Search results for: "Thought"
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- Over-informed… So what did he do? He got his mind into that state and he asked the question, “Is there still some stress here?” He realized it was in the directed thought and the evaluation. What happened if you drop that? In the beginning, the directed thought and evaluation were necessary parts of getting the mind to settle down, because otherwise, if you didn’t …
- Big Things in Little Things… There’s bodily fabrication, which is the in-and-out breath; verbal fabrication, directed thought and evaluation, the way you talk to yourself; and then mental fabrication—feelings and perceptions. These are things you experience directly as you meditate. You’re focused on the breath, you direct your thoughts to the breath, you evaluate the breath, you use perceptions in order to maintain your …
- A Safe Harbor… We come into life and have some sense of protection that comes from our parents, but as we grow up, we begin to realize that our parents are not as all-powerful as we thought. We have to depend more and more on ourselves. And we look at ourselves: How reliable are we? We’re slaves to craving. We do so many things that …
- More than Just Letting Go… Verbal fabrication, technically is called directed thought and evaluation. It’s basically the sentences with which you talk to yourself. You direct your thoughts to a particular topic and you comment on it or ask questions on it. Mental fabrications are feelings and perceptions. Feelings are feeling-tones of pleasure, pain, neither-pleasure-nor-pain. Perceptions are the images you have in your mind …
- The Buddha’s Safe Space… These are thoughts you can revert to when you see aspects of yourself that you don’t like: things you’ve done in the past, or things that were done to you, and all the reverberations over the years that have developed around those things. You need a way of picking those things apart and putting them in a light that makes it easier …
- Staying Normal… Thoughts of the past, thoughts of the future, come and go. All these things come and go, but the mind stay steady in the midst of them. This requires practice, because the nature of the mind, the ordinary mind, is to get knocked around by these things. That’s because you go out and put yourself in the line of fire by laying claim …
- Body & Mind from Within… Even people who can read your mind don’t see how you see your thoughts from your perspective. They can’t feel your breath the way you feel your breath. Yet this is where the Buddha wants you to focus. This is your area. This is where the suffering is happening. This is where the cessation of suffering can happen as well. This is …
- Caught in a Thorn Bush… The passive patience is where you start getting thoughts that say, “This is getting slow. I don’t know when I’m going to be able to finish this.” Okay, you endure those thoughts, but you don’t put up with them. In other words, you endure them in the sense that you don’t let them get you disturbed—just brush them aside …
- The Power of Intention… Any thought that comes up, just cut right through it and come back to the breath. Take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths and notice where you feel that sensation of breathing in the body. You may feel the air coming in through the nose, but you can also feel the rise and fall of the chest, the rise and …
- How Much Concentration Is Enough?… both the side that’s willing to engage in thoughts of goodwill and the other side that has some thoughts of anger or ill will. You have to ask yourself: When the mind chooses sides, what’s going on? What’s the process? It’s when you learn how to take these processes apart that you break through to something that’s not fabricated …
- Three Levels of Effort… So send thoughts of goodwill to as many people as you can think of, even people you don’t know. That establishes the right orientation for the meditation. You’re here to find true happiness. You’re not going to find it by looking around and seeing where in the body is a little package of happiness, or where in the mind is a …
- Virtue & Right View… The things you don’t accept are unskillful thoughts in the mind: thoughts that create suffering now, or even worse—create suffering down the line. There are some forms of practice, the Buddha said, that can be pleasant now but will cause long-term suffering, so watch out for those. There are those that are difficult now but will create well-being further down …
- The Need for Goodwill… There are other people who will benefit too from the fact that I’m doing this.” I would often have that thought in Thailand after I became a monk and I was going out for alms. There were days when some very poor people would put food in my bowl. I’d come back to the monastery and I’d remind myself, “Okay, today …
- Pleasure & Pain… You sense how when this particular thought comes and surrounds the pain, it makes the pain worse. This particular thought makes it better. You see these things through your own sensitivity, by having a place to stand and watch where you’re not totally threatened by the pain. At the same time, you learn how to deal with pleasure. It’s so easy, when …
- Mature Happiness… You actually check your actions for the sake of happiness—your thoughts, your words, and deeds—to see whether they actually cause harm or not. First, look at what you expect will come about from what you’re planning to do. After all, your actions do make the difference. You’re acting for a purpose one way or another, so be clear about what …
- Strength of Conviction: 1… One of the Thai ajaans once said that we tend to think that discernment comes from reading a lot, from having a lot of ideas and developing our thoughts, but it actually comes from conviction. Because what kind of discernment are we looking for? We’re looking for the discernment that finds a way out. And for that kind of discernment, we need to …
- Fighting off Ignorance… Along with the fabrication of the breath, there’s the way you frame thoughts and ideas in your mind. This is called directed thought and evaluation. You focus on certain things as being important and then you evaluate whether they’re good or bad, what you want to do about them—that kind of thing. This is classed as verbal fabrication, which can be …
- Living Forward, Understanding Backward… We forget, we thought it would make us happy the last time around, and it didn’t. Well, we try it again and again. In other words, it’s Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing but expecting different results. So it’s a normal part of our lives that we’re going to make mistakes, make decisions that we hope will …
- Acceptance & Equanimity… You go from mindfulness to analysis of qualities, which is basically directed thought and evaluation. You’re getting the mind into the first jhana. And in that directed thought and evaluation, you’re engaging in the activity of discernment as well. As you notice what’s skillful and what’s unskillful in the mind, you let go of what’s unskillful, develop what’s …
- Strength Training… As for other thought worlds that might come up, just let them go. Think of them as being like bubbles. They burst. They’re going to burst anyhow, but we have this tendency to move into them. We lose our bearings in the body and go someplace else. The bubble floats away and bursts. Then we create more bubbles. But we don’t really …
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