Search results for: "Thought"
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- Help Others, Help Your Mind… Apparently he thought that discernment had to mean seeing things in terms of the three characteristics. But the Buddha’s categorical teachings don’t include the three characteristics. They include the principle that skillful actions should be developed, and unskillful actions should be abandoned, and then the four noble truths, which are basically the application of that first principle to the problem of suffering …
- Sorting Yourselves Out… So you try to remind yourself of the good things that that person has done or thought or said for you. Even though you may feel a resistance, as if that person doesn’t deserve it, or, “I’m going to be trapped in that person’s net if I think nice things about the person,” you have to remind yourself: “No, you’re …
- Nobility Through Inner Strength… When unskillful thoughts come up in the mind, you know you don’t want them to get out into your words or deeds, so you try to stop them before they have that kind of influence. One way of preventing them is to give the mind a good place to stay. All too often, the reason we do things that aren’t in our …
- Adult Education… As you get really sensitive to the actions of the mind, you begin to see how they come out in terms of your thoughts, words, and deeds, and how these things shape your life. This is all an important education. It’s a large part of our standard education that’s missing. More and more, you see people calling for an education that trains …
- Chewed Up by Your Food… And our thoughts, as we’ve seen many times, can eat us up. Especially when we think about the stupid and thoughtless things we’ve done in the past, or ways in which we’ve suffered in the past. It’s funny how the mind can feed off of these things, even though they’re unpleasant. Yet it goes back to them. It gets …
- Training like an Adult… What thoughts does the mind like to feed on? What nourishment does it get out of them? Even the thoughts we don’t like to think keep coming back, coming back, which means that there is part of the mind that really likes the process, finds some satisfaction, finds some gratification in that thinking. You’ve got to look into why, what is this …
- Ways to Think… It’s going to come back and get me!” That’s our normal first thought about the teaching on kamma. But that’s not what the Buddha emphasizes when he teaches kamma. He emphasizes the positive side of karma: The fact that we can do a lot of good with our actions. He starts with reflecting on the gratitude we owe to people who …
- Creativity & Play… Think, “Comfortable breath.” Think, “Full breath.” You don’t have to do anything else — just think that thought, maintain that thought, and see what happens to the process of breathing in the body. Or, if you want, you can play with your focus. Instead of focusing on just one spot, try to focus on two spots at once. I personally always find that riveting …
- Play with the Breath… You want to stay with the breath, other thoughts come in, and you run with those thoughts, and then you get upset because you ran away, and you yank yourself back to the breath. Sometimes you set up a bad relationship with the breath when you do that. It seems as if the breath is the hardest thing to stay with. But you don …
- A Self Rightly Directed… So when thoughts come up in the mind that get in the way of the practice, you have to remember: They’re not the direction you want to go in. You want to go in the direction of mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, and not let yourself get waylaid by petty affairs. That’s when you can say that you have some real appreciation for …
- Location, Location… It’s a scary thought. So he gives you a checklist of the various places where craving might be focused: any of the six senses; any of the objects of the six senses; and then contact at the senses; consciousness at the contact; feeling born of the contact; perceptions for sights, sounds, smells, taste, tactile sensations, ideas; intentions for those things; directed thoughts; evaluation …
- A Sucker for Random Memories… You want to see things in terms of either the body in and of itself, feelings, mind states, mental qualities, and if you go into a thought, into a memory, you’re going into a state of becoming. That’s wrong mindfulness. If you can stand out of it and watch it simply as a process, then you maintain right mindfulness—and there’s …
- Isolating the Aggregates… In particular, you get more sensitive to that little process where there’s a stirring somewhere in the body—which could either be physical or mental to begin with—but then you decide it’s going to be a thought, so you place the label of “this is a thought about x” and then you allow it to grow in that particular direction. When …
- A Special Time… No matter what other things will come up—thoughts, memories, anticipations—you have to keep reminding yourself: No, don’t go there. Stay with the breath. Then there’s alertness, the ability to watch what you’re doing, to see your intentions, to see how you act on your intentions, and then to see the results of those actions and intentions. Ardency is what …
- Survival Tactics… You can deal with whatever thoughts come up. And all kinds of thoughts are going to come thronging in to your awareness at that point: this regret, that disappointment, this complaint. There’s going to be a lot of negative stuff. But if you’ve got good solid mindfulness and good clear awareness in the present moment, you can just watch these things come …
- You Can Do It… You don’t look at your actions, you don’t want to see any faults in your actions or your words or your thoughts, so you miss a lot of things. Self-doubt is also debilitating. You start focusing on the breath and you give into all the voices that say, “Who are you to be meditating?” Think of the Buddha sitting under the …
- A Meditative Life… If you’re careless in your looking, careless in your listening, it’s very difficult to be careful about your thoughts, because thoughts are so much more subtle. This doesn’t mean that you go around with blinders on your eyes or plugs in your ears; it simply means that you’re skillful in how you look at things, skillful in how you listen …
- Three Levels of Evaluation… directed thought, evaluation, singleness of preoccupation, pleasure, and rapture. Ajaan Lee makes a really useful observation about them, that the first three—directed thought, evaluation, and singleness of preoccupation—are the causes. Those are the factors you can do, whereas the other two factors are results. So you focus on trying to keep the mind with one object. You direct it, say, to the …
- Seeing Distinctions… But if you set up a marker with the thought, “I’m going to stay right here,” then you begin to see: Is the water flowing from the direction of the first river or is it flowing in the direction of the second? In the same way, you make up your mind to stay with the breath. Any intention that pulls you off the …
- Concentration… You’re here to focus on the breath, not on thoughts of jhana or absorption. In fact, even the words of this talk: Don’t let them get in the way of your focusing on the breath, watching the breath as it comes in, as it goes out, being intent to stay right here with the breath. The talk is here to encourage you …
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