Search results for: "Thought"
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- Hindrances Based on Delusion… It’s also thoughts in your own mind that tempt you off in random directions. So you have to be ready for these things. They’re bound to be there. And prepare yourself to deal with them. When you’re practicing concentration, the big obstacles, the big Maras, are the hindrances. There are five of them. And they can be mapped against the three …
- You Should Heed These Shoulds… What this line of thought is doing is taking the three perceptions and turning them into a metaphysical teaching of three characteristics, making that the basis of the Buddha’s teachings. On top of that basis, you place the four noble truths. Then you try to figure out the duties of the four noble truths in line with the fact that everything is going …
- Worldly Narratives… As for skillful thoughts, he allowed himself free rein. He just kept mindful of them to make sure they didn’t start going out of bounds. Then he began to realize that even skillful thinking can tire the mind. That was when his mind was ready to settle down. So meditation is not just an activity of stopping your thought processes. You have to …
- Jhāna & Discernment… As every meditator knows, there are times when you’re sitting here with the breath, and all of a sudden you’re someplace else, totally forgetting the breath, and in another thought world. When you realize that’s happened, you just drop the thought world and you come back. Ideally, though, you want to see the earlier steps before you go into the thought …
- The Importance of Being Focused… They’ve had plenty of chance to get thought about, to get dealt with. You need to be able to reserve some space and time for the breath, so that it can get its due. Otherwise, things that seem pressing push in, push in, and things that are important get pushed out. It’s so easy to lose perspective. Some issue jumps up at …
- Curious About the Process… You might think that you should finish off the thought first, to round it out, but you’ve got to learn how to treat your thoughts a little roughly, because we give too much credence to our thoughts. One way of not giving credence is just to cut them off, come back, and be prepared that the mind is going to wander off again …
- 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 …
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