Search results for: "Thought"

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  2. Ajaan Suwat’s Gift
     … We’re responsible for our thoughts, our words, our deeds. We can’t be responsible for anybody else’s. Yet all too often that’s what we’re concerned about. We want to stop somebody else from doing this, or encourage them to do that, without turning around to look, well, are we doing what’s right? This is why we train our minds … 
  3. Skilled in Aims
     … In fact, it’s when the mind gets past sensual thoughts, secluded from sensual thoughts and secluded from all types of unskillful dhammas—unskillful qualities from wrong view all the way up through wrong mindfulness—that you lift the level of your mind. You give it a good foundation inside—a sense of well-being inside—that doesn’t have to depend on any … 
  4. Knowing the Body from Within
     … But you also want to be able to pull yourself out at any time, in case a thought world turns vicious, so it’s good to gain practice in just staying with the body. Think of “body, body, body,” keeping the body in and of itself as your frame of reference. If a thought does arise, and you can sense where in the body … 
  5. Damming & Diverting
     … In other words, take the energy in the emotion and have it flow into something that’s actually skillful, like the skillful practice of concentration or other skillful thoughts outside. If there’s passion, divert the passion into doing your practice well. As you keep the mind in control like this, you begin to get a better sense of what’s going on: how … 
  6. Noble Conversation
     … We’re dealing with directed thought and evaluation in both cases. And the more you can control your directed thoughts—directing them to topics that are useful, and evaluating how much is enough conversation—then the easier it gets to exercise the same discretion while you’re meditating. What should you be talking to yourself about? How should you be analyzing it? When you … 
  7. The Power of Present Kamma
     … And then you engage in the second kind of fabrication, verbal fabrication, which is directed thought and evaluation, vitakka and vicara in Pali. Directed thought means choosing a topic. Evaluation means expanding on it, either making comments or asking questions. These two activities constitute the way we talk to ourselves. We focus on a topic and then we make comments about it. So here … 
  8. The Strength to See
     … But if you can learn to strip away those thoughts, strip away the labels that say, “Here’s the pain: It’s right there, it has this shape, and it has this quality”: Just let those labels go; let those thoughts go. What’s left will be the pure sensations of pain. That way, you learn a lot about the mind. The things you … 
  9. Death Is All Around
     … feeling, perception, thought constructs, and consciousness. You turn these things into a path. Focus on the breath, develop feelings of ease, spread them throughout the body. You use your perception of the breath to focus your concentration. You use your directed thought and evaluation, which are thought constructs, to keep your mind on the breath and to evaluate the breath. Then you’re aware … 
  10. Focused on Your Duties
     … Once you have this spot in the present moment where you’re anchored, then if other thoughts come in, you can question them. Your first response, of course, is just not to get involved at all. But you find yourself, every now and then, slipping off. You have to ask why. What was the appeal of that thought? What was the appeal of this … 
  11. Mindfulness the Gatekeeper
     … Fortunately, the young monk had been studying the Dhamma, and as soon as he heard the word “duty,” he thought of the duties of the four noble truths. He was developing the thoughts instead of letting them go. Or you might say, whatever it was that was causing the thoughts, he was trying to let to go of the thoughts without letting go of … 
  12. The Challenge of Right View
     … The main fabrications in meditation are directed thought, evaluation, and perception. You direct your thoughts at a particular object, you evaluate it, and then you see which perception you can apply to it that’s going to be helpful. As in concentration: All the stages of concentration up to dimension of nothingness are all called perception attainments—as when you’re focusing the body … 
  13. The Dhamma Eye
     … As for the second type—thoughts that were based on renunciation, non-ill will, and harmlessness: Those didn’t afflict anybody, and they didn’t get in the way of full awakening, of true peace, true freedom. Those thoughts, he said, you could allow to have free rein. But if you thought them for 24 hours, they would wear out the mind. So he … 
  14. The Most Important Thing to Be Doing
     … You start thinking about the extent to which your thoughts can determine your actions, and the way your thoughts have led you in good and bad places in the past without much pattern. You want to give some pattern to your thoughts. In other words, turn them into a path, the path that leads to the end of suffering. This is something you have … 
  15. Asalha Puja
    Try to drop all sensual thoughts, all unskillful qualities in the mind: vivicc’eva kāmehi, vivicca akusalehi dhammehi. Think about and evaluate the breath so that there’s a sense of ease and well-being in the way you breathe. This is how you get the mind into concentration. Concentration is part of the path. When you practice the path, that’s called paying … 
  16. Mastering Causality
     … You begin to get more sensitive to what the mind is doing, particularly in terms of its perceptions and thought-fabrications, and how these relate to your feelings. Perceptions are the labels you put on things. For example, you may experience the body as something solid breathing in and breathing out. Well, you can change that perception. See everything you sense in the body … 
  17. Talking Among Your Selves
     … The Buddha calls all this directed thought and evaluation. It’s in our directed thoughts and acts of evaluation that our sense of self largely resides. If you like the way you talk to yourself, you tend to be at ease with yourself. If you’re driven crazy by all the voices in your mind, you might decide that you’d rather have no … 
  18. Laying the Infrastructure
     … Otherwise, if you keep running back and forth between the breath and trying to stop this thought and stop that thought, the breath gets abandoned, and so instead of being concentrated on the breath, you find yourself running around. There’s a children’s game I saw once in a department store in Japan. In the department stores there they have game arcades up … 
  19. Frustrated Desires
     … What’s that about? Open it up a little bit, and it turns out to be a thought. Then you start weaving that thought into larger and larger realities. What started out as simply an impetus from your past karma suddenly becomes something your present karma is entangled in. Then you drop your concentration. You’ve forgotten it totally; you don’t know where … 
  20. Arising & Passing Away
     … You reduce these things to simply, “There is passing away, arising again, passing away on the surface.” You see that they are not nearly as powerful as you thought they were. They are not nearly as compelling as you thought they were. That puts you in a position of greater strength. When you learn to look at these things simply as stress arising and … 
  21. Into the Light of Consciousness
     … Verbal being direct thought and evaluation, the way you talk to yourself. You direct your thoughts to a topic and then you pass judgment on it, ask questions, make comments. Mental is perceptions and feelings, perceptions are the labels you apply to things that give them meaning, identify what they are. Feelings are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. We encounter … 
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