Search results for: "Thought"
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- Right View about Right View… One is the principle that skillful thoughts, words, and deeds should be developed, and unskillful ones should be abandoned. The other principle is the four noble truths. Now, you notice that the three characteristics are not on that list. In fact, the word “three characteristics” is never applied by the Buddha to the teachings on inconstancy, stress, and not-self. He calls them perceptions …
- Free for the Time Being… As you create this totally present attitude in the mind right now, the only thoughts that will be really useful right now are the ones that remind you to stay here, or they help you figure out how to stay here with more solidity, with a greater sense of enjoying it. Try to keep your awareness all around, so that there’s no room …
- Fear… There’s always a fear that comes with the thought that maybe there is a punishment for what you’ve done. Even for people who don’t necessarily believe fully in the principle of karma, something in the back of the mind knows that there’s got to be some settling of the score somehow. They just don’t know how. They would prefer …
- The Kindness of Body Contemplation… Particularly if you’re physically attracted to the other person or if you’re physically attracted to yourself—or if you’re not attracted to yourself, the thought of these things disgusts you. It’s interesting that whether you like the body or don’t like the body, the cure is the same: look at the body in terms of its 32 parts. If …
- The Carpenter’s Adze… There was that one time when he was telling the monks to be mindful of the breath, and one monk spoke up and said, “Oh, I already do that.” The Buddha said, “Well, what kind of breath mindfulness do you practice?” And the monk said, “I put aside all thoughts of the past, all hankering after the future, and calming my mind in the …
- Appropriate Attention… His first thought was, “Who’s looking after whom here?” Then he said to himself, “Well, as long as I’m awake, I might as well meditate.” So, he sat in meditation, and he realized that he’d been relating to the headache in the wrong way. He’d been trying to push it away, trying to get rid of it, whereas the Buddha …
- Looking After Yourself… There’s a school of thought saying that the practice is not a practice of doing, it’s simply a matter of allowing things to happen, allowing the mind to unfold in its natural direction. But if that were the case, the Buddha wouldn’t have stressed heedfulness so much. He said it’s the basis for all skillfulness, the basis for the skillful …
- The Essence of the Dhamma… You don’t have to tie up the loose ends of your thoughts before you leave them and return to the breath. Leave the thoughts dangling. Leave the loose ends loose. Come right back to the breath. Learn how to use the breath as a means for staying present in the moment. This means taking an interest in the breath, exploring the possibilities of …
- The Breathing Game… In this way, you’re less likely to get sucked into the little thought worlds that the mind keeps creating for itself, some of which come in and consume your awareness. Especially if they have strong emotional connotations, they seem to take over your whole body. You feel that you can’t stand it; you’ve got to get them out of your system …
- The Four Biases… As we peel away all the different layers of our involvement in our thoughts, our involvement in things outside, we finally come to this part of the mind and often we’re afraid of it, because we feel that it makes us antisocial or unsocial or unfeeling. But that’s not the case. It puts us in a place of security, a place of …
- It’s All in What You’re Doing… You’ve got the thought fabrications that are directing your thoughts and evaluating to get the breath and the mind to settle down together. And then you’ve got the awareness, the consciousness, that’s aware of all these things. That’s where you’re going to see those five aggregates. It’s not that they’re going to be set out some place …
- A Complete Training… This is especially true when you’re developing thoughts of goodwill. You have to learn how to talk to yourself in ways that make you want to extend goodwill to people you don’t like or to those you feel have been really behaving in horrible ways. Yet you have to have goodwill for them. So you have to talk to yourself in terms …
- From Anxiety to Confidence… So when you’ve thought about the universality of the destructive nature of human beings and have developed a good sense of samvega, remember that the cure for *samvega *is pasada—confidence that the goodness you do is not lost. The opportunities to do good may get cut short, but you have to determine you’re going to keep on—to continue to pursue …
- Virtue Fosters Concentration… Those habits are going to be useful the next time you sit down to meditate, because you’re going to have to refrain from wandering out after every vagrant thought and learn how to say No effectively to distraction. In learning how to say No effectively in terms of the precepts, you learn how to trust yourself. If you’ve been saying No and …
- Large-hearted… You have to put aside all thoughts about other beings. But when you come out of concentration, you’re dealing with other beings and you want to have the strength within you to deal with them skillfully. So being large-hearted doesn’t mean just having large, broad goodwill for all beings, compassion for all beings. It means being resilient, being enduring. And the …
- Duties… It might be form or feeling or perception—i.e., the labels you put on things—the thoughts you fabricate about things. Or you’re simply holding on to the consciousness, your awareness of the six senses. There’s s a clinging to some of these things or at least one of these things at any one time whenever there’s stress. And you …
- Taking the Buddha at his Word… They can offer ideas of approaches you might not have thought of otherwise. But it’s also good to try to figure out your own approaches so that you can come to your own understanding. The things you understand through having figured them out stick with you for a long time, much longer than things you’ve simply heard. So we take the Buddha …
- Hold onto the Breath… Again, sometimes it’s because we thought we had to. But the message of the Buddha’s teachings is that regardless of how bad the world is, and how bad the people around us are, we don’t have to suffer from that. From the outside it may look like we’re being passive, just accepting things as they are, but we’re doing …
- Recollection of Hell… Your first thought is your need to feed. So they laugh, pour molten copper into your mouth, and then throw you back in. These are some of the possible places where fabrication can lead you—this need we have to keep turning the raw materials of experience into form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness. So it helps you realize that when things are going well …
- Your Secret Foundation… There is verbal fabrication, where the mind directs its thoughts to the breath and evaluates the breath. And then there’s mental fabrication, the feelings that arise—the sense of pleasure, the sense of dis-ease, depending whether the breath is comfortable or not—and your perceptions, the labels you put on things. These are all present right here. Everything you really need to …
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