Search results for: "Thought"
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- 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 …
- Using Right View Rightly… There’s a passage where the Buddha’s talking to a monk, saying, “Do you have any desire for things you haven’t seen, heard, smelled, tasted, touched, or thought about?” The purpose being to point you to the fact that desires come totally out of your sensory experience—just these six senses right here. Then, from those desires, you build all kinds of …
- Food Insecurity… You talk to yourself, telling yourself that “Something’s going to come of this generosity that I’m developing.” You have to talk to yourself while you’re doing these practices to get the full benefit out of them, because they’re giving you training in what? Directed thought and evaluation, turning your thinking to a positive direction so that you get more and …
- Educating Equanimity… Often we think of our emotions as being a given, “This is what I truly feel, this is the way I really feel, this is my identity.” We tend to trust our emotions more than our thoughts, perhaps because we know that a lot of our thoughts are just picked up from other people, but somehow we feel that our emotions are innate to …
- Free from Animosity… But if you have vera, it means not only that you have thoughts about revenge concerning somebody else, but also that somebody else has thoughts like that concerning you. It’s as if you’re both tying each other down. You’re holding on to the grudge and it’s weighing you down. The way out is not to try to figure out who …
- How to Listen… When you first get the mind to settle down, your thought is, “How can I make this last?” There’s nothing wrong with that thought. Learning how to appreciate the pleasure of getting the mind into oneness, finding pleasure apart from sensuality, is an important skill—one that should be cultivated, one that should be appreciated. But you have to realize that it’s …
- Mindfulness + Discernment = Intelligence… He developed right resolve to keep in check any thoughts that might wander off out of sensuality, ill will, harmfulness, and he allowed his mind to think only thoughts that were coming out of renunciation, non-ill will, and harmlessness, because of the effect that they would have on the mind. He looked at his thoughts in terms of cause and effect, not in …
- Getting the Most Out of Now… If we didn’t have some control over our thoughts, some control over our minds, we would never have thought that we could have any control at all, or as much control as we’d like. The fact is that we do have some control, and we can take advantage of that. As the Buddha said, if we couldn’t abandon unskillful qualities or …
- The Dhamma Wheel… Thought constructs or fabrications, where you put thoughts together. And then consciousness, which is aware of all these things. He says we cling to these things, and that’s the suffering. The word for “clinging,” upādāna, can also mean, “to feed, to take sustenance.” We go around feeding all the time, trying to find happiness in these things. Yet there’s always a sense …
- You Can’t Clone Awakening… This means, at the very beginning, that if you find the mind is thinking unskillful thoughts imbued with sensuality, ill will, or harmfulness, you try to replace them. And you realize that you can. Sometimes it’s harder than other times, but still it’s something that can be done. If you recognize that a thought has come from an unskillful intention, you hold …
- Loving Yourself Wisely… And although there may be a little bit of comparing yourself with others in that thought, what it comes down to is that you realize that your goodness doesn’t have to depend on other people’s goodness. There was a debate recently over the question of whether there are times when it’s justified to go out and kill people if they’re …
- Ideals… This is an area where you have to practice what the Buddha calls “guarding the truth.” When you approach the practice with ideals, you have to ask yourself, “What are your ideals based on?” What you’ve heard, what you’ve read, what you’ve thought out on your own? None of those are totally reliable. You have to test these things. You have …
- A Path Rooted in Desire… We cling to the aggregates of form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, consciousness—and that’s the suffering. It’s the passion and desire that wants to hold on to these things as you’re feeding on them. There’s a hunger, and the hunger is not yet satisfied—that’s where the suffering is. That’s to be comprehended. The cause is the craving …
- Thinking Seriously about Happiness… At the very least, you can spread thoughts of goodwill. Goodwill is a wish for happiness. The Buddha calls it “a monk’s wealth.” In other words, when you become a monk, everything you have is somebody else’s gift. If you’ve been a monk for a couple years, every cell in your body is the result of somebody’s generosity, of the …
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