Search results for: "Thought"

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  2. Faith in the Practice
     … That motivates you to look very carefully at your thoughts, your words, and your deeds, and especially at your thoughts, because your actions come out of your thoughts. This is why we meditate. We like to think that we’re meditating to bliss out for a while, and the meditation does have that possibility, but the bliss here is meant to be used. This … 
  3. Success on the Path
     … This is where citta merges in with vimansa , your powers of analysis, your powers of discrimination, your ability to question the thoughts that come into your mind. You can ask yourself, Exactly where does that thought come from? Can you identify the person who in your past would think in that way? Can you identify the tone of the voice that thinks in that … 
  4. The Basic Medicine
     … our lack of skill in managing our thoughts, our lack of skill in relating to feelings, perceptions, thought-constructs, and consciousness. And so what we’re doing is learning new skills to relate to what’s going on in the mind, along with a new sensitivity that comes with these skills. The skill is not just staying with the breath but also finding ways … 
  5. Healthy Conceit
     … Our thoughts are like that. You see the evil person fall over the cliff. You think he’s dead at the end of one sequence. Well, you know that people who disappear off the cliff can always magically reappear. And it’s the same with our finished thoughts. You’ve taken care of that issue then you’re going to back to the breath … 
  6. Compassionate Duties
     … First were the thoughts inspired by sensuality, ill-will, harmfulness: Those he said you had to keep in check. The thoughts that were inspired by renunciation, in other words, trying to find happiness in a way that doesn’t involve sensuality—i.e., what we’re doing right now, trying to find a sense of well-being as we focus on the breath—thoughts … 
  7. Guardian Meditations
     … the pride that you can think thoughts of sensual satisfaction and have yourself play a role in those thoughts where you’re able to get other people to go along with your ideas of what you would find satisfying. There’s a lot of pride that goes with lust. And yet what is it all about? You become a slave to these things that … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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