Search results for: "Thought"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. Customs of the Noble Ones
     … What does the Dhamma have to say about your thoughts? What does it recommend that you do with those thoughts? What are the standards for deciding what’s skillful and what’s not? Be willing to hold yourself to that standard. There’s that old saying from the third Zen patriarch that the great way isn’t difficult for those with no preferences. There … 
  16. Believe in Your Actions
     … She had been coming from a school of thought where meditation was supposed to be just being open to whatever comes and learning to be accepting of whatever comes. That’s not heedfulness at all. That’s a very heedless kind of meditation, a very irresponsible kind of meditation. But at least she now discovered that maybe it would be a good thing to … 
  17. Stress
     … directed thought and evaluation. There comes a point, though, where you’ve done enough. The breath is good enough to settle down with. That’s the point where the directed thought and evaluation become superfluous. They are the disturbance at that point. So you let them go. You get into a more peaceful state of concentration. Try to maintain that. And then you notice … 
  18. Concentration Nurtured by Virtue
     … So even there, the thought of wilderness can weigh on the mind to a certain extent. That’s why the Buddha recommends that you go on to thinking about the elements of the body. He recommends the earth in the sutta, but you can use the breath as an alternative. You’re just here with breath. You can think of breath permeating throughout the … 
  19. Looking Inward
     … It lies in our thoughts, our words, our deeds. Generosity may be an act of giving things to other people, but it’s primarily a development of a quality of the mind. The same with the precepts: They govern our interactions with other people, but their primary purpose is training our thoughts, words, and our deeds—again, focusing in on our mind: the intentions … 
  20. Right Speech, Inside & Out
     … You’ll try to put aside your sensual obsessions, put aside ill will, put aside thoughts of harmfulness. Then you’ve got to focus on your speech, as this is a primary place where you’re going to be training the mind—because you’re dealing both with their external chatter and your internal chatter. In a lot of ways, it’s easier to … 
  21. Practicing from Gratitude
     … You’ll find not only that you get a great sense of well-being, but that the well-being also begins to spill out for other people through your thoughts, words, and deeds. Your sense of well-being here makes it a lot easier for you to act in skillful ways. You’re not so hungry for things that are going to cause trouble … 
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