Search results for: "Thought"
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- Mental Seclusion… So he asked her, “I thought you were going to stay for two weeks.” She said, “Well, I’ve been thinking about my family. Who’s going to cook for them? Who’s going to look after them?” He said, “Tell yourself that you’ve died. If you were really dead, they’d have to be able to fend for themselves one way or …
- Cooking Skills… directed thought and evaluation—in other words, the way you talk to yourself. You choose a topic and then you comment on it. And then mental fabrication: perceptions—the labels you apply to things, the images you apply—and then feelings, feelings of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. These are all things that we can adjust in the present moment, so that no …
- Study & Practice… It suggests possibilities you might not have thought of otherwise. And it gives you some good strategies to try. One is to notice that when the Buddha teaches mindfulness—i.e., this ability to keep something in mind—he gives you some frames of reference along with some recommendations as to the qualities you want to bring to them. The frames of reference are …
- Mindful of Karma… Why? What’s the appeal? What can you do to think in new ways, to see that this particular line of thinking is not as much fun or as attractive as you might have thought it was. “Alert” means really watching what you’re doing. It’s more than just being aware of the present in a general or random way. You’re looking …
- Standing Where the Buddha Stood… bodily fabrication, which is the breath; verbal fabrication, which is directed thought and evaluation; and then mental fabrication: feelings and perceptions. As you move the mind through the levels of jhana, directed thought and evaluation get abandoned on the second level. That’s where they grow still. Then bodily fabrication, the in-and-out breath, grows still in the fourth. What you’ve got …
- The Uses of Pleasure & Pain… There are better ways to think, better ways to manage the thought processes in the mind. And a funny thing happens. As you master these processes, they bring you to a point where everything reaches equilibrium. That’s where you can really let go. You can even let go of your tools at that point because they’ve taken you where you want to …
- How the Dhamma Protects… Think of yourself sitting right here and sending thoughts of goodwill off to the east, off to the west, the north, and the south, including everybody in all those directions; thoughts of goodwill above and below, all around. That helps in two ways. One is that the more you develop a sense of goodwill, the harder you find it to do harmful things to …
- Toward Release… All your thoughts about what you want out of the world or your past disappointments with the world—put those aside. The problem is that we’re very quick at picking them up again. Even though a lot of those issues are not right here right now, we can easily create them into little worlds, and then we go into them. We’re so …
- Happy to Be Here… Try to notice, given that that’s the way the body is, in what ways are you holding it in the wrong way, forcing things in the wrong way? In what way are you pushing things out of balance, and how can you bring them back into balance? All that has to do with perception together with the directed thought and evaluation. The purpose …
- Energy Channels… It may not have been precisely where you thought it would be, it may not have been precisely what you thought it would be, but you find it. That’s the important thing, in the course of being very meticulous, very precise, very sensitive to what you’re doing, as you’re trying to bring the mind to stillness. Notice where there are places …
- What Right Mindfulness Remembers… Then why would you want to twist the Buddha’s words? What do you think he would have thought about this? People say “I want to have my own meaning that I extract from texts.” That’s perfectly fine, but at least give the texts a fair hearing. And remember, his texts are not the sort of things that the post-modernists get all …
- Days Fly Past… Which words, which thoughts, which deeds are most skillful? Always look at things in those terms. When I was staying with Ajaan Fuang, and I’d report a particular experience in my meditation, he’d never say, “This if the first jhana,” “This is the second jhana,” this is whatever. He wouldn’t tell you what it was, but he would tell you what …
- Bad Stuff Happens… People you thought were kind and sympathetic suddenly turn unkind and unsympathetic. After my mother died, I was looking through her things. And I found a letter that she had written to one of her agents. She was a novelist and was proposing a new novel. It was about the end of a marriage. And one of the things she said was, “Worse than …
- Injustice… As thoughts of anger come into the mind, they trigger certain hormones in the body, and the effects of those hormones last for quite a while. Even though the thought of anger may have passed away, the hormones are still doing their work. Something in the mind takes that as a sign: “Well, look, I’m still angry.” And so you go fall back …
- Peace Requires Character… After all, when you’re told that your happiness is worth nothing next to the happiness of others, the immediate thought is, “Well, what about their happiness? If I can’t search for my own happiness, why should other people be happy?” What we’re doing is looking for happiness inside in a way that promotes the happiness of others. We’re doing it …
- Practice All Day… The worst garbage is the things you thought, the things you did and said that weren’t really skillful, because they direct the mind in an another direction. The Buddha’s image is of the mind being bent. The things you think about, the things you go for in the course of the day: Your mind is going to be bent in that direction …
- Kamma & Rebirth—A Handful of Leaves… We live in a world of complex interdependencies—which the Buddha never taught as a reassuring thought. It’s a scary thought. In complex systems, things can change very quickly, going from one extreme to another in the flash of an eye. You hear the planes going overhead. There are people up there saying to themselves that they’ve got to stay ready for …
- Sensuality Is a Fetter… And part of one of the wrong factors of the path, wrong resolve, is getting involved in thoughts of sensuality. So you wonder why the Buddha has to repeat the sensuality part. It’s because it is so deeply entrenched in everybody’s mind; it’s why we’re here in the human realm. We’re addicted to thinking about sensual matters, sensual pleasures …
- Just Events… Any other thoughts that come up, feelings, , all these things: You have to see them from that “these are just events” mode. You can say, “Oh, this is what it’s like, the body falling apart,” and just leave it at that. And try to stay with that sense of awareness. This is best when you’ve learned how to get the breath really …
- The Four Precepts… And when you’re oblivious to the intentions behind these blatant actions, how are you going to catch the more subtle intentions in the mind? Furthermore, if your intentions are to harm other people, then when you sit down to meditate, the thought of that harm is going to loom large in the mind. And your reaction is either going to be regret, a …
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