Search results for: "Thought"

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  2. When You Hit a Plateau
     … He asked the right questions. “How am I putting this together? What are my intentions right now? What views are they based on?” We go through life being driven by thoughts and attitudes that we don’t really comprehend. And although there are some things that you see more clearly the higher you get on the mountain, there are other things you’re not … 
  3. The Buddha’s Filters
     … When a situation comes up that requires reflected thought, the first reflection should be, “Where is the suffering here? What’s causing it? And what can I do to put an end to it by attacking the cause?” Try to comprehend the suffering, abandon its cause, and develop the path so that you can realize the cessation of suffering. That should be how you … 
  4. The Not-Self Discourse
     … There’s dis-ease in the body, dis-ease in your feelings, in your perceptions, in your thought fabrications, even in your consciousness. If these aggregates really were you or yours, you could totally control them. Now, this doesn’t mean you have no control at all. As the Buddha admitted in other places, the aggregates do offer some pleasure. If they didn’t … 
  5. Up for the Challenge
     … Say, when the ship goes down, it goes down at a different angle than you thought it would. You thought you could get out the right side, but no, the right side is sinking, so you’ve got to go out the left side. Learn how to look at the situation and make your choices. These are the strengths you’ll need, and these … 
  6. The Fetter of Perceptions
    When I first went to stay with the Ajaan Fuang and read Ajaan Lee’s instructions on the breath energy going through the nerves, around the muscles of the body, and through the different organs of the torso, I didn’t realize it, but part of me thought of it as kind of make-believe. Until one day I was sitting, meditating and noticed … 
  7. Basic Meditation Instructions
     … You want to be in the driver seat, so that when the time comes to think about things, you can direct your thoughts in the direction that’s going to be useful. When you realize you’ve thought something through, then you can rest the mind, so that it’s not wasting its energy in idle inner chatter. And when its energy isn’t … 
  8. Sense Restraint
     … As the Buddha says, you’re secluded or withdrawn from sensuality; you pull out of those thoughts—and only then can you can get into right concentration. So an important part of the practice is how you go through the day and how you manage your senses. It’s one of the reasons why we have the eight precepts. Ajaan Suwat made the comment … 
  9. Heedful of Death
     … It builds thought-worlds that don’t seem totally real unless you can close off your awareness of how the thought-world was built. It’s in those gaps of alertness that the actual machinations of fabrication are going on, so those are precisely the things you want to see. As soon as you realize you’ve slipped off the breath, come right back … 
  10. Succeeding at Happiness
     … He thought it didn’t seem natural. It was more natural—and therefore better, he thought—when it was spontaneous. Of course, that had to do with the author’s ideas about who was behind all these feelings of unity and consciousness. He saw it as a gift from above, and it didn’t seem right to him that people were actually learning how … 
  11. Surveying the World
     … If you can stay on this level, then when you see thoughts that would go out into the world again, you put them aside. Try to stay just on this level of events happening right here, right now. You’re doing this to clear the decks, because eventually you’ll want to see how those thoughts form—the ones that pull you away, that … 
  12. Antidotes
     … Just as when you sit here and a thought comes into the mind you learn not to run with it, you’ve got to learn to use this skill in other areas, other parts of your life, where things are more rushed, where there’s a lot more going on. If you forget the skills you’ve developed here, you’re going to get … 
  13. A Mirror for the Mind
     … In terms of concentration, your acts are directed thought and evaluation, plus the effort to bring that directed thought and evaluation to one object. So keep your eye on those activities. Direct your thoughts to the breath. Evaluate the breath. Be mindful of the breath. Be alert to the breath. Be ardent in trying to create a sense of well-being, a sense of … 
  14. Cross-questioning
     … When you take abstract thought and you trace it back, you find it refers to very concrete things. The abstractions we deal with tend to have a basis in concrete activities. For instance, when we talk about grasping the concept, we’re thinking about the hand grasping an object. When talk about resonating with an idea, that’s an analogy to music. If you … 
  15. Desire
     … Either we don’t get what we want; or when we get it, we find that it’s something different from what we thought it was; or it seems to be what we thought was, but it doesn’t last. All of which is frustrating. So the Buddha said that the only way out is to go beyond desire. But desire’s not something … 
  16. Practicing in Solitude
     … Other ways you get help from reading the Dhamma include the fact that it gives you ideas for meditation you may not have thought of, like ways of dealing with the breath in the different parts of the body so that you have some variety. It’s not just in, out, in, out. It’s in here and out there. If you’ve got … 
  17. Joyous Endurance
    Direct your thoughts to the breath. Direct your attention to the breath. Direct your whole mind to the breath. And try to keep it in that direction. In the Mangala Sutta, this is called having yourself rightly directed. It’s one of the ways that you bless yourself, protect yourself. The nature of the mind is that it doesn’t just sit in one … 
  18. Easy to Instruct
     … With that first line—this is what should be done—someone in the group raised his hand: “Wait a minute, I thought Buddhism didn’t have any shoulds.” They spent the whole morning discussing that point. It’s not as if the Buddha was a lawgiver enforcing people to do things. Everything in his teachings is voluntary. Take the altar here in front of … 
  19. Solidly Established
     … Other thoughts may come into the mind, but you have to learn how to pay them no attention. Think of them as people passing by when you have work to do. You don’t have to identify with the thought, thinking that it’s your thought or something you have to look into. What you’re here to do right now is to stay … 
  20. Gladdening
     … You can sit here and you can think thoughts of goodwill, but primarily, when you’re sitting here with your eyes closed, it’s a matter of training the mind side, trying to understand cause and effect in your mind, first with an eye to getting the mind to settle down. What would provide the mind a good place to settle down? What kind … 
  21. Layers of Selves
     … When you begin to see that the pain and the body really are two separate things, you begin to realize that the pain moves around a lot more than you originally thought. You thought it was kind of a dull ache right there and it had a particular location with clear boundaries. But now the boundaries begin to get a little bit more fluid … 
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