Search results for: "Thought"
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- Grief & Regret… Because these thoughts help get you past any desire to punish yourself or punish the other person or punish anybody at all. They reinforce your desire not to make mistakes that are harmful. And they give you a much larger perspective on things. Those brahmaviharas are for everybody. As the Buddha said, they should be immeasurable. Because when the weight of your own loss …
- What’s Worth Doing?… Sensuality, of course, is the mind’s fascination with thinking about sensual pleasures—lustful thoughts or simply thoughts about food, clothing, shelter, how you’d like this to be that way or that to be this way. The amount of time we spend fantasizing about these things, dressing them up before and after, keeps pulling the mind in the wrong direction. It gives us …
- Willing to Learn… Other people refuse to do as they are told until they’ve thought it through and come up with their own ideas. But it’s important that you learn how both to listen and to think. Toward the end of his life, Ajaan Maha Boowa was recorded as saying that Ajaan Lee was Ajaan Mun’s favorite student. When you look at Ajaan Lee …
- The Buddha Meant What He Said… If you realize that an action you’ve done has caused harm—and we’re talking about actions in thought, word and deed—then you resolve not to repeat the mistake. If it’s something you did or said, you go talk it over with somebody else who’s further on the path. The whole point of this is to look at your actions …
- A Promise to Yourself… As he got to the first line, a hand shot up, “I thought there were no shoulds in Buddhism.” The poor teacher had to spend the whole morning explaining how there could be a should in the Dhamma. It’s really quite easy: If you want to put an end to suffering, if you appreciate the state of peace, this is what you’ve …
- Appreciating Merit… Then you ask yourself, “How can I help?” When you’re extending goodwill for others, it’s not a matter of thinking that your thoughts of goodwill are going to be magical and make everybody happy just as they are. Because there are a lot of people out there for whom you think, “Well, I’d rather not they’d be happy just as …
- Five Strengths… Think thoughts of goodwill—goodwill for yourself, goodwill for all the people around you, for all the living beings everywhere. May we all find true happiness. And then focus on your breath. Know when the breath is coming in, know when it’s going out. Stay with the sensation of the breathing as consistently as you can all the way through the in-breath …
- In Charge of Your World… He had commented that the more he thought about it, the more he realized that people who act in harmful ways in what they do, in what they say, in what they think don’t really protect themselves. They don’t really love themselves. They leave themselves open to attack from all sides. The people who are well protected are the ones who behave …
- First Principles… Really get to know the breath element—how it responds to your mind, how it responds to your perceptions, how it responds to your directed thought and evaluation. You learn some important lessons in that principle the Buddha put at the very beginning of the Dhammapada. Mano-pubbangama dhamma: All phenomena have the mind as their forerunner. We tend to regard the elements in …
- Training Your Inner Teacher… Ajaan Chah took that and thought about it. He came up with the image of a fence around a house. If there are big holes in the fence, then no matter how strong the fence is on one side, if there are holes in the back, thieves can still get in. You’ve got to make sure the fence is solid and impenetrable all …
- At the Door of the Cage… Or if you tell yourself that everything is inconstant, stressful, and not-self before the mind has a safe place to settle down, those thoughts can be really unsettling and disorienting. Only when you’re in a relatively stable place mentally, and ready to look for a way out from even the subtle instability there, will those thoughts provide the way out. Years back …
- An Exercise in Sensitivity… You have to learn about feelings, and what better way of learning about feelings than to create feelings that are skillful and pleasant? There’s the phrase says, Vivicc’eva kāmehi vivicca akusalehi dhammehi, secluding yourself from sensual thoughts, secluding yourself from unskillful mental qualities, you settle down. You try to find a sense of well-being with the breath. This is why Ajaan …
- Right Questions in the Right Order… And there have been people in the past who actually gained stream-entry but thought that it wasn’t stream-entry because they still had a lingering sense of self. Yet as the suttas explain elsewhere, you no longer equate your sense of self with the aggregates or define the sense of self around the aggregates, but there’s still a lingering sense of …
- An Equanimity You Can Feed On… Of course you want to get stuck on these pleasures, because otherwise what pleasures are you going to get stuck on? The pleasures of sensual thoughts, sensual passions, sensual objects. The pleasure of jhana is a lot safer than the pleasure of sensuality. Nobody’s killed or stolen or engaged in illicit sex or lied or gotten drunk because of the pleasure of jhana …
- Anybody Home?… That thought enables your grief to be transformed into compassion. When you think about everybody’s suffering, why pile more suffering on other people who are already suffering? Why pile extra suffering on yourself, since relationships are marked by so much suffering? That’s the first stage in dealing with grief. Ultimately, the Buddha says, you want to go from what he calls householder …
- Doing Favors & Making Merit… And, of course, with thoughts of goodwill: Sometimes we’re told we extend goodwill to others because they deserve it. But the Buddha never spoke in those words. We extend thoughts of goodwill because it’s good for us. It makes us happy, provides us with protection. It protects us from having ill will, which would then lead us to act in unskillful ways …
- The Dangers of Sensuality… He thought it would be pretty cool to spend a couple of years writing about that. But after the first volume, he said, he realized that sex is one of the most boring things possible. There’s not much to it, yet we can fantasize, we can elaborate, we can embroider it in so many ways. But it all comes down to the same …
- We’re All Learning the Ropes… So the thought got even more oppressive. After she left meditation, she told Ajaan Fuang about her sense of frustration and hopelessness around this, thinking that he would give her some words of comfort and encouragement. But he said, “Well, you’re the one who wanted to be born here.” It shocked her but it made her come to her senses. After all, she …
- The Power of Human Effort… He thought to himself: There’d never been anyone who had devoted himself to austerities more than he had. There are people who, if they had come to that point in their practice, probably would have just stayed right there. They wouldn’t have wanted to admit they’d made a mistake. After all, they’d devoted all that time and suffering. And what …
- Identifying Weeds… Make up your mind that any other thought coming into the mind right now is something you don’t want. No matter what the thought is, treat it as a weed, something you don’t want to go near. Then, as you get more firmly established in the breath, you can start watching these things. When these weeds grow, how do they grow? What …
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