Search results for: "Thought"
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- The Perfection of Freedom… his pointing out things that I’ve never thought of as possible at all. Beginning with simple things like, what’s going on in your body? Is there energy movement? How is it related to the breath? I had never thought of that possibility. So learn to explore it. Explore possibilities in terms of the amount of effort you can put into the practice …
- Not Crushed by the World… That helps to pull you away from your tendency to go floating out in thought worlds that travel around and burst and drop you off someplace else. You fully inhabit right here. The more you fully inhabit the body with a large sense of awareness, the harder it is to fit into little thought worlds. This is a basic principle in establishing your sense …
- Working Through the Breath… When we’re focusing here on the breath, directing our thoughts to the breath, evaluating the breath, we’re actually engaging in all the three levels of fabrication: bodily fabrication, which is the in-and-out breath; verbal fabrication, which is directed thought and evaluation; and then mental fabrication—feelings and perceptions. The feelings here are feeling tones, such as pleasure, pain, or neither …
- A Blameless Happiness… There was a period when he actually thought the best way to find true well-being was to deny yourself all kinds of pleasures He finally realized, however, that that’s not the way. And he found the middle way because he was able to realize there was more to life than just pain and sensual pleasure. There were other kinds of pleasure, other …
- Unsentimental Goodwill… So it’s not because people are lovable that you spread thoughts of goodwill to them. You spread goodwill because you need protection. And you want to be able to draw on that attitude of goodwill with regard to anybody, at anytime. The Buddha talks about the case where bandits have pinned you down and are savagely sawing off your limbs with a two …
- Heedful, Ardent, & Resolute… This applies to your thoughts, your words, and your deeds, although with your thoughts you don’t have to talk it over to anybody else. You just realize that that was a harmful thought, feel ashamed of the fact that you’ve stooped to that kind of thinking, and resolve not to repeat it. This practice, too, is based on heedfulness, realizing that you …
- Put Your Heart into It… Any thoughts that help in that, you try to develop, to encourage. Any thoughts that’d pull you someplace else, you try to abandon. You put your whole heart into this. In fact, the Buddha uses the word citta here again. That means that you aren’t just thinking about it. You’re intent. You’re wholeheartedly doing it. As for resolute, the Buddha …
- The Practice of Right View… The things we intentionally do with our body, with our words, and with our thoughts all count as kamma and they all have results. There’s no such thing as idle thinking. It may be idle in its intent, but it actually has an impact on the mind. It’s something you’re doing, and it leaves kammic traces. Just as the Buddha discouraged …
- Life Well Lived… Because sometimes when a thought goes through the mind, there’s a pattern of tension in the body. If you breathe through that tension, the thought goes away. But in particular, notice to see how the movie pulls you in. These little plays that get put on in the mind: What is it that makes them so absorbing? You notice, if you’re flying …
- Learning Right Speech… Think of those factors of directed thought and evaluation. Those are the factors that precede speech. They lie at the basis of all our verbal actions, but they’re also part of how you get the mind to settle down. You have to talk to yourself in the right way. So this is something you do train yourself in. You can’t say, “Well …
- Responsible Happiness… Any other thoughts that come in right now into the mind, you’re not responsible for them. You don’t have to worry about them. You don’t have to check them out to see whether they’re good or bad or indifferent. You’re giving the mind a chance just to be in the present moment and find a sense of well-being …
- For the Good of the World… But when you think about the unhealthy energies people are putting out in the world all day, every day, through their thoughts, words, and deeds, the world really needs people who are putting out peaceful energy. That’s where meditation has a lot to offer. The mind is like a broadcast station. It sends out currents. If we create a peaceful, steady, calming current …
- The Buddha Didn’t Play Gotcha… Is there an alternative way? He thought of the time when he was a child sitting under a tree while his father was plowing, and his mind entered the first jhana. So he asked himself: “Why am I afraid of that pleasure? Why am I afraid of that rapture? Is there anything blameworthy about it? Anything harmful about it?” And the answer he came …
- A Mind Larger than the World… She thought that the perfections were a Mahayana invention. Actually, they came before Mahayana split off, and they really are a powerful way of understanding how Buddhism is practiced in Southeast Asian Theravada countries, because they deal with the virtues you need, the virtues you develop, as you go through daily life. Some of them are related to meditation, like renunciation, which doesn’t …
- See Yourself as Active Verbs… the perceptions, the thoughts. How do you get these things to stay together so that breath and mind are acting in concert? That’s the skill we’re trying to develop right now, because when they act together we become more sensitive to them. It’s as if the mind had lots of little minds, and they’re all headed out in different directions …
- All Dhamma, All the Time… Here you want to learn how to question your own mind, and in particular, the things you’ve always accepted about your thoughts. When you think in a certain way, you have to question yourself: “Is this really the right way to think? What happens as a result? Have I ever noticed what the result of my thinking is?” All too often, we get …
- Investment Strategies… Some of the chants we repeat, many, many times because it’s a way of drumming particular messages into the fabric of your thought. “May I be happy, i.e. may I be truly happy.” That’s a useful thought to keep in the back of your mind, to remind yourself that this is your motivation, so that when there’s a temptation to …
- Three Levels of Concentration… You get here by letting go of other thoughts, but also by being very focused on the breath. This is where it’s different from falling asleep. When you fall asleep, things get still and then you just let go totally, let go of all your mindfulness, all your alertness, and move off into another stage of becoming, as the texts call it. Whatever …
- A Path Under the Trees… Any thoughts of the world, you just let them go. As your focus gets more solidly established, it turns into right concentration. There’ll be a sense of ease, a sense of pleasure. Then there’s p*īti, *which we translate either as rapture or refreshment. These sensations come simply from the fact that your mind has withdrawn from unskillful thoughts, and it’s …
- Keep the Mind from Wandering… We tend to do this in a very unskillful way because we’ve never thought about it systematically. We’ve never really explored it to see what can be done in order to master these different potentials. That’s one of the things you do as you meditate. You start out with the breath element—the potential for breath in the whole body, a …
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