualities now: You’re mindful and alert and …
- The Dhamma Protects… The thoughts will come and the thoughts will go. The thing is, they’re going to come again unless you figure them out. So you’re watching them to figure them out, to understand them, to understand what happens where those moments of total mindlessness come in, when you suddenly realize you’ve been running with these things. Okay, which part of the mind …
- Dwelling in Emptiness… There’s the directed thought, the evaluation of the first jhana. For a while, you can’t let them go. You have to put up with that disturbance, because you’re trying to fit the mind together with its object, the breath, and make the most of the breath to give rise to a sense of well-being and ease. You need directed thought …
- Anapanasati Day… There was once a time when the Buddha was advising the monks to practice breath meditation, and one of the monks said, “Oh, I practice breath meditation already.” And the Buddha asked him, “What kind of meditation do you practice?” The monk said, “Well, I try to remain calm and equanamous about thoughts of the past, calm and equanamous about thoughts of future, and …
- Views & Vision… You should have that attitude towards your own thoughts. Your really interesting thoughts are about the more universal things, particularly this issue of vision, which means that you actually see what the mind is doing, see how it’s creating suffering for itself. And this may not be a topic that you can talk about with other people, but at least it doesn’t …
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