Search results for: "Thought"

  1. Page 78
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. Right & Right
     … These things are no guarantee, so you can’t be cocky about your knowledge, insisting that “This is what I’ve read, this is what I’ve thought, so it must be right.” This is why wisdom has to be tested, not only what you’ve heard, but also what you’ve thought about. You have to put it into practice and see what … 
  8. Asalha Puja
     … His first thought was to teach his two previous teachers, but he realized that both of them had passed away and gone to the formless realms, where they were beyond reach. So the next thought was to teach the five brethren who had helped him when he was going through his period of austerities. So from Bodhgaya he walked all the way to Sarnath … 
  9. In Line with the Dhamma
     … What’s it made of? It’s made out of forms, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, and acts of consciousness. That’s it. We’ve cobbled our sense of self out of these things. When you actually look at them, you can see that there’s really not that much there. These things keep changing and changing and changing, so how could we find any … 
  10. Your One Responsibility
     … Then we neglect our own responsibility, which is to look after our own thoughts, words, and deeds. The passage we chanted just now: “I am the owner of my actions.” What are your actions? The things you do intentionally. And you have to look very carefully at that. This is why we meditate, because the source of our intentions is here in the mind … 
  11. Wind, Fire, Water, Earth, Space
     … someone complaining about the idea of translating the word kusala as skillful, saying that in Western ethical thought the idea of skillfulness plays no role, so why should we introduce it when we talk about Buddhism? That’s a very narrow attitude, as if whatever Buddhism has to offer has to go through our filter first before we’ll accept it. And we’re … 
  12. Beyond Nature
     … And for those of you who’ve been living in the city, cut off from nature, there’s often the thought that if only you could get back to nature and stay there, that would solve all your problems. But go ask people who live in nature all the time, and they can tell you a long list of problems they still suffer from … 
  13. Peace on Earth
     … But you can set an example inside, an example with your own thoughts, your own words, your own deeds. At the very least, the world of your becoming will have a peaceful center. That’s your main responsibility. As Ajaan Suwat used to say, each of us has only one person. What he meant is that each of us has only one person we … 
  14. On Top of Your Actions
     … Are you leaning toward thoughts of the future or toward thoughts of the past? Things that put you in a good mood, things that put you in a bad mood? Try to learn how to read your own mind, and then you’ll have a good idea of how to start the meditation. We want to get down to the breath. But sometimes there … 
  15. Endurance & Restraint
     … Look at your thoughts, your words, and your deeds as an area that you want to master as a skill. We’re born into this human realm, we have these human abilities, we should try to think of all our activities as an attempt to be skillful in our thoughts, our words, and our deeds, to look for every opportunity to be skillful. You … 
  16. Refuge in an Admirable Friend
     … But as he said, it’s not that he couldn’t think of clever ideas for raising money, but every time he thought of them, he thought about Ajaan Mun and he felt embarrassed. Ajaan Mun wouldn’t do things that way. So try to have somebody in your mind who plays that same role, someone in whose eyes you’d like to look … 
  17. Teaching Old Selves New Tricks
     … The Buddha says when you spread thoughts of goodwill in that situation, you have to start with the bandits, because you don’t want to get fixated on how horrible they are or how cruel they are or how much you might want to get revenge, because who knows when you might die, and you don’t want to die with those thoughts in … 
  18. Deep Time
     … How do I get out? So, when you find that your thoughts are taking over, when you find them especially interesting or especially gripping, use this perspective as a solvent to make you see that the tragedy, the injustice, whatever, is not such a big issue. There are other more important issues. Do you want to keep on coming back to this sort of … 
  19. What Focus? What Breath?
     … Rather than looking at the actual process, or looking at the looking, we look in whichever direction the thoughts point, so we miss a lot of things that are going on right before our eyes. The choices we make, the way we focus right here in the present moment on this breath, this breath, this breath: That contains all the lessons we need to … 
  20. Refuge & Strength
     … I was talking with someone last weekend who was saying that the thought that your actions have consequences makes you feel very stressed out. And you wonder what kind of world that person would want to live in, where actions didn’t have consequences. The fact that our actions have consequences means that there’s hope: that we can learn how to develop our … 
  21. What Are You Bringing?
     … That’s a sobering thought. Because we live in time, often it’s hard to foresee what the results of our actions are going to. And we live with minds that are affected by greed, anger, and delusion, so they color our perceptions of what’s going to work and what’s not going to work. So it’s good that there has been … 
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