Search results for: "Thought"
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- Present-Moment Intelligence… You’re learning to shift the focus of your desires away from sensual pleasures, sensual fantasizing, and more toward noticing which thoughts are skillful, which thoughts are unskillful, and getting a sense of the long-term consequences of your actions. That’s a shift in focus, but it requires desire as well. Then we see: Acting on these desires, what happens? In other words …
- Honest & Observant… directed thought and evaluation, feelings and perceptions—with the realization that you have to be mindful around goodwill, you have to be determined on it. You make up your mind to have goodwill for everybody, and you hold that in mind. You don’t slip in any ill will and then pretend it’s not there. If you detect ill will, you’ve got …
- Make Yourself Small… giving your time, giving your energy, giving a lot of thought to what you’re doing and saying. The best way to give is to learn how to make your own needs as small as possible. In other words, learn how to get the most out of little things—what you’ve got. As meditators, we’re honest businessmen and businesswomen, not dishonest ones …
- Harmony… We look at our behavior in terms of our thoughts, our words, and our deeds, and try to have a sense of where our strengths are and where our weaknesses are—and how we can use our strengths to compensate for the weaknesses, to fill in the blanks, fill in the holes, so that the practice is a practice all around. Ajaan Mun once …
- What Is One… So when you learn how to meditate and get the mind into a state of well-being—finding an object you like, learning how to maximize the sense of pleasure through your directed thought and evaluation—you’re adding a new item to the menu. And you want to learn how to develop a taste for this. That means, for instance, when you’re …
- Mistakes… The Buddha’s way of rewarding yourself—this deals with mistakes in any area of life—is to spread thoughts of goodwill: goodwill to others, goodwill to yourself. For goodwill to others, if your action that was a mistake had a bad impact on others, you want to make sure, “I don’t harm anyone again.” That’s because you know that that the …
- The Treasure Hunt… physical fabrication — that’s the breath; verbal fabrication — the directed thought and evaluation that give rise to words; and then mental fabrication — your feelings and perceptions. When you’re focused on the breath properly, all these things are brought together. There’s the physical fabrication of the breath, there’s directed thought and evaluation directed to the breath, and there are the perceptions of …
- Protective Meditations… So when you extend thoughts of goodwill, ask yourself, “Is there anybody out there who I find it hard to have goodwill for?” If there is, then ask yourself, “Why? What purpose is served by seeing them suffer? Or wishing them ill? How does this help you?” And remember, we’re setting the intention that we ourselves can understand the causes for true happiness …
- Craving & Desire on the Path… In this case, he expresses it as, “You see that other people have gained awakening, and you have the desire within yourself, ‘I, too, would like to have awakening.’” That’s craving for becoming: “I want to be awakened.” Here again, we’re often told that that thought will skew your practice. You’re starting with wrong view, that there’s a “you” who …
- Commit & Reflect All Around… As for any other thoughts that come into the mind—and they will come into the mind—you just let them go. You don’t let them pull you away. One of the forest ajaans has an image: You’re sitting in a house and there’s only one chair in the house. As you’re sitting in the chair, other people will come …
- A Good Buddhist Ego… There’s one where he says you put aside thoughts of the past, thoughts of the future, concerns for the future, and you focus on what’s arising in the present moment. Why do you do that? Because you have to do it today. If you don’t do it now, it’s not going to get done. Tomorrow you may die. In other …
- Learning from the Precepts… It could be in a perception, it could be in a thought construct. You read the long list of possibilities and you can get overwhelmed by the fact that the allure could be anywhere, but the Buddha isn’t describing things to overwhelm you. He’s giving you leads. Follow this lead and see where it takes you. Follow that lead and see where …
- Wisdom & Compassion… It’s an opportunity to put down all your thoughts and concerns, and let the mind be treated in a healing way. One good way of getting out of mind’s concerns is to focus on how the body feels right now. Before you focus on the breath, you might want to go through the body and relax it. Starting with the tips of …
- Encourage Yourself… For a moment he thought, “My gosh, here I am, just a rag thrown away in the forest. My life has no meaning at all. At least those people know enough how to have fun, how to have a good time.” But then he was able to set his thoughts aright. He said, "Wait a minute. My being out here in the forest: I …
- Training for Happiness… Any other thoughts that come into your mind, you can let them go. Try to be sensitive to how the breathing feels. When it comes in, does it feel good? It is too long? Is it too short? If it feels too long or too short, you can adjust it. Is it too heavy? Is it too light? What kind of breathing really feels …
- Your Higher Power… We cling to our feelings, our perceptions, our thought constructs, and our consciousness. And when these things turn on us, we’re stuck with what we’ve clung to. But if you learn how to let go—and letting go means first fashioning more skillful versions of these things, more skillful perceptions and thoughts to give rise to feelings in the body that are …
- Safety All Around… It comes from questioning the things you’ve been doing, the places where you thought that what you were doing was leading to happiness. You can suddenly realize that, No, it’s not. You’re growing up. In one of Ajaan Chah’s images, he said it’s like getting sober after having been drunk. The mind clears. Or it’s like that cow …
- Cooking the Present Moment… This results from the perceptions, the directed thought, and the evaluation of the breath. The way you put those things together makes the difference between whether there’s a sense of well-being or a sense of irritation, a sense of being trapped inside the body. So as you meditate, you’re learning new cooking techniques, new food preparation techniques, how to make better …
- Rebirth is Relevant… Some people thought that there was rebirth; other people thought that there wasn’t. And the way the question was approached centered on the issue of what a person is, such that a person could or couldn’t be reborn. If you identified a person with something that could be annihilated, then rebirth was impossible. And even among the people who believed in rebirth …
- In the Context of the Path… that you should abandon or avoid unskillful actions in thought, word, and deed, and you should try to develop skillful actions in thought, word, and deed. That’s it. Those are the only teachings the Buddha said are true and beneficial across the board. The three characteristics, or the three perceptions, he said, are always true but they’re not always beneficial. As we …
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