Search results for: "Thought"
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- Why It’s Good to Know Why… Remember that when you’re extending thoughts of goodwill, you’re not saying, “May you be happy just as you are.” The thought is, “May you understand the causes for true happiness and be willing and able to act on them.” And see that as a real possibility. We tend to dismiss other people: “So and so is like this, so and so is …
- Talking to Yourself… Two of the factors of getting the mind to settle down are what he called vitakka and vicāra, directed thought and evaluation. Directed thought is when you focus the mind on a topic, decide that you’re going to focus on one thing, and you keep thinking about it, reminding yourself to stay here, stay here, stay here. For instance, you want to stay …
- Mindfulness Gets Intimate… When the mindfulness is really established in that framework, then he says you keep track of the body in and of itself, but don’t think thoughts of the body. Don’t think thoughts connected with feelings or mind. Just be present with the experience. As you drop those thoughts, that can get you into the second jhana. But then the Buddha says there …
- Appreciating Dispassion… Sariputta talks about how, when you get into the second jhana, you see that directed thought and evaluation are a disturbance. You’d rather drop them. You get the breath feeling so good throughout the body that you don’t need to adjust it anymore. Ajaan Fuang’s image is of a jar of water. Once you get it full, it doesn’t matter …
- The Fourth Tetrad… You ask yourself, “Is that the problem? Is this something you thought you could rely on? Or is it something you thought you could just have a quick hit and benefit from it?” In which case, focusing on inconstancy is not the issue. Focusing on it is not solving the problem. The real problem is in the pleasure you get out of it. You …
- Start Out Small… And as for what’s going to happen when you focus on the breath, put that thought aside. And where the meditation is going to take you and how it’s going to take you there: Put those thoughts aside as well. Be careful not to anticipate too much, because when you know too much in advance, it’s not really knowing. A lot …
- Sensuality… It’s all too easy—as you’re sitting here putting aside your duties of the day, your various responsibilities, and you create an empty space here in the present moment—that these are the thoughts that come flooding in: the sensual pleasures you’d like to fantasize about. When the Buddha talks about sensuality, it’s not so much the pretty things out …
- Give Before You Get… You’re going to have to give up all the thoughts that you could have entertained yourself with when allowing your mind to wander around as it likes. You’re going to focus on one thing, and the rewards of that one thing may not appear right away. You have to give some time to it; you have to give some energy to it …
- The Real World… You spread thoughts of goodwill to all beings. These are happy actions and there’s merit in doing them. They train the mind in the right direction. And there’s happiness at the same time. When you dedicate merit, you’re hoping to share that happiness with others. Of course, happiness isn’t something you can take out of your heart and put into …
- A Gentle Touch… So pay attention to the feelings and perceptions and the thoughts that hover around right here, right now. Meditation is not a process of stopping thought right away. Just bring your thoughts to bear on what’s happening right here, right now. To some people this is threatening. They’re afraid of what’s going on right here, right now, which is why we …
- A Heart & Mind of Goodwill… That’ll make it a lot easier to think these thoughts when you’re miserable and hungry and in pain. Sometimes there’s a mind state that thinks, “As long as I’m suffering maybe everybody else should, too.” That’s the wrong way to think. The Buddha set a good example. One time he was attacked. Someone wanted to kill him and so …
- Deep Understanding… On the level of listening and thinking, you can hear about mindfulness, you can hear about alertness, you can hear about concentration and discernment, but it’s when you actually try to develop these things in the mind you come up against issues you might not have thought of before, things that weren’t in the plan. And you find that as you develop …
- Making the Dhamma Your Own… There’s a great passage in the Canon where a king says that when he was young he thought he had the strength of two men, but now that he’s 80, he thinks of putting his foot somewhere, and it won’t even go there. It goes someplace else. The body gets less and less good a repairing itself, so actions that used …
- Achieving Balance… Sometimes that thought will help stir you up. Then look at what you need to do to energize the mind even further to keep it awake. You might decide that you need to go through the parts of the body. Think about the different bones in your skeleton. What have you got? Imagine all the bones starting from the toes coming on up: Where …
- 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 …
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