Search results for: "Thought"

  1. Page 91
  2. The Noble Pursuit of Happiness
     … He thought of the time when, as a young child, he’d spontaneously entered the first jhāna. The question arose in his mind, “Could this be the path to awakening?” And something inside said, “Yes.” So why was he afraid of that pleasure? He’d been fleeing pleasure for six years at that point, so why was he afraid of that pleasure? He stopped … 
  3. An Exercise in Freedom
     … Then there’s verbal fabrication—directed thought and evaluation—and he has you bring those to the breath, too. Keep directing your thinking to the breath, and watch it: See how it comes in, how it goes out. And evaluate it: Does it feel good? Does it not feel good? Here’s one place where you can really exercise a lot of freedom. You … 
  4. Dhamma for Laypeople
     … After all, as we’re sitting here, what are we doing? Thoughts come up and you have to put them down. They come up again. You have to let go of them again. Those skills will really come in handy when you’re forced to let everything go. And you want to practice them every day, in the same way that you practice a … 
  5. The Bureaucracy of the Defilements
     … A thought forms and you can see it in the beginning stages. In the past, as you were just up there in the head office, you would hear about things only after the functionaries below you had sent things up through the channels, and, of course, when they sent things up, they tended to put their little spin on it. But now you can … 
  6. The Lightened Mind
     … But we pull in our thoughts around the sound. Then we let them reverberate through the mind. So if our attitude is that we’re suffering because of things outside, we’ve got to drop that attitude, not because we’re trying to absolve other people of any wrong-doing, but because we have the choice. The things they may say may be really … 
  7. Contentment
     … Verbal fabrication is directed thought and evaluation. Those are two of the factors of the first jhāna. You keep directing your attention to the breath, and then you evaluate it. Is it comfortable? If it’s not comfortable, you can change it. Try longer breathing. Try shorter breathing. Try deeper breathing. Try more shallow breathing. Once you’ve got a comfortable sensation of the … 
  8. Fear of Missing Out
     … When you’re going to speak, you start with directed thought and evaluation. When you’re going to think, you use perceptions and feelings. So you’re working on some important ground here, the beginning of all your karma. Now, in the passage where the Buddha talks about these large-frame types of fabrication, they’re kind of scary. You can engage in these … 
  9. Be Heedful & Think
     … When I first learned this, I thought this was simply a matter of learning how to translate difficult terms into easy terms. But the word attha, which means meaning, can also mean goal ot purpose. What is this Dhamma for? Ultimately, all the Dhamma is for the sake of release. As the Buddha said, the Dhamma has one taste all the way through, just … 
  10. Appreciating Goodness
     … Spread thoughts of goodwill to yourself, thoughts of goodwill to all the beings around you, and then get back to the breath. Watch the breath coming in; watch the breath going out. We do this because the mind needs to be trained. Try to find a breath that feels comfortable so that the mind will be happy to stay here, because you want to … 
  11. Questioning the Hindrances
     … At the same time, with right concentration you don’t go wandering off into the thoughts, analysis, and world perceptions where insight practice—without any good, solid concentration foundation—can lead you. So you need the two qualities together, stillness and insight. They work together. The stillness is what enables you to see. Now, you can wallow in the stillness, get carried away by … 
  12. Conviction in the End of Suffering
     … But you can run a pragmatic thought experiment in your mind. How are you going to act if you believe that everything is predetermined?—say, by your DNA, or by the stars, or by simple physical laws? How are you going to act when the noble course of action requires sacrifice? What would be your motivation for being willing to sacrifice, to do something … 
  13. Countercultural Conditioning
    When we hear that the Buddha taught the path to the unconditioned, one of our first thoughts is that he’s going to do away with our social conditioning. Actually, he’s doing something a lot more radical than that. But in the process of doing something more radical, he’ll first make use of our social conditioning. After all, when he taught the … 
  14. Freedom & Security
     … As you act on this conviction, you discover more potentials, more abilities within yourself than you thought you had. You’ve got this huge field that you can plant full of all kinds of good seeds. The next three of the qualities basically protect you against planting bad seeds in the field: virtue, a sense of shame, and a sense of compunction. Virtue is … 
  15. Look Around as You Follow the Trail
     … The things you’re most 100% confident that you know, you have to realize you don’t really know as well as you thought. That’s what the Buddha calls “guarding the truth.” When you have a particular idea that you’re really attached to, ask yourself, “Where did you get that idea? What are you basing your ideas on?” You begin to realize … 
  16. Purity of Heart
     … The food of intellectual intention, he said, is like being dragged off to a pit of burning coals, constantly on fire with this thought, that thought, wanting this, wanting that. As for the food of consciousness, he said to compare it to a man who’s been caught by a king and is condemned to be speared in the morning with 100 spears. The … 
  17. How to Feed Mindfulness
     … I recently read someone saying that mindfulness is an unfabricated phenomenon—that only your thought processes that pull you away from the present moment count as fabricated, that when you’re in the pure present there’s no fabrication going on at all. But that’s a major misunderstanding. Mindfulness is something you do. It’s a fabricated activity. Alertness is something you do … 
  18. Doing
     … Those kinds of thoughts, the Buddha said, just turn around and attack you. They don’t lead to the end of suffering. If you want to get to the end of suffering, you have to watch what the mind is doing, because that’s something happening right before your very eyes. In fact, it’s closer than your eyes, and yet you don’t … 
  19. To Be Trustworthy
     … So right now you’re ardent to develop only skillful qualities, skillful thoughts around the body, and to abandon unskillful ones. You’re alert to what’s actually going on in the mind with regard to the body. And you keep in mind the determination you want to get the best things out of the body before you have to let it go. The … 
  20. Tenacity
     … Open yourself to the possibility that holding on to the breath really can take you through a lot of things that, in the past, you thought you had to worry about, had to plan for. In a lot of situations, simply holding on to the breath with this sense of fully inhabiting the body can provide you with the foundation actually to be in … 
  21. Concentration: A Balancing Act
     … All your thoughts, all your directed thoughts, your evaluation, your perceptions, your attention, your intentions: Bring them all right here. You might think of them as concentric circles all centered on one place. Ajaan Lee does talk about focusing on one spot in the body first, on what he calls a resting spot of the breath. It can be just above the naval, at … 
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