Search results for: "Thought"
- Page 55
- A Refuge from Death… Especially if you can sense where in the body there’s the tension that corresponds to the thought, just zap the tension, breathe right through it, and the thought doesn’t have any foundation. It collapses. If that doesn’t work, then, as the Buddha said, grit your teeth, press your tongue against the roof of your mouth, and just determine that you’re …
- Goodness Comes from Heedfulness… The mind does have this tendency to blank out when it’s switching from one thought world to the next. It’s almost as if the blanking out is intentionally meant for you to forget the old world and be in the new one. So when you realize this has happened, you bring the mind back to the breath and you make up your …
- What We’re Here to See… What are the stages in getting the mind to settle down? The Buddha says you’re going to use some directed thought and evaluation, and this is nothing new. It’s not like you have to suddenly invent directed thought and evaluation. The mind’s doing that all the time. It’s its basic way of conversing with itself: You choose the topic and …
- Alighting on the Dhamma… This is why the Buddha said that the first step of right concentration includes directed thought and evaluation. It’s not as if you haven’t been doing directed thought and evaluation, and suddenly you have to do it to get concentrated. You’ve been doing it all along. It’s your internal chatter, which is the basis for all speech. What we’re …
- Patterns to Happiness… One is directed thought., when you direct your thoughts, you direct your attention, to a particular object. The second is evaluation. You evaluate the object to see what’s working in the sense of getting the mind to settle down. For instance, when you’re focused on the breath, you can play with the breath in different ways: long in, long out, short in …
- The Power of Truth… They demand that you look at your thoughts, your words, and your deeds—and particularly your thoughts—in a way that often will require you to let go of things you really like. That’s because you learn how to look at the thoughts as part of a causal process. When you think in this particular way, where does it lead? When you think …
- Skills to Take Home… Just as when you’re meditating and a thought comes up and you say: “Well, is that so? Is that so?” you can ask the same thing of other people. Of course you don’t ask it right out loud, you just pose the question in your mind—“To what extent is that so?” If you can’t do that with other people’s …
- No Running Away… It’s all too easy, when you think thoughts of goodwill for everybody out there, for it to be as if you’re spreading marshmallow cream over the whole world. The people you like and the people you don’t like all become buried in the marshmallow cream. As a result, everybody gets invisible. All you see is the marshmallow cream. But that’s …
- Respect for Concentration… We’re taking the khandhas — these aggregates of body, feeling, perception, thought-fabrications, and consciousness — and instead of identifying with them, we use them as tools. And as part of the process of mastering them as tools, there will have to be a sense of identification. You identify with the state of concentration, whatever sense of the body is present in the concentration, whatever …
- Virtue, Concentration, Discernment… You’re not killing your good qualities; you’re not stealing the bad qualities of other people to think about; you’re not engaging in illicit thoughts about sex; you’re not lying to yourself; and you’re not intoxicated. You’re alert; you’re mindful. At the same time, as you develop your discernment, you bring the mind to deeper and deeper levels …
- Up for the Challenge… One of the people in the audience raised his hand and said, “Wait a minute, wherever there’s desire there’s going to be suffering, right?” “Yeah.” He thought he caught me in a contradiction: How can suffering be part of the fourth noble truth when it’s the first? “But look at your practice,” I told him. “Has your practice been constantly smooth …
- Practice Without Gaps… Then you try to put aside all thoughts of greed and distress with reference to the world. That means any thoughts about the world, what you like about it, what you don’t like about it—just put those aside. Maintain your original frame of reference. As it gets more and more solid, that’s when the mindfulness practice turns into concentration practice. As …
- Appropriate Attention… These include actions in thought, word, and deed. So that there are some shoulds there. The other categorical teaching builds on that: the four noble truths. Craving, the second truth, is an unskillful action. The noble eightfold path, the fourth truth, is a skillful way of acting. And here, too, there are shoulds. Each truth is not just something to sit around and talk …
- The Joy of Curiosity… How can we get it quiet and how can we get it to stay with one thing? The commentator has to do some directed thought and evaluation to figure things out. If the mind is not settling down, why? Is it the breath? Is it the mind? Is it something you’ve carried in from earlier in the day, a mood, a memory of …
- Thinking About Rebirth… We tend to think of rebirth as a big selfing kind of thought, which doesn’t fit in with that not-selfing that the Buddha teaches. But actually it’s useful for both skillful selfing and skillful not-selfing. And the teaching on not-selfing doesn’t wait until the very end, when all you see are things in terms of the five aggregates …
- Suffering Starts Before Life… You do this as you go from life to life, and you do this as you go from thought world to thought world right here and now. In fact, it’s the habit of going from thought world to thought world right here that prepares you for the kind of life you’re going to go to when this life ends. So the suffering …
- Luminous… It can think a thought and it can observe itself thinking the thought, and see the process of thinking as a process—without necessarily getting sucked into the thought world. So even though we have a lot of old patterns of behavior that we picked up from way back, we’re not necessarily trapped in them. Especially as we have the opportunity to meditate …
- Totally Secure… And watch out for when the mind starts leaving the breath, starts fabricating other thoughts, other worlds, fabricating the past, fabricating the future. This is one of the things the mind is really good at, fabrication. The Pali word is *sankhara. *The problem with this fabrication is that it creates a lot of suffering for the mind. This is not to say that sankhara …
- Get Real… Other thoughts are going to come in. That’s something you can expect to happen, so don’t get worked up about it. The trick lies in letting them go right through you. Think of your awareness of the body as a big window screen, with lots of little holes. They’re porous. When a sound comes in, when a thought comes in, whatever …
- Levels of the Breath… You’ve got directed thought and evaluation; those are verbal fabrications. And you’ve got feelings and perceptions and the intentional element fashioning them; that’s mental fabrication. These are the things you want to understand. You understand them by learning how to master them, bringing them all together—as we’re doing right now when we focus on the breath—and approaching their …
- Load next page...
