Search results for: "Thought"
- Page 70
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Appreciating Your Practice… You can see a thought coming up that used to hook you and make you miserable, but now it comes up and yet doesn’t make you miserable anymore. Appreciate that. You’ve made progress. Ajaan Maha Boowa talks about seeing little tiny flakes of bark get chipped off the trees of his defilements, and he took a lot of satisfaction in that. So …
- Mindfulness Island… Some thought that your karma did have an influence on your rebirth, some thought that it didn’t, and some thought that there wasn’t any rebirth anyhow. As for how things worked in terms of rebirth, some of the beliefs were really strange. My favorite one is the belief that when you die, you go up to the Moon and you feed off …
- The Not-Self Discourse… This is what directed thought and evaluation are all about. You direct your thoughts to the breath and then you evaluate how good the breath is. Then you evaluate how well the mind is staying with the breath. Ajaan Lee makes a comparison, that alertness is like a pulley. You pull a rope in one direction, then you pull the rope in the other …
- Strengthening Your Goodness… When the Buddha was teaching mindfulness of breathing to his son, he started out with some discernment exercises, in particular, focusing on inconstancy—and that includes stress and not-self—to give karate chops to your unskillful thoughts. Whatever they propose, you can say that the pleasure that comes from engaging in lust or anger or whatever is very inconstant, and yet you’d …
- Learning Through Healing… The Buddha tells you to engage in what he calls directed thought and evaluation to get the mind to settle down. In other words, you look at the breathing, watch it for a while. Notice where you feel it: Does it feel good? If it doesn’t feel good, you can try to change. Directing your attention to the breath: That’s directed thought …
- Befriending the Breath… Your thoughts are harmonious. You protect yourself in this way. You become a force for harmony in the world as well. This is an important principle. All the important qualities we need to develop in our relations with other people, we first have to develop within ourselves, in our relationship to the breath. Start out with thoughts of goodwill, as in that chant we …
- The World Is Swept Away… Even your body, your feelings, your perceptions, your thought constructs, your consciousness: You can’t take those with you, either. These first three Dhamma summaries provide an interesting point to reflect on — that the Buddha’s teaching on the three characteristics may have come from the simple facts of aging, illness, and death. Aging — inconstancy; illness — stress and suffering; and death — not-self. The …
- Self-Healing… As you ask these questions of yourself, that’s called directed thought and evaluation. In other words, you direct your thoughts to a certain topic and then you make comments on it; you ask questions, answer the questions—try to figure things out. What you’re trying to figure out here is how to breathe in a way that feels good: energizing when you …
- The Need for a Purpose… We have a purpose, which means, of course, that we have some expectations, that by fashioning a sense of form, feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness out of the raw material given to us by our past karma, we’re looking for something. We have a purpose in mind. This is the nature of our mind. It’s purposeful. When it has no purpose …
- Attention with an Agenda… You direct your thoughts and you evaluate for the sake of something. You apply different perceptions and focus on different feelings for the sake of something. Like right now: You’re trying to get the mind into concentration. So you breathe in a way that will give rise to a sense of comfort for the sake of getting the mind into concentration. You use …
- Training Your Commentator… We think that the mind should be still and that there shouldn’t be any thoughts at all. But then there’s a voice here and a voice there and something inside you will say, “Okay, it shouldn’t be this way.” Well, maybe that voice doesn’t know anything, either. As the Buddha said, directed thought and evaluation are factors in the first …
- Good Work… So while you’re sitting here and meditating, any thought that pulls you away from the breath, you have every right to let go of. No matter what the responsibilities might be—having to mull over things you regret doing or saying today, or worrying about things you’re going to have to do or say tonight or tomorrow when you leave here—those …
- Determined to Practice… You have to be very, very selective about the friends you choose, the things you choose to read and listen to, and the thoughts in your own mind that you choose to listen to as well. This requires determination. Underlying all this, of course, is goodwill. And that—as the Buddha specifically says—is a form of determination. This goes against what you ordinarily …
- Load next page...
