Search results for: "Thought"

  1. Page 82
  2. Equanimity & Karma
     … There may be pains in the body as a result of past actions, and a lot of tormenting thoughts may come up in the mind as a result of past actions, but you have the choice of how you’re going to relate to those things. This is one of the reasons why we meditate: to develop more skill in how to relate to … 
  3. Delight in the Breath
     … It starts with dropping your thoughts of sensuality, all your plans for the pleasures you can find outside. Focus on the breath inside. He says if you can find a pleasure in here, then no matter how tempting the pleasures will be outside, you have something to counteract them from within. If you don’t have this pleasure inside, he said, then no matter … 
  4. Disenchantment
     … You look for the origination of whatever desire you have—for forms, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, and consciousness—and you see that it originates in the mind. What is it in the mind that wants these things? What wants to take the raw materials, the potentials in the present moment for these things, and turn them into actual aggregates? And then from the aggregates … 
  5. Protection
     … Now, at the same time that you focus on the breath, you’re also putting aside any thoughts that would pull you out into the world. This is your frame of reference right here. Again, sometimes we hear that mindfulness doesn’t mean just non-judging awareness. It’s also all-encompassing, allowing you to go wherever you want. But the Buddha says that … 
  6. The Lessons of Good Kamma
     … You have the perfect right to sit here and think lustful thoughts for an hour, or angry thoughts for an hour, but then what would you gain? The mind would get even more lustful, get even more likely to be angry. You’d shorten your fuse. But once you learn to give these things up of your own free will and learn how to … 
  7. To Escape the Prison of Time
     … And one of the basic premises of intellectual history is that if you want to understand a person’s thought, you have to know when he or she lived, and what the other people of the time were thinking. The underlying premise there, of course, is that each person is a prisoner of his or her own time. It was a rare individual who … 
  8. Undividing the Mind
     … You can use those thoughts to put you in a positive frame of mind. Then it’s simply a matter of learning how to apply them at the appropriate times and to develop an enthusiasm for your meditation object, an enthusiasm for the training, along with a sense of wariness and heedfulness around anything that would pull you away. As the Buddha said, heedfulness … 
  9. Reflect on What You’re Doing
     … It starts out with directed thought and evaluation as you talk to yourself to get the mind to settle down, but even as you drop those activities, you’ve still got the fabrication of intention to keep it going. And then there’s consciousness, which is aware of all these things. You begin to see that the state of ease and well-being even … 
  10. To Be an Adult
     … When you’re learning a skill—how to be skillful in your thoughts, your words, and your deeds—both the motivation and the results are relevant, because you can learn from both. You’re judging a work in progress. So the Buddha is teaching Rāhula to be honest, to have integrity, to have compassion, to show restraint—all the signs of a good healthy … 
  11. Three Weapons
     … Instead of directing your thoughts to sensuality and evaluating different sensual plans, you direct your thoughts to your breath, you evaluate the breath, and you take an interest in what’s going on inside here. The more you can take an interest here, the more you see. It is like physicists. They look at light and they can study light for their whole lives … 
  12. Abandoning & Developing
     … Do they really lead to the results that the Buddha said they would? In other words, you think unskillful thoughts—what does it do to your mind? You think skillful thoughts—what does it do to the mind? As you begin to see for yourself that you’re much better off developing skillful qualities, then you have something more solid to base your decisions … 
  13. What Am I Becoming as Days & Nights Fly Past?
     … What am I becoming as days and nights fly past, fly past? In other words, how are you changing? In what direction are you developing? Are you just staying stuck in your old ways or are you moving in a good new direction? Look at the kind of person you’re becoming in your thoughts, your words, and your deeds, to see if that … 
  14. All Your Old Baggage
     … Put all those thoughts aside and just be with what you’ve got right here. And what have you got right here? You’ve got the body sitting here breathing, you’ve got the mind thinking and aware. So you’ve got all the raw materials you need, all the tools you need for a good meditation. And regardless of however well it’s … 
  15. Finding Your Own Balance
     … Concentration does require some thought. It’s not that you try to forbid the mind from thinking. You have to think about the object. You have to evaluate the object, evaluate how the object and the mind are getting along together. If they’re not getting along, what can you do to change? For the breath, not only is there the question of how … 
  16. The Wall of Discernment
     … When the Buddha was teaching his son Rahula, before he taught him breath meditation he taught him some discernment exercises—seeing things in terms of inconstancy, seeing things in terms of not self; developing thoughts of goodwill for all beings—as a way of inclining the mind to want to be quiet, to want to be still. For instance, when you think of the … 
  17. Fully Here
     … Little thought worlds can develop. Have you ever noticed the fact that when a thought world appears in the mind, there’s also going to be a pattern of tension someplace in the body? That part of the body tends to get obscured. But if you’re fully inhabiting the body and staying on the level of the body, those thought worlds don’t … 
  18. Inner Wealth
     … If the mind wanders off, just drop that thought and come right back. It wanders off again, drop the thought, come back again. Don’t get discouraged. Each time you come back, don’t come down hard on yourself for having wandered off. Instead, reward yourself for the fact that you’ve come back, by breathing in a way that feels really good. Think … 
  19. Chanting on Your Own
     … In India, in other teachings, it was often thought that the words themselves had power—the syllables had power—but from the Buddha’s point of view, the power is in the intention behind the chant. In that case it’s goodwill, and goodwill expresses itself in different ways—in this case, a wish for safety. One of the chants, the Ratana Sutta, has … 
  20. Slowing Down to Look
    If anything I say is relevant to what you’re doing as you meditate, it’ll come into your awareness without your having to direct your thoughts to the words. If it’s not relevant to you, it may be relevant to someone else, so just let it pass. There’s a tendency in mindfulness practice to slow things down, to be more deliberate … 
  21. Cooking Food for the Mind
     … Then you can do what Ajaan Lee did when he thought he wanted to disrobe. Think about it: What would it really be like? Run the whole thing through your imagination but be very honest with yourself about what’s involved in following through with that particular type of lust. You watch it die. And when it dies, you can come back to the … 
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