Search results for: "Thought"

  1. Page 74
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. A Sense of Duty
     … But he does know that if they follow the path—as he expressed it, the path of skillful action, thoughts, words and deeds; the four establishings of mindfulness; and the seven factors for awakening—then they’ll get to awakening. So it’s up to us to make the choice. We should ask ourselves, “Where are we going to place our hopes?” The only … 
  17. Booster Stages
     … directed thought and evaluation. There’s a passage where the Buddha says that if you find that the way you’re focusing on the body makes you anxious, irritable, uncomfortable in the present, try to focus on a theme that inspires you, that gives rise to a sense of clarity, confidence in the mind. Then, when that theme has done its work, you can … 
  18. Nothing Wrong with Right & Wrong
     … When the Buddha was judging his own thoughts, he judged them both by where they came from and by where they led. If the thoughts came from sensuality, ill-will, or harmfulness, they were to be abandoned. That’s because they gave bad results, unskillful results. They led you to do bad things. If they were based on renunciation, goodwill—or non-ill-will … 
  19. Determined to Make a Difference
     … Other thoughts will come up, and you have to remind yourself, they’re not worth it right now. The Buddha gives some principles for your speech, and they also apply to your thoughts when you meditate: Is it true? Is it beneficial? And, is this the right time? There are a lot of thoughts that might be true and beneficial, but this is not … 
  20. Working with Nature
     … As Ajaan Lee points out, when you’re trying to get the mind into concentration, directed thought, evaluation, and singleness of preoccupation are the causes. You keep directing your thoughts to the breath and evaluating it to make it a good place to stay. All of this may involve some activity. You want to get the mind still, but to get it still, you … 
  21. Developed in Body & Mind
     … If your frame is moving all around, then it’s very easy for the mind to slip in some extraneous movements and then suddenly be off, hopping from one train of thought to another train of thought, like a hobo. So you want to be right here, anchored. And ask yourself, how can you give rise to a sense of fullness? What are the … 
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