Search results for: "Thought"

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  2. Happiness Comes from Inner Strength
     … to stretch our imagination, to help us understand that we have more energy inside, more potentials inside than we would have thought otherwise. There are three main ways of developing these potentials: through generosity, virtue, and fostering thoughts of universal goodwill. In each case, we find that we have to take something we have inside and develop it further. In doing so, we gain … 
  3. Feeding Frenzy: Dependent Co-arising
     … Form, feeling, perception, thought fabrications, and sensory consciousness: These are the things we feed on. When we’re meditating we’re trying to create a good bhava, a good place for the mind to stay in the present moment. If you create a world for yourself that maintains its reference to the present, then it’s a lot easier to see what that world … 
  4. Turtle Mind
     … knowing when to apply equanimity, when to apply thoughts of goodwill, compassion, or empathetic joy. The first three are there to motivate your actions in thought, word, and deed. The equanimity is to remind you: This is the way the world is. So you want to be careful in your actions. But you also have to realize that there are a lot of things … 
  5. Get Out of Yourself
     … As he said, he got on to the right path when he was able to look at his thoughts not so much in terms of what he liked thinking about or what he was stewing about or whatever, but he pulled out of his thoughts and looked at them as causal processes. “Where does this thought come from? Where does it lead? If it … 
  6. Take Care of Your Tools
     … The Buddha has you remind yourself that once you have that kind of thought, then the basis for the thought, the basis for your claim, has disappeared and turned into something else. In other words, if you think, “I’ve got this great stage of concentration and I’m better than that person over there,” just that thought, in and of itself, takes you … 
  7. Unhindered at Death
     … As long as you’re attached to thoughts of sensuality, you’ll fear that you could go to some place where those pleasures no longer exist. This is one of the reasons why, when the Buddha is giving Mahanama some instructions on how to counsel somebody who is dying, after making sure that the person is not worried about his family, not worried about … 
  8. The Demands of Goodwill
     … And so metta has its difficult side as well, because it requires you to be very scrupulous, very thoughtful in how you deal with yourself and with other people. It’s often thought of as a nice “feel good” kind of practice—and it does create that energy of feeling good about yourself: that you don’t have any evil intentions toward anyone. You … 
  9. Settling In
     … A little knot of energy will develop, and if you’re not careful, it’ll turn into another thought world. So think of your awareness as a spider on the web. The spider’s in one spot, but the web extends throughout the whole body. So as soon as there’s a disturbance in any part of the web, you go there, unravel it … 
  10. May All Beings Be Heedful
     … They had trouble saying, “May I be happy.” They thought it was superficial, airy-fairy. Or they thought they didn’t deserve to be happy. Either way, they just couldn’t get their hearts around this practice. Then gradually, over the years, there was a change until now: Younger generations seem to have no problem extending goodwill to themselves at all. They feel that … 
  11. Reflections
     … Whether they’re thoughts, words, or deeds, you’ve got to think about the consequences. After all, that’s how the Buddha himself got on the right path. He divided his thoughts into two types based on the consequences they would lead to. And he could tell that the consequences had a lot to do with the state of mind that was motivating them … 
  12. Do. Maintain. Use.
     … As for thoughts, sometimes you have to learn how to think through why you don’t want to think the thought. Other times, you simply let it be there, but you don’t have to get involved. Watch out especially for the thoughts that say, “Well, I’ve done this now. What’s next?” A large part of the meditation is learning to do … 
  13. To Know the Noble Truths
     … Then there are thought constructs, the way we put our thoughts together. And finally consciousness, which is aware of all these things. If it weren’t for the activity of consciousness, you wouldn’t be able to do any of these other things. Our sense of the world, our sense of our self, our sense of what should be done, and what kind of … 
  14. Allowing the Breath to Spread
     … Because of the craving, you have your perceptions of your feelings that are based on craving, you have thought-constructs about your feelings that are based on a craving, even the ways you breathe are based on craving. Those are going to make the pain even worse. So remind yourself that the pain is not necessarily totally a given. Some of the pain you … 
  15. Imagining Freedom
     … Any thought of total freedom always gets dragged down to earth by the fact that we have to eat, we need certain comforts just to keep going. And most people accept that as just the way things have to be. They don’t think outside the box. The Buddha however, thought outside the box. What if there could be a happiness that wasn’t … 
  16. The Languages of Right View
     … And if you’re sitting here meditating and you’re getting discouraged about how the meditation is going, thoughts of “you” can lead to other thoughts about how you’ve not done other things well in the past. That can get really entangled and goes nowhere good at all. That’s when you’ve got to switch languages, with a different set of concepts … 
  17. Mindfulness of Death & the Deathless
     … It creates a thought-world and then it goes into that thought-world. That’s the process of what the Buddha calls “becoming,” followed by “birth.” So the process that would lead to rebirth is happening right here, all the time. All the “becomings” that we create in the course of the day are simply small versions of what’s going to happen when … 
  18. Fighting Attitude
     … You could have the physical symptoms—because, after all, the hormones are still there in your bloodstream—even though the actual thought of anger has gone away. An example of having a hindrance when you don’t think it’s there is when you start thinking about things, insights into the Dhamma seem to be coming, and your thoughts swerve off into abstraction. If … 
  19. Just One Person
     … As the Buddha said, try to be committed to relinquishment because it’s so easy to follow a thought as it “sprouts,” you might say. Little thoughts come sprouting up here and there. You want to look carefully: “Where is this one going to take me?” “Where’s that one going to go?” If you look at it out of curiosity or out of … 
  20. A Friend to the World
     … Metta is the quality of a good friend, which is what you’re trying to develop as you develop thoughts of goodwill. Now, there are all kinds of friends. There are true friends and false friends. There’s skillful friendship and unskillful friendship. And it’s obvious, of course, that the Buddha wants us to develop the qualities of true and skillful friends. So … 
  21. Glad to Be Here
    The Buddha’s instructions on how to get the mind in concentration start, on the one hand, with the reminder that you have to get past sensuality—your fascination with thinking thoughts about sensual pleasures. You can’t let the mind wander off in those areas. The Buddha says you should have a definite sense of the dangers of those places. That’s why … 
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