Search results for: "Thought"

  1. Page 60
  2. Wealth & Strength
     … Soon after we set up the monastery here, this monk came one evening with a group of lay people to give a donation, thinking that he would be able to worm his way back into Ajaan Suwat’s graces and at the very least, if Ajaan Suwat accepted him as a monk, everybody would see that Ajaan Suwat thought he was innocent. He also … 
  3. Ask Yourself the Buddha’s Question
     … This part of concentration is called directed thought and evaluation. The Pali terms are vitakka and vicāra, and they basically constitute your mind’s conversation with itself. You want to train them so that they engage in an interesting conversation—a useful conversation. Of course, a lot of every conversation lies in the questions you ask. They’re actually what directs the conversation. This … 
  4. The Questions of Suffering
     … different perceptions; different thought fabrications. You learn how to perceive the breath continually. You direct your thoughts to the breath. You evaluate the breath—that’s fabrication—so that you can create a feeling of well-being. The breath feels smooth, silken, diffuse throughout the body, energizing the body, nourishing the body. The sense of the body from within changes because you’ve changed … 
  5. Consciousness, Name, & Form
     … Then, building on the present moment, we can use mental events to create thoughts of past and future. But right now we’re trying to keep away from getting involved in the past and future, and just trying to see what’s happening right here, right now, simply as events. If you add your sense of “you” to it all, then it becomes a … 
  6. Moods Are Not-Self
     … We hold to them very tightly, because they seem to be us even more than our thoughts. We know that we get a lot of our thoughts from other people, but our moods seem to be totally coming from within. They’re totally ours. Yet as long as you identify with them, they’re going to color everything. You’ve got to see that … 
  7. Persistence
     … So as thoughts of sensuality come up, you have to say “No.” Interesting thoughts about your work, interesting theories about the world, about politics: You have to say No to them right now. Your ideas may seem very intelligent, very insightful, but they’re not what’s wanted right now. You’ve got to work on this other skill, the skill of being very … 
  8. Useful Thinking
     … And when it’s expansive like this, it’s easier to stay in the present moment, because to create a thought about the past or the future, the mind has to shrink down. Your awareness has to shrink down so you can get inside that little thought balloon. As long as you stay aware of your hands, your feet, your head, every part of … 
  9. Establishing Priorities
     … If you’re really alert, you can catch it before a distracting thought is fully formed. The more quickly you can see that process, the better. You can feel that stirring of a form or a thought beginning to occur, like a little tingling or a little stirring around, a little knot in the breath energy. At that point, it’s hard to say … 
  10. A Position of Strength
     … As soon as a thought begins to move in the direction of any of those things, just cut it off. And when you cut it off, have a sense that you’ve liberated the mind, not that you’ve cut off anything vital. You’ve cut off all the vines that come to entangle and pull you down. The mind can now stand tall … 
  11. A Generosity of Spirit
    Every day we extend thoughts of goodwill to all beings. It’s a basis for concentration; it’s a basis for meditation. Even if we don’t take goodwill as the object of our meditation, it reminds us of why we’re here: to find a happiness that doesn’t harm anybody, a happiness that spreads its goodness around. Because when the mind is … 
  12. Delusion Concentration
     … The primary thought in people’s minds is: “How can I get through these hours as pleasantly as possible?” The mind finds a little place—it’s called delusion concentration—where there’s a sense of ease, and the mind’s not doing any work at all. It’s just very, very still. You go to hide out there, but you don’t really … 
  13. Licking Yourself Clean
     … Thoughts of goodwill are good thoughts to think. They feel good. They put the mind at ease. You don’t have to struggle with anybody. You don’t have to settle any old scores. It feels good to be thinking good thoughts. It helps put you in the right mood to meditate. Physically, you work first with your posture. You want to sit straight … 
  14. Clinging & Feeding
     … to develop that sense of no longer wanting to eat these things, seeing that they have their dangers and that they don’t provide the satisfaction that you thought that they would. But those aren’t the only perceptions he has you apply. Sometimes there’s the perception of seeing these things as a wound, a dart, cancer, a void, a dissolution. In other … 
  15. Admit Your Stupidity
     … The Canon calls it directed thought and evaluation. You direct your thoughts to a topic, and then you evaluate it. Like you’re doing with the breath right now: You direct your thoughts to the breath and you evaluate it. Then you have mental fabrications, which are perceptions and feelings. The perceptions are the images you hold in mind; feelings are feeling tones of … 
  16. The Fangs of Conceit
     … I’d always thought that I’d make a pretty good attendant, but it turned out that I was not nearly as good as I thought I’d be. It got to be kind of discouraging. And he kept pointing out areas where I was lacking. I had to realize: There was nobody else there to help him. So at the very least, there … 
  17. Pure Action
     … purity in our thoughts, in our words, and in our deeds. As for compassion, you realize that you want happiness, and everyone else wants happiness, too. We all have that same basic desire in common. So you should have sympathy for others. But also, in a very practical terms, that means that if your happiness is based on somebody else’s misery, they’re … 
  18. There Is This
     … She’s had many illnesses in the past, and many occasions when she thought she was going to die. But this was the scariest because her brain wasn’t working, and she was struck by the thought, “Well, what do I do now? How can I access the states I accessed before?” That fear, if she had died at that point, would have been … 
  19. Evaluating the Practice
     … that directed thought, evaluation, and singleness of preoccupation are the causes. Those are the things you do. When you do them well, they give rise to the other two factors: pleasure and a sense of fullness, rapture. It’s all too easy, if you read the description of five factors, to think that you can just throw the five factors together. But it doesn … 
  20. The Limits of Old Kamma
     … What thoughts could you be thinking right now? What qualities could you develop? At the moment we’re trying to emphasize the thoughts that focus you on the breath in the present moment; and we’re trying to be inquisitive, trying to learn about the breath. Those two factors—thinking of the breath or focusing on the breath, and being inquisitive—count as directed … 
  21. More than a Sliver of Mindfulness
     … One area you keep it away from, of course, is thoughts of greed and distress with reference to the world. These are the thoughts that the kids in New York were having trouble with. They hadn’t been given the proper tools for dealing with them, but the Buddha gives lots and lots of instructions throughout the Canon on how you deal with thoughts … 
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