Search results for: "Thought"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. Sort Things Out
     … For the time being, any thoughts that pull you away from the breath count as unskillful. Any thoughts that help you come back and help you stay here are skillful thoughts. It’s not as if when you meditate you have no thoughts at all. You start out with some thinking. The thinking gets more refined as your concentration gets stronger, but in the … 
  17. Grasping the Snake
     … Actively develop new thought patterns in the mind so that when an angry thought comes up—and you know the kind of conversation the mind has with itself when it’s angry—you have an antidote ready. If anger does come into the mind, use the antidote to get rid of it. At other times, think in the terms that would undercut the anger … 
  18. You Can Do Better
     … craving for sensuality—your fascination with sensual thoughts, sensual fantasies; craving for becoming—wanting to take on an identity in a world of experience so that you can get something you want from within that world; and craving for non-becoming—the times when you’d prefer to be obliterated or that the world be obliterated. These things you want to abandon. When you … 
  19. Samvega First
     … To fend off any thoughts of people who have wronged you in the past, or people you’ve wronged, things that you’d like to go back and change but you can’t, you try to develop thoughts of goodwill and equanimity beforehand… You remind yourself, “Well, I’m trying to have goodwill for everyone, trying to be equanimous about the things I can … 
  20. Inconstancy
     … When you realize the mind can lie to itself—and how much it does lie to itself—that’s good protection against distracting thoughts. The same with thoughts of inconstancy: Whatever you can think of that would pull you away from the concentration, anything that you find attractive, anything you find compelling: Just how long is that attraction going to last? The things that … 
  21. Choose Your Battles
     … Things you shouldn’t endure are thoughts of ill will, thoughts of sensuality, and thoughts of harmfulness that arise in the mind. You don’t let them stay; you don’t let them take over. It’s natural that they will come, but you don’t have to continue with them. In Ajaan Lee’s image, you don’t have to continue weaving that … 
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