Search results for: "Thought"
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- Your Hair Is on Fire… Then the Buddha also taught Rahula to think about the theme of inconstancy, that these thoughts that appear in the mind are pretty unreliable. They come and they go. And they come again, and then they go again. Or they don’t come when you want them to. They’re pretty much the result of past karma, which means they could come at any …
- Adult Dhamma… As the Buddha says, this is how you purify your thoughts, words, and deeds. Nobody else is going to come along and do the job for you. You’ve got to do it yourself. You have to learn how to be observant. You have to learn how to deal maturely with your mistakes. Don’t hide them from yourself. Don’t pretend they didn …
- You’re Already Dead… So every time a thought comes up, remind yourself, ‘I’ve already died. I can’t go back.’” She took his instructions and was able to stay for a whole two weeks. Of course, that lesson is immediately relevant to our staying here, away from the responsibilities of our work and our family. It’s one good way of cutting through all the entanglements …
- The Equanimity that Doesn’t Give Up… The Buddha thought a lot. He set down guidelines for how to think. He didn’t say not to think. He said to think in terms of appropriate attention, to think in terms of the four noble truths. Ask yourself questions as to what’s skillful and what’s not. Put things to the test, evaluate them. There’s a lot of thinking in …
- The Buddha’s Eight Principles… Even though he was a noble warrior, and noble warriors live by the sword, he knew enough to not go for thoughts of revenge: to shed the pride that comes with being a noble warrior, to shed the thoughts for revenge. He teaches this story to monks who have gotten involved in a quarrel over something really minor. The purpose of the story is …
- Training Your Cynical Voices… You don’t have to think about directed thought and evaluation. You just do them. Evaluate your breath. If it’s not good, change it. Keep coming back to the breath again and again and again. Keep exploring how you can breathe in a way that really feels gratifying. As for the stages of concentration, they’ll come on their own when you’re …
- Specifically… But can you tell yourself, it is possible to be there with the pain but not let it invade your mind? What does it mean to invade your mind? That it’s going to take over your thoughts, it’s going to become the target of your thinking. Can you look off to the side a little bit to see what’s around the …
- The Train Trestle… Sometimes it’s with the thoughts going on in the mind: things left over from the day. If you find a lot of left-over stuff, sort through it a bit. Imagine the Buddha’s point of view, and think of what he would have to say about the issues that are coming up in your mind right now, how he might advise you …
- A Better Place to Feed… Fortunately, that’s not a selfish thought because your true happiness—if it’s going to be true and it’s going to last—can’t involve harming other people. Otherwise, they’re going to try to destroy it, which means it’s not going to last. You think about what would qualify as true happiness, and a lot of the qualifications have to …
- The Four Jhanas… That’s directed thought and evaluation. As long as your hovering can stay with the breath and doesn’t hover off to other places, you’ve got the third factor for first jhana, which is singleness of preoccupation: the singleness here meaning both that it’s the one topic you’re interested in and that, as you work with it, it becomes more and …
- The Middle Way… As for any thoughts that’d pull you away to something else, you say, “Not now. This is not the time.” And you bring three qualities to this. Ardency is the desire to do this well. Alertness is watching what you’re actually doing, both watching the breath and watching the mind. Mindfulness is remembering to keep something in mind. When you see something …
- Balancing Tranquility & Insight… But after a while, as they actually try the method, they become more and more sensitive to the element of intention in the breathing, and they begin to realize that even when they thought they were allowing the breath to do its own thing, they were actually manipulating it unconsciously. They’d been taught to overlook the extent to which they were already fabricating …
- What You Bring to the Meditation… Other thoughts will come up, but you have to keep reminding yourself, “No, you’re not going to go with them. You want to stay with the breath. You want to explore the breath energy here.” Then, you have to be alert to notice what you’re doing, to notice how things are going with the breath, and to notice when the mind is …
- Songkran… So, when you extend thoughts of goodwill, you’re telling yourself that you want others to be happy, and you want yourself to be happy, by doing good things. You’re not saying, “I want you to be happy just as you are.” If people are misbehaving, if they’re doing things that’re unskillful or harmful, you want them to see the error …
- Breaking Old Habits… Even if you’re simply reacting against them, the way they think has a molding effect on your own thoughts, so you have to be careful who you hang around with. This is what you might call the social side of the practice. The second condition is that you listen to the Dhamma from your admirable friends. You really listen. And the Buddha gives …
- Enlightenment is Not a Hot Dog… And she never thought of applying the skills of meditation to her life. She thought that meditation would automatically redo her mind, make her wiser, make her less deluded. Well, it doesn’t work that way. As my teacher said, you’ve got to take the skills of the meditation and consciously apply them. This is another way that you develop your sensitivity. And …
- A Sense of Space Inside… You’re sitting here focusing on the breath, and other thoughts are going to come up. It’s all too easy to drop the breath and go into whatever becoming bubbles up into the mind. If you have a desire to think about yesterday, all of a sudden you’re there: yesterday. Think about tomorrow. Think about tomorrow’s meal. Think about tomorrow’s …
- Immersed in the Body… Then, if you decide it’s going to be a thought, you nurture it and slap a few more labels on. And then you ride with it. So if you say No to these voices and resist their message, you’re going to start seeing the workings of the mind, which is precisely what we’re here for. This is one of the ways …
- Questioning Your Way to Certainty… You find yourself wondering, is this really the right meditation for me? Is the Dhamma really right? Did the Buddha know what he was talking about? Those thoughts can really get in the way of the mind settling down. But it’s interesting to note that the Buddha’s solution for uncertainty is not just to ramp up your conviction, saying, “I believe, I …
- Look Around… At first Ajaan Maha Boowa was upset about it, but after all, this was his teacher, so he thought about it and realized that Ajaan Mun was simply seeing things that Ajaan Maha Boowa was not seeing, because he was looking at things from all sides. How do you develop that quality? You start by developing it in your everyday activities. There’s another …
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