Search results for: "Thought"

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  2. Good at Thinking
     … And no matter whatever interesting thoughts, fascinating thoughts, or important-seeming thoughts may come up in the mind as you try to get it to calm down, you don’t have to pay them any attention. You can think those thoughts any other time. Right now is a good time to practice this new skill: the skill of bringing the mind to stillness, to … 
  3. Stake Out
     … He thought quite a lot. All those suttas, all those teachings he gave: It’s not that he was on automatic pilot. He was thinking, but by that point he had learned how to think. As he said, he thought the thoughts he wanted to think and he didn’t have to think the thoughts he didn’t want to think. Yet he had … 
  4. Meticulous
     … And how do you do that? Well, not by simply just watching everything arising and passing away, because what you’re focusing on then is just basically surfing from one full-blown thought to another full-blown thought. What you have to do is sense that a thought has arisen and cut it off just as quickly as you can. And when another thought … 
  5. Thoughts About Thinking
    Thoughts About Thinking March 2, 2023 We start with thoughts of goodwill to clear the decks. Any issues you may have had with people during the day, get them out of the way, because you’re trying to give the mind a place it can settle down in, right here, right now, and you don’t want those attitudes to be getting in the … 
  6. A Cure for the Sluggish Mind
     … Verbal fabrication is directed thought and evaluation: how you talk to yourself. The Buddha’s analysis of how you talk to yourself, dividing it into directed thought and evaluation, is really useful. What topics are you choosing? Where do you focus your thinking? What have you been focusing it on? If the object of your directed thinking pulls you down, focus it someplace else … 
  7. Truth with Boundaries
     … This applies to insights in your meditation—to say nothing of your thoughts as you go through the day and start getting obsessed with something. You need the tools for getting yourself out, for breaking the shell around that thought, so that you can escape from it, so that you can be outside the thought and not totally consumed by it. So when you … 
  8. Speech for the Sake of Stillness
     … thoughts that led to skillful states of mind and thoughts that led to unskillful states of mind. With the unskillful ones, he said he’d hold them in check. He’d make sure that he wouldn’t go with thoughts of sensuality, thoughts of ill will, thoughts of cruelty. These things are not beneficial to anybody. As for thoughts of renunciation, thoughts of non … 
  9. The Karma of Narratives
    It’s often thought that meditation is all about not thinking, but actually the Buddha said that one of the purposes of meditation is to learn how to think whatever thoughts you want to think and not think the ones you don’t want to think. That involves mastering two skills. One is simply the skill of learning to turn off a thought when … 
  10. Full-Body Breath
    Often when you set your mind on the breath, the hardest thoughts to let go are not the ones that are blatantly unskillful. They’re the relatively skillful ones. There’s a part of the mind that keeps telling you that you’ve got to be responsible for this. You’ve got to look after that. Can’t let this go. If you let … 
  11. How the Tree Leans
     … Thoughts of sensuality, thoughts of ill will, thoughts of harmfulness: These bend you in the wrong way. You’re heading in the wrong direction. Thoughts of renunciation, non-ill will, i.e., goodwill or equanimity, harmlessness, compassion or equanimity: Those bend you in a good direction. There are the four wrong courses, when you’re biased because of favoritism, biased because of antagonism, biased … 
  12. Judging Mindfulness & Concentration
     … The first is mindfulness itself, which means keeping something in mind, like keeping the breath in mind, but you’re also keeping in mind the fact that you’ve got to put aside any thoughts that would pull you away. You’re making a value judgment. There are certain thoughts you want to stay with, thoughts about the breath, and certain thoughts you’ve … 
  13. Defilements with Their Bambi Eyes
     … Before introducing breath meditation, he talks about the contemplation of the body, contemplation of not-self, inconstancy—the point being that if you’re going to get the mind to settle down and pull away from its thoughts, you have to contemplate the drawbacks of your thinking to at least some extent. Otherwise, when the mind gets still, your old thoughts begin to invade … 
  14. Distraction & Drowsiness
     … One of the best ways of dealing with these thoughts is just not to get involved. If you get really sensitive to the breath, you realize that every time one of these thoughts comes in, there’s going to be a corresponding pattern of tension in the body. If you can locate that pattern of tension… It comes up as the thought arises and … 
  15. With Reference to the World
     … This applies to the world outside, the physical world, the world of this lifetime, and also to all the thought-worlds inside. You can create wonderful thought-worlds, but they all leave. And whatever you thought you might have had as a possession within that thought-world that you can hold on to, it goes, too. Finally, these worlds are all insufficient, insatiable, a … 
  16. Think Outside the Ruts
     … So when a certain thought pattern comes up, try to look and see, when it arises, what’s coming up with it? What’s pushing it into or out of your mind? Sometimes these thoughts seem to arise simply because of the force of past kamma, but there’ll be a present-kamma addition. Look for that. In fact, the Pali word for “origination … 
  17. Responsible for Your Actions
     … As for thoughts that were imbued with renunciation, goodwill, or compassion, he allowed himself to think those thoughts. Notice that he was looking at his thoughts not in terms of whether he liked them or not or whether he was in the mood to think in a particular way. He looked at where the thoughts came from and where they were going. They were … 
  18. Helping Others Is a Battle
     … You feed your discernment by noticing what’s happening in the mind, sorting your thoughts out into two sorts: skillful and unskillful. The skillful ones come from thoughts of renunciation, thoughts of goodwill, thoughts of compassion. The unskillful ones come from thoughts of sensuality, ill-will, harmfulness. Even the Buddha, when he was on his path, noticed that his thoughts fell into those two … 
  19. Death Is Normal
     … At the same time, you’re giving the mind the ability to step out of unskillful thoughts: thoughts that cause sadness and other qualities of mind that are going to get in the way of your seeing things clearly and making the right decisions. We all need to be able to step out of our thoughts. Otherwise it’s as if a thought comes … 
  20. Blessings
     … On the one hand, there were thoughts imbued with sensuality, ill will, or harmfulness. Those were the unskillful ones. The skillful ones were the ones imbued with renunciation—in other words, not getting fascinated with thinking about sensual pleasures; non-ill will, actually thinking thoughts of goodwill and equanimity; and harmlessness, with thoughts of compassion. So the Buddha judged his thoughts on where they … 
  21. Purity Comes Through Discernment
     … You see thoughts arise and pass away, and they really pass away. They’re gone. But you find that other thoughts arise and pass away, and yet they keep coming back, coming back, coming back. That requires that you dig a little deeper. This is where you take all the tools you’ve used in developing concentration—the breath, directed thought, evaluation, perception, feeling … 
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