Search results for: "Thought"

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  2. Undefeatism
     … One thing you have to watch out for is once you set up a determination like this, there’ll be little blips of thought in the mind that say, “Well, maybe not tomorrow.” Or, “Today I’m too tired, let me rest tomorrow morning.” They’ll blip and then they’ll go away, but it’s as if they’ve left little landmines in … 
  3. The Breath All the Way
     … When these thoughts have focused the mind, bring that focus back to the breath. Finally, if the mind is feeling burdened, figure out how to release it from its burdens, particularly if it’s being burdened with unskillful thinking. These might be thoughts of sensuality or thoughts of anger. How can you let go of those? Sometimes you focus on the object of the … 
  4. Meaning & Purpose
     … Now, we’re told that we’re trying to overcome our craving for becoming, but the Buddha always thought strategically. Someone showed me a video the other day, where some Abhidhamma expert was talking about how people who try to get the mind to be concentrated are suffering from greed, which is an unskillful state. When the mind gets still and is not analyzing … 
  5. An Even Keel
     … A thought will come and you want to watch it: both the thing that it’s thinking about and the thought in and of itself. Put a little question mark next to them. Ajaan Lee once said that one way of testing your insights is to turn them inside out: Suppose that the exact opposite of that insight were true? Or how about turning … 
  6. The Blood You’ve Shed
     … But just the thought of that possibility leaves us with an important lesson. No scores are fully settled. Things don’t come to closure. This is the nature of samsara: It just keeps wandering on and on and on. No story comes to an end. We watch plays, read books, where events come to a satisfying closure, and part of us would like to … 
  7. Playing Your Lute
     … In other words, when there are limitations on your capabilities, don’t sit down with a thought, “I’m going to sit here and won’t get up until I attain supreme awakening. If I don’t attain supreme awakening, I’m going to let my blood and flesh dry out.” You’re not ready for that yet. Adjust your expectations for what you … 
  8. The Four Noble Truths
     … In other words, if you were to follow with it, if you were to identify with it, where would it take you? Say a thought of anger arises in the mind. If you were to think that thought for twenty-four hours, where would it lead you? What shape would your mind be in? If it’s going to be bad for you over … 
  9. Take the Buddha Seriously
     … What is the breath doing right now? Where is it going in the body? Then there are the feelings that arise from your directed thought and evaluation, and your perceptions. You begin to realize that the feelings are there, not just willy-nilly, and they’re not totally the result of past karma. They’re based on what you’re doing right now. So … 
  10. Solo Practice
     … good thoughts, bad thoughts, good breaths, bad breaths, whatever. Just be equanimous. Don’t be too active in your thinking. And how do you know which time to use the more active factors and which time to use the more calming ones? You’ve just got to learn through practice, through trial and error, until you begin to get a sense of just right … 
  11. Learning from Labor
     … How do you train it so that it’s actually helpful on the path? Again, I’ve had people asking me, “What is this directed thought and evaluation I’m supposed to be doing?” Well, you’re doing it all the time. It’s the way you talk to yourself, the way you prepare sentences in the mind. You choose a topic and then … 
  12. The Meaning of Insight
     … Each time the question comes up and there’s a little stirring of a thought in the mind, choose to come back to the breath. Let the thought go, unless it’s a thought related to the breath and helpful for getting the mind to settle down. The mind is always making choices, both when you’re meditating and when you’re not. In … 
  13. How to Use the Three Perceptions
     … For instance, if people are feeling tempted to do something really unskillful, they can tell themselves, “Well, if there is no self, there’s nobody to reap the rewards of this, then it doesn’t really matter even if the results are bad.” In fact, there was actually a monk at the time of the Buddha who thought in that way. And the Buddha … 
  14. Beyond Imagination
     … It’s like that comment that one of my history professors once made time about the Tsar of Russia at the end of the nineteenth century: “The Tsar ruled by his whim, and he had a whim of iron.” In other words, random thoughts would come into his mind, and then he’d have them enforced, sometimes quite harshly. You wonder when you’re … 
  15. Patience & Sensitivity
     … Say, you crave a person—where exactly is your craving focused? On a perception? A thought construct? Your way of talking to yourself? Images you hold in mind? Words you say to yourself? Often, when we’re attracted to somebody, it has very little to do with the actual person and more to do with our ideas about ourselves in relationship to that person … 
  16. The Safety of Dualities
     … directed thought and evaluation, in other words, the way you talk to yourself; and then mental fabrication: feelings of pleasure or pain, neither pleasure nor pain, and then perceptions, the labels you apply to things. All of these things are actions and they can take you in different directions. Take perception, for instance. The way you perceive a particular part of the body, the … 
  17. Bless Yourself
     … All too often when you start thinking about your own bad points, you try to push the thought out of your mind by focusing on the bad points of other people. And when you’re focusing on their bad points, it becomes harder to treat them well. So you have goodwill for yourself, and then you have goodwill for others, reminding yourself that the … 
  18. Detail Work
     … I was commenting on the clever details that the architect had put a lot of thought into. One of the women who was hosting said, “You’re not like other monks. You notice things.” My first thought was, “What kind of monks have you been hanging around?” In my years with Ajaan Fuang, he’d notice the little details right away. There was that … 
  19. Balancing the Bases for Concentration
    Spread thoughts of goodwill all around you. Remind yourself that you’re here for the sake of true happiness, and that your true happiness doesn’t take anything away from anyone else, because it comes from things you discover within, things you develop within. That means that your true happiness doesn’t conflict with anyone else’s true happiness. So when you spread thoughts … 
  20. Goodwill & Kamma
     … This is one of the reasons why we begin each meditation session with thoughts of goodwill for ourselves and for all beings, to learn how to be comfortable with those thoughts, because those are the right thoughts for human beings to think. And then we work on this business of learning how not be overcome by pleasure, not to be overcome by pain. With … 
  21. Momentum Through Restraint
     … You’re trying to get some intelligent control over your mind, so that it doesn’t wander off into thoughts and emotions that are harmful to you or to other people; you want to encourage the emotions and thoughts that are actually helpful, skillful. When you’re off the cushion and off the walking meditation path, that comes down to a practice called restraint … 
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