Search results for: "Thought"
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- The Identity Crutch… My ability to examine my thoughts, to step back from my thoughts, and look at them simply as processes in the mind: That might be useful to bring in here.” The qualities of endurance you’ve learned as you’ve endured pain sitting here: We learn to endure these pains not because this is the only place where endurance is necessary. When other situations …
- Lessons from the Breath… So you use that understanding to keep reminding yourself that thoughts of goodwill, the wish for happiness, are not a bad thing. They’re actually a good thing. They’re our motive for being on this path to begin with. We want to find true happiness. We want a happiness that doesn’t cause any suffering to other people. If our happiness causes suffering …
- Desire for Happiness… So one of the first steps in the practice is to begin to soften yourself up from the inside—not only with thoughts of goodwill, but also actual actions showing goodwill for yourself. You start with a very immediate way with the way you breathe. Allow yourself to breathe comfortably. Think of the breath not only as the air coming in and out of …
- Trading Up… As the Buddha said, you can gain insight into the drawbacks of sensuality, but if you don’t have the alternative pleasure of intense concentration, you’re just going to keep going back to your old ways of feeding off of sensual thoughts. So focus on something here in the present moment that’s not a sensual pleasure, but is a pleasure: the way …
- An Ennobling Pleasure… It’s especially compounded in Thai when sankharas are equated with thoughts, and some schools of practice will tell you that mindfulness, when there are no wandering thoughts, is free from sankharas. That’s not the case. Mindfulness itself is a type of sankhara, a type of fabrication. Your attention to the present moment is a type of fabrication. Your decision to watch the …
- A Good Foundation… So I learned to change the spot where I thought the breath was coming in, so as to share the load. The muscles I had been working got to rest, and other muscles pitched in. Then, as they got tired, I’d move my picture of the spot again. So how you picture the breath to yourself is an important part of the meditation …
- Discernment Through Ardency & Evaluation… There’s directed thought, evaluation, singleness of preoccupation, pleasure, and rapture. He divides those factors into two: causes and effects. The directed thought, evaluation, and singleness of preoccupation are the causal factors. Those are the things you do. The pleasure and rapture are things that come about as a result. And of all those factors, the wisdom or discernment factor is the evaluation. In …
- Tuning Your Lute… You can imagine how Soṇa feels—an unskillful thought has gone through his mind, and the Buddha shows up. He was lucky that he had the Buddha doing that. A lot of us sit here with unskillful thoughts going through our minds, and yet nobody shows up to warn us. The Buddha asks Soṇa about when he was a layman: “When you played the …
- What You Bring to the Moment… Verbal fabrication is directed thought and evaluation, which is what you’re supposed to bring to the breath as you meditate. You direct your thoughts to the breath and then you evaluate how it’s going. Is it comfortable? Is it not? What can you do to make it comfortable? That’s looking at it in terms of the feelings, which are the mental …
- Tenacity… You have to make yourself very, very quiet, so that the sound of your body doesn’t get in the way of the sound of the music; the sound of your thoughts doesn’t get in the way of the sound of the music. You want everything to be as quiet as possible so that you can hear the subtleties, because there will be …
- Negotiating with Death… If a series of thoughts comes up in the mind that are really compelling, try to take them apart, say, “Okay what in here is an attachment to a sight, and what in here is attachment to a sound, and what is an attachment to a taste, or a smell, or feeling in the body or to a thought you’ve had?” Take it …
- The Mind Set Tall… You’re going to need to be able to tap into that sense of well-being, you’re going to need to be able to pull the mind out of any train of thought that’s beginning to get too threatening. It’s not the case that you’re going to work, work, work on nothing but concentration and then, when you’re already …
- Finding Balance… Right there you’ve got some directed thought and evaluation. You direct thoughts to the breath and then evaluate what you’ve done: Is the breath appropriate right now? And how about the way you’re relating to the breath: Is that appropriate? If you have trouble staying with the body in the present moment—in other words, the more you’re focused on …
- Daily-Life Dhamma… You make up your mind you’re going to stay with the breath and abandon all other thoughts: Well, stick with that. Be true to that. And it’s easier to be true in your meditation when you’ve learned to be true in your daily life. Self-control: Whatever irritations there may be in the surroundings around you, okay, you don’t react …
- Mindfulness Immersed in the Body… It keeps gnawing, gnawing, gnawing on sensual thoughts but doesn’t get any substance out of it, any real nourishment. As Ajaan Lee says, all of the flavor is in the dog’s own saliva. In other words, the flavor lies in what you put into it. And is it worth putting anything into it? The purpose of all these contemplations is to think …
- Calm & Insight into Pain… That’s verbal fabrication—in technical terms, directed thought and evaluation. You direct your thoughts to the breath and your perceptions, and you evaluate how well they’re calming things down. So you’ve got three kinds of fabrication—bodily, verbal, and mental—and in each case you’re trying to calm them down. To see things in terms of fabrication, that’s insight …
- Stupid about Pleasure… And a sense of security can develop around that thought. Because of that sense of security, it’s possible for a stream-enterer to become complacent — to say nothing of people who’ve simply experienced jhana, or right concentration. Just the fact that you’ve encountered the really refined pleasures of right concentration doesn’t mean that you automatically let go of your attachments …
- The Fortress… In the first level of concentration, the first jhana, there’s directed thought and evaluation. You direct your thoughts to the breath, and then you evaluate how the breath goes, as I explained just now. You evaluate it not just to decide whether it’s already good or bad. You evaluate it to make it good. That way, it gives rise to a sense …
- Ven. Ananda’s Awakening… In one case he’s talking to a nun, telling her that the end of conceit is one of the goals of the practice, but the conceit that goes with the thought, “There are others who have gained awakening—they’re human beings, I’m a human being. If they can gain awakening, why can’t I?"—that’s to be encouraged. It’s …
- The Form of the Body… just that thought, that realization, that the little worries and concerns of the day, or even some of the big worries and concerns of the day, really don’t have to be taken all that seriously. There are other issues that are more serious. The ability to free the mind from suffering: That’s important. You want the issues in the mind to take …
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