Search results for: "Thought"

  1. Page 61
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. Mindfulness of Death
     … Often our first reaction to the thought of death is, “If I die, I’ll be missing this person, that person.” If the reflection were to stop there, you’d be left without any real guidance. You’d simply start getting sentimental, very attached, very clingy. But then the Buddha goes on to have you reflect about kamma: that you’re the owner of … 
  10. Right Here, Right Now
     … directed thought and evaluation. When you focus your thoughts on the breath, you’re evaluating the breath, okay, verbal fabrication is right there. And then mental fabrications: feelings and perceptions. Perceptions are the labels you put on things. Feelings are the feelings of pleasure, pain, neither-pleasure-nor-pain that you feel both in body and in mind. Well, those are right here as … 
  11. Learning from Desire
     … Otherwise, you go from one thought-world to another thought-world to another one, like a hobo hopping trains, and you end up who knows where. If you’re asked to trace how you got there, often it requires a real feat of memory. Things seem to modulate, as they do in music from one key to another key, getting further and further away … 
  12. The Middle Way
     … The next question was, who would he teach first? He thought first of the two teachers he’d studied with, but he realized that they had recently died. Then he thought of the five brethren who had attended to them during his period austerities. They were now in Isipatana, which was near what is now the city of Benares. So he walked all the … 
  13. Calm in the Storm
     … Only when our emotions are really strong, or our thoughts are really necessary, do we see them. As for vagrant notions, little wisps of ideas that come in, go out, we hardly notice them at all. Yet they’re the things that grow into big issues. We come to a place like this to see what we can find out about how the little … 
  14. Determination
     … When I returned from Thailand, someone once asked me, “What was the hardest thing to endure over there?” I thought and I thought and I thought, and I couldn’t think of anything in particular. Then I realized it was because there were so many positive things going on in my practice, learning new things, that even though there were a lot of difficulties … 
  15. Dimensions of Right Effort
     … For instance, with the four noble truths, you have to learn how to sit with suffering, sit with stress, sit with pain until you understand, “Exactly what is it about the pain that’s so burdensome? And where is it coming from?” Here we’re talking mainly about pains in the mind, thoughts that make you uncomfortable, thoughts that make you suffer. Look for … 
  16. Goodwill Is Respect
     … This is why we consciously develop thoughts of goodwill. It’s not that goodwill is our innate nature. Goodwill comes easily to us in some cases, and ill will comes just as easily in others. That’s the typical human attitude. What we’re trying to develop are Brahma attitudes, and those are higher, more refined, more inclusive: goodwill for all, everybody without exception … 
  17. In Search of What’s Skillful
     … I mentioned this morning the story that Ajaan Maha Boowa tells of where he’d been meditating for a long time, contemplating the unattractiveness of the body, until the thought struck him that for a long time he hadn’t had any thoughts of lust, any feelings of lust. So the question arose: Had he gone beyond lust? So he decided to test it … 
  18. Unlearning Unskillful Behavior
     … If you’re meditating and you’ve made up your mind that you’re going to sit for a certain amount of time, and all of a sudden a certain thought defeats you, think about how you might get around that thought the next time, so that it doesn’t. This approach applies to all areas of life: addictions, problems in meditation, problems with … 
  19. The Wisdom of Self-regulation
     … So for the time being as you’re sitting here meditating, any thought that has to do with staying with the breath: Take that as a skillful thought. Any thought that wants to pull you away. Take that as something unskillful. There are relative levels of skill in both cases, because sometimes the thoughts that tell you to stay with the breath shout at … 
  20. When This Is, That Is
     … The thought constructs you have, directing your thoughts to the breath, evaluating it: These become part of right concentration. Your awareness of all this becomes part of the path, too. In other words, you take all the aggregates, which normally you lug around as your sense of self, and you turn them into a path—by the way you use them, by the way … 
  21. Why Train the Mind
     … If the mind wanders off—and it probably will wander off—be quick to catch it and remind yourself that whatever the thought it’s wandering after, you don’t have to complete it before you come back. Nine times out of ten, the thoughts you wander off with are old things you’ve seen many times before, like old movies. You know what … 
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