Search results for: "Thought"
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- Doubt vs. Discernment… You see the processes of thought construction in action. If you lose your reference to the present moment, you’ll go drifting off into thought worlds. When you’re in a thought world, you can’t see it clearly for what it is, how it’s constructed, how it’s jerry-rigged, so you’re missing a lot. Everything that’s happening right here …
- Issues of Control… Any other thoughts that would get in the way of the breath, you put them aside. And for the time being, thoughts of jhāna might count as thoughts related to the world because all too often you want to come out and say, “Well, I got this jhāna, I got that jhāna…” I noticed that when Ajaan Fuang was teaching, he never guaranteed anyone …
- Friends with the Breath, Friends with the Buddha… Some of them are thoughts you’ve come up with on your own. Others are things you picked up from people around you: some well-meaning but ignorant, others even ill-meaning. So you can’t trust everything that’s coming up in the mind. Even the members that you developed yourself: Sometimes they were committee members that came from a desire you had …
- The River Gauge… You’re putting it together with your thoughts, your words, your deeds, all the five aggregates we chanted about just now. Your concentration is going to require form—the form of your body, the breath. It’s going to require feeling. You have to develop feelings that they call feelings not-of-the-flesh, pleasure not-of-the-flesh. Part of the motivation though …
- Goodwill as Right View… So think about what goodwill really means, and make it a regular practice that, as you leave meditation, you think thoughts of goodwill for everybody. Ajaan Suwat used to say that when you think thoughts of goodwill for everybody at the beginning of a meditation session, it’s basically for you, to clear away the difficult issues of the day. No matter what other …
- Right Now… If you can’t stay with the breath, look at what thoughts are pulling you away. The Buddha talks about the three characteristics. As I mentioned the other night, they’re the terms in which he discusses discernment. All I emphasized the other night role was that discernment plays after you’ve developed concentration. But it can also be your preparation for concentration on …
- Don’t Be a Traitor to Yourself… The people here stand for thoughts of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations outside—which of course includes thoughts of actual people and material objects outside. This is how they all come in. You let them in. Learn how to close off those gates. Even though the enemy may be laying siege to you all around, as long as you’ve got all the …
- Duties in the Present… Keep your thoughts with the breath, keep thinking about the breath each time it comes in, each time it goes out. This ability to keep that thought in mind: That’s mindfulness. Sometimes we hear mindfulness described as present awareness, but actually the word for present awareness is sampajañña: alertness. All-around knowing in the present moment: That’s sampajañña. Sati or mindfulness is …
- Using the Committee of the Mind… There may be attitudes you picked up from your parents, picked up from school, picked up from the media, but you’ve internalized them, so that every thought sounds like your thought; every desire, your desire. But, when you realize that you have a choice—that you can have other desires, other thoughts—that allows you to pull yourself out. Otherwise, you’re stuck …
- Reclaiming the Breath… That way, you can step outside of the vicious circle where the thoughts hijack the breath, and then the breath augments the unskillful thoughts. You can break that. Then you can move more and more into the body, reclaim more and more of the body as you feel better here. This feels like a place where you really belong. Then you can start playing …
- The Need for Evaluation… directed thought and evaluation, the factors in the first jhāna. They’re a necessary part of the meditation, both for the sake of well-being and for the sake of knowledge. We can’t ignore them. We can’t slough over them or skip over them, because this is where a lot of our insight into the mind and into the body can come …
- The Joy of Renunciation… that what we experience in terms of form, feeling, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness is based on what we’ve fashioned out of the potential for these things. We have certain intentions that make us fashion these aggregates. That applies to feelings of pleasure and pain. The pleasure you’re going to find in the precepts is something you have to fabricate. You do that …
- Path & Goal… It’s a painful thought, but it’s part of our motivation. We can’t let that pain overwhelm us. We have to remember that when the goal is found, it’s going to be found right here. So it’s a question of learning how to settle in properly right here. And if you don’t like the idea of a goal hanging …
- The Thinking Heart… Your emotions have thoughts; your thoughts have emotions. The big problem for the heart, of course, is suffering. And it’s hard to separate that from thinking. As the Buddha said, our first response to suffering is bewilderment, trying to figure it out: “Why is this happening?” Then the second response is a thought, too: “Is there anybody out there who knows a way …
- Freedom Through Painful Practice… What would you do if you didn’t have it? What would you do if parts of it were paralyzed? Unusable? The immediate thought that comes in, of course, is that you really are attached to the body after all. The next question is, can you use that thought to help spur you in the practice? After all, there will come a time when …
- On Human Nature… If you find yourself thinking any petty or unwise or selfish thoughts, that’s not necessarily your nature. Those are just habits you’ve picked up from your past ways of looking for happiness, but you’re not stuck there. On the other hand, though, when you’re thinking nice, kind thoughts, that’s not necessarily your innate nature, either. So you can’t …
- The Skill of Stillness… If that thought of, “This is boring,” tries to pull you away, well, resist the thought that it’s boring. If it sounds like you’re saying that it’s boring, just assume that it’s somebody else assuming your voice. You don’t have to believe it. You don’t have to identify with it. The skill of not identifying with your thoughts …
- The Forerunner of All Things… You can say, “Yes, I really do feel this, I really do think this,” but are those feelings and thoughts something you want to go with? After all, if the mind is capable of so many things, good and bad, you can’t trust everything that comes up out of the murk; or that whenever you shine a light down into the murk, whatever …
- Choices… There are thoughts behind your feelings, and feelings behind your thoughts. A feeling is simply a thought that’s gotten more into the body. When you think that the body is telling you something, actually the body is not telling you anything. It’s simply conveying a message from one part of the mind to another. And just because the message goes through the …
- Heedful of Ruts in the Mind… When you’re careless—you go through the day here, you say, “Well, I can think a few unskillful thoughts now and then, as a reward for all that time I spent meditating”—you’re just putting more ruts in the mind, so that when mindfulness lapses, that’s where you’re going to go. You have to think about this. The places where …
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