Search results for: "Thought"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Learning by Doing… They entertain themselves with these thoughts, not realizing that what they’re doing is destroying your concentration. That’s one of the reasons why the Buddha said that respect for concentration is an important part of getting close to nibbana. You have to realize that a state of mind in which things are very, very quiet, very, very still, is not a state of …
- Decisions… So we’re not trying to ban all thought, just the thoughts that are irrelevant to the task at hand or get in the way of the task at hand. That task is to get the mind to be as stable and clear as possible in the present moment so that you can see even more clearly what you’re doing. It’s a …
- Equanimity Isn’t Everything… There’s verbal fabrication in the directed thought and evaluation as you direct your thoughts to the breath and evaluate the breath. Bodily fabrication is the in-and-out breathing itself, because that’s the process that fabricates your sense of the body. It’s one of the few bodily processes that you can actually control. You can decide to breathe long, you can …
- Bedside Dhamma… Have them keep those things in mind because those thoughts will protect them. When they’ve been thinking about the unskillful things they’ve done, and then something really miserable opens up, and they feel, “Oh, here’s my punishment coming to get me,” they just go into it, where they don’t have to. The types of karma where you have to go …
- Not-self as a Raft… form, which is your sense of the body; feelings of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain; perceptions, the labels that you put on things; thought fabrications, the way you put thoughts together; and consciousness, which is aware of all these things along with itself. These are all activities and we cling to them. That’s what the suffering is: the act of clinging. We …
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