Search results for: "Thought"
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- Straightening Out the World… Your actions, your thoughts, the words you say: They all come out of your mind and they can be really harmful if you’re not careful. This is why you have to exercise mindfulness and make it stronger. And this is what we’re doing right here: We’re exercising the mind. All the good qualities in the mind—mindfulness, alertness, concentration, discernment: Without …
- Mindfulness Like a Dam… Whereas the Buddha says that if you really want to understand things, you have to learn how to separate them, in the sense of seeing how this thought functions in this way and that thought functions in that way. This perception feeds on that perception. They are interconnected, but they are somewhat distinct. And you want to see them as separate from one another …
- Measuring Progress… So you drop that thought and stay where you are. Focus on this breath, this breath, knowing that by exercising your mindfulness, exercising your concentration, it’s got to get better. The one thing you do have to worry about is the tendency to think that if the meditation is going better, then it should automatically make your life better. But that’s not …
- Breath, Tranquility, & Insight… Verbal fabrication is your directed thought and evaluation, as when you bring up a topic in the mind and then evaluate it. This is how we create sentences in the mind, ask questions in the mind. The third type of fabrication is mental fabrication, which is composed of feelings of pleasure, pain or neither pleasure nor pain, and then your perceptions. Those things—feelings …
- Space for Sustained Contemplation… So we do this contemplation both to get the mind into concentration, to realize concentration is a much better thing to feed on, and then as your mind gets more settled down, then you can go back and look at those old objects along with the way the mind conducts its thoughts about these things, its narratives, its image of these things, what’s …
- The Primacy of the Mind (1)… If you begin to see it wasn’t as good as you thought, you can change. If you see there are areas where you can be even stricter with yourself, well, you can make changes there as well. This then becomes the mind-state you bring into the meditation—committed to staying with one object. If you already have practice in drawing lines for …
- Wisdom Requires Integrity… The Buddha told Rahula to apply this principle not only to his physical actions but also to his words and even to his thoughts. And this is where it gets applied to meditation. In another sutta, the Buddha talks about what he calls an entry into or an alighting on emptiness. Basically, this means getting the mind into a state of concentration and appreciating …
- Approaching Painful Memories as a Meditator… At the same time, you’ve also got other worlds coming up—thoughts about the past, thoughts about the future, things you did in the past, things that were done to you in the past, things you plan to do in the future—and it’s very easy to go into those worlds and take on identities in them as well. In fact, this …
- Disenchantment & Dispassion… As long as there’s passion for these experiences, we’re going to keep on creating them, keep on churning them out—and we keep churning them out with no thought for quality control. This becomes the mind’s basic default mode. So this is the aim of the Buddha’s teachings. In the final evening of his life, he talked about how people …
- The Gift of Speech… And of course, the first level of right concentration starts with directed thought and evaluation, the way you talk to yourself. The way you talk to yourself will have a big impact on how you talk to others, and vice versa. When we sit down to meditate, often the words we’ve said in the course of the day come reverberating through the mind …
- Victory… So gather your thoughts in right now. If you’re going to think about anything, think about the breath. Think about the mind being with the breath. Then pay attention to whether the mind is settling down or not. If it’s not settling down, what’s wrong? Is it a problem with the breath? Is it a problem with the feelings in the …
- To Take Danger in Stride… A little thought can sneak in and take over and push you in all kinds of directions if you’re not careful. So try to be with the breath, try to get a sense of the breath filling your body, your awareness filling your body, and then find a spot to rest someplace inside. Be like the spider on a web. The spider stays …
- Dwellings… So Fred asked the question, “Did Ajaan Suwat know of this story?” Ajaan Suwat said, “Yes.” Then Fred asked, “Didn’t it make you have any doubts about the Buddha?” The word for “doubt” in Thai is sŏng-săi, and that was so far from Ajaan Suwat’s thoughts that he didn’t even hear that word. He heard the word sŏng-săan, which …
- Two Kinds of Defilements… Then you look at your verbal fabrications—in other words, the directed thought and evaluation—that go around the issue. How are you thinking about the issue? How do you frame the issue? What are the questions you ask yourself? What are the little maxims you tell yourself? You know Thomas Mann’s version of the biblical story of Joseph in Egypt. Joseph leaves …
- The Skills of a Hunter… You can imagine what the hunter thought. He’d been sitting there very patiently, because he knew that the fish was battling with itself. Part of it knew there was danger, but the other part was hungry. He was willing to wait until the hunger won out over the wariness. He had developed that skill: staying focused, staying still, while he waited. And part …
- The Gift of the Practice… But in his having gained the results of the practice, it did open my mind to the possibility that there’s a lot more happiness available in this world than I thought before. It wasn’t something that he was born with. He was very clear on the fact that everything he had in terms of true happiness and all the good qualities he …
- Suffering Comes from Those You Love… She needed some medicine, that’s what she thought. So people directed her to the Buddha, and the Buddha said that the medicine would be something very simple, mustard seeds, but it would have to come from a household where no one had ever died, a family where no one had ever died. So the woman goes around and asks for mustard seed, and …
- Focus on Your Skill… So in that sutta, he’s basically giving a picture of how he thought on the night of his awakening and addressed the options that were available to him. He could have thought about questions of, “Who am I? Where am I going? What will I be in the future?” But that would have not led to release. Release comes from looking at your …
- Maintained by Fabrication… That’s a bit scary, because the unfabricated is going to require that we abandon a lot of things that we’ve been fabricating for in the past—things we thought were good, things we thought were worthwhile—which is why we have to keep reminding ourselves of what right view says: that our intentions really do matter, and that intentions can be developed …
- True, Beneficial, Timely… First, is it true? Two, is it beneficial? And three, is this the right time and place for that? If you can hold all your thoughts to these tests, it helps get rid of a lot of unnecessary chatter inside and focuses you on the things that are really useful to say. What you say to yourself, the Buddha classifies as directed thought and …
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