Search results for: "Thought"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Rebirth & Not-Self… As you direct your thoughts to the breath, you can also evaluate it to figure out what feels good, what feels best, what kinds of perceptions are best, what ways of breathing are best, so that you can settle down. The directed thought and evaluation are fabrication. Then you’ve got consciousness, which is aware of all these things. Consciousness, of course, is part …
- The Mirror Inside… Think thoughts of goodwill: goodwill for yourself, goodwill for others. Or think about taking the body apart in your imagination—all the different parts inside. If you’re having a problem with lust or sensual desire, okay, take this apart to see: What is there that’s really worth lusting for? You realize that lust has very little to do with the actual object …
- Right but Wrong… The Buddha thought he’d been right. He thought there were only two alternatives, and this was obviously the right one of the two. It was when he was able to open his mind that maybe there was more out there than just these two alternatives: That was when he was able to get on the right path. He realized that his pride was …
- Fears… You learn that the reality was not as bad as you thought it would be. As this disjunction grows clearer, the fear gets calmer, weaker, more and more manageable. That’s how you handle neurotic fear. Realistic fears require deeper practice. One of the members of our community lost her mother in a war, came to the States, and became a psychotherapist. As part …
- A Trustworthy Mind… It’s not when you have lots of different thoughts and lots of different ideas that the mind has great value. It’s like having a fruit. If the market is full of that particular kind of fruit, it doesn’t have much value at all. If there’s only of one that particular kind of fruit in the market, it can fetch a …
- Only One Person… So you want your examples—the examples you set by your thoughts, words and deeds—to be good ones. That’s one of the ways in which you’re acting for the benefit of others. Always keep that point in mind. The Buddha grants us the dignity of having freedom of choice. Kant, the German philosopher, said that this is what makes human beings …
- The Value of Refuge… So he asked himself, was there another path? He thought of the time he sat under a tree as a child and spontaneously entered the first jhāna: a sense of happiness that didn’t depend on sights, sounds, smells, tastes, or tactile sensations—a happiness that started within the mind and then spread through the body. The happiness of form; the pleasure of form …
- Step Back & Watch… But with Ajaan Suwat, he had trained his mind to step back from his thoughts, to step back from his thought worlds. And that’s what saved him from a lot of suffering. This is one of the reasons why we develop mindfulness, why we practice concentration: to keep in mind the possibility that sometimes our perceptions are off. The concentration gives us a …
- To Comprehend Suffering… You learn how to separate yourself out from it and realize that whatever the thought may be in the mind that’s causing you pain, the pain is one thing, the thought is something else. The awareness is something else still. When you can see that, then you separate yourself from the pain. But to see that, the mind has to get very, very …
- In Touch with Your Fabrications… When the Buddha defines fabrication, he defines it as taking the potentials for a sense of form, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, or consciousness, and then putting them together into actual experiences of those aggregates for the sake of something. Many of our problems come from the fact that we, in the past, did these things for the sake of what we thought was going …
- Expanding Your Skill Set… You don’t have to the tie up any loose ends of your thoughts. Even if there’s a fascinating thought, you don’t have to remember it. If it’s really worthwhile, it’ll come back to later. Right now is your time to develop this new skill, which is learning how to stay with the breath as continuously as possible. If the …
- Equanimity… That thought is a painful thought—“There’s a freedom I haven’t attained”—but there’s also hope. “Other people can do it. Why can’t I do it?” So it is important to have a goal as you practice. The skill lies simply in learning how to relate to the goal well. If you’re going to go on a weekend retreat …
- Right Livelihood… If there are a lot of hidden agendas and little corners for hiding away in the mind, then the thoughts that are lodged in those corners and hide behind those agendas are hard to deal with. Especially if there are aspects in your life where you have to go into denial in order to justify the way you act: That denial is going to …
- Bless Yourself… So let that thought calm you down, at the same time making you want to practice. This is a large part of the strength of persistence: learning how to motivate yourself and figuring out what kind of motivation you need right now. The strength of persistence is part of a whole set of five strengths. There’s conviction—conviction that the Buddha really was …
- Doing, Maintaining, Using… feeling, perception, thought constructs. And as you learn how to use them in different ways to deal with different situations, they begin to stand out more clearly because you see them in action, you’ve used them in action. This is when you’re going to gain real insight into them, how you can relate to them in a way that’s healthy rather …
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