Search results for: "Thought"

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  2. Determination
     … So why is it renunciation? You’re renouncing sensual thoughts as you’re getting the mind concentrated. Your fascination with thinking about physical food, the pleasures of clothing, the pleasures of shows, all the things that people tend to talk about all the time: You have to say, “No, I’m not going to talk about those to myself right now. I’m going … 
  3. A Thread Out of the Maze
     … The mere power of thought can change the way you breathe. Simply reminding the body that it can breathe in a different way, that it doesn’t have to breathe in ways that are uncomfortable: This is one freedom they’ll never take away from you, the freedom to breathe in a comfortable way. But most of us don’t take advantage of it … 
  4. To Understand the Path
     … You lose your bearings, which means you’ve got work to do, directing your thoughts here, directing your thoughts there, working with the breath, trying to develop an ability to evaluate the breath, using the breath to create a sense of balanced concentration that’s alert and mindful, or as they say in Pali, malleable and workable. In other words, you can actually do … 
  5. The Committee of the Mind
     … This is what the directed thought and evaluation are all about. It’s like moving into a house. When you first come in, it’s just empty walls, empty rooms. You realize you have to furnish it. You have to make it comfortable if you’re going to stay. When you do, then over time it does become a home. And it’s the … 
  6. Harmony Inside & Outside
     … Don’t think of yourself as a shameful person for thinking those thoughts. Everybody, except for the arahants, thinks unskillful thoughts. Learn to see the thoughts as something you’d be ashamed to follow through with, but don’t think of yourself as a shameful person. Learn how to make that distinction. It’s important. Criticize the act, not the person. When you make … 
  7. Seven Facets of Discernment
     … There will sometimes be self-destructive thoughts coming into the mind. Sometimes they take over, and you look at yourself and you don’t see anything good at all. You have to realize you can’t believe those thoughts. They may be right to some extent but it’s not the case that you’re totally hopeless. The fact that you’re a human … 
  8. Refuge
     … That means you take a special relationship to your thoughts. The point where the Buddha’s life and his teachings come together is in his very last teaching. In those days, some teachers liked to save their really special teachings for the last moment. They didn’t want to hand over everything to their students beforehand, for otherwise the students might outshine them. But … 
  9. Solid in the Face of Death
     … It can be with the breath, thoughts of goodwill, repeating Bud-dho, or visualizing the parts of the body. The choice is up to you, because you’re looking for a place where the mind can stay and feel engaged. You’re also looking for an antidote. Sometimes with sleepiness, just repeating the word *buddho-buddho-buddho rapid-fire *helps keep you awake. Or … 
  10. Training Wheels
     … This is what directed thought and evaluation are all about. When in the first jhana, you’ve still got to do some thinking. You’re trying to get these things to come together in a way that feels right. Once there’s a sense of well-being and refreshment, you let it spread so that it suffuses the body. Then when things come together … 
  11. To Certify Yourself
     … As for thoughts about the past, thoughts about the future, it’s the same sort of thing. They can come into the mind, and either you latch on to them—in which case, you lose your concentration—or you can just let them pass right through, like wind going through a screen on a window. The screen stays in place; the wind goes through … 
  12. Finding Extra Energy
     … You have to look at the way you’re thinking about it, how you evaluate it, how you direct your thoughts to it: in other words, the conversation you’re having in your mind about the issue. Maybe that has to be changed. And then finally, there are the feelings and perceptions. These are mental fabrications, and maybe they have to be changed, too … 
  13. The Five Precepts for the Mind
     … They thought that he was looking down on them, thinking that they, as lay people, were not ready for high level Dhamma, and that he was teaching them only low level Dhamma. But they misunderstood. One, they misunderstood the fact that the precepts are not low level practices: It’s not easy to maintain the five precepts. It requires a lot of alertness, a … 
  14. Respect for What’s Noble
     … form—this body of ours, which is constantly changing—feeling, perception, thought-fabrications, and consciousness. These are all activities that are involved in feeding: The form is the form of the body, the form of the food we eat. Feeling, in the feeling of hunger that drives us to eat, and in our desire for the feeling of pleasure that comes when we’re … 
  15. Thinking About Your Fears
     … We think that if we think about them, our thoughts will make them happen. You run up against an obstacle that you can’t figure out how to handle and you just stop thinking. You’ve got to learn how to think things through. The Buddha, of course, thought through death. As he said, there are four things that we fear about being dead … 
  16. As Days & Nights Fly Past
     … First start with thoughts that are comfortable to think. “May I be happy, may all living beings be happy,” as in the chant we chanted just now. That’s a comfortable thought to think. And think about the possibility of a true happiness: a happiness that doesn’t harm you, doesn’t harm anybody else, because it comes from within. Those are good thoughts … 
  17. For the Survival of True Happiness
     … I always thought that the Buddha’s four noble truths were the greatest idea, because they point to something really different and more profound: We want to survive, not for the sake of brute survival, but for the sake of happiness. There are people who sacrifice their lives for the sake of something that feels noble, and it makes them happy that they’ve … 
  18. Everything Gathers Around the Breath
     … Then when things settle down, there’s less need for any directed thought and evaluation, so you can release it from that. That puts you in the third and fourth tetrads. So these tetrads overlap. They’re different ways of looking at what’s going on in the process of learning to be mindful and then trying to deal skillfully with what you’re … 
  19. Something New
     … There are forms, feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness. Out of those five, fabrications covers the widest variety of mental events. It’s the way you talk to yourself. It’s the way you think. It’s your emotions, your world views, your ideas of what you have to do, what you don’t have to do, how other people should be, how other … 
  20. Get Attached to Jhana
     … Sensual pleasures have to do with your thoughts about sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations—in other words, the things that come and touch the body—whereas this is different. This is the body in and of itself as you feel it from within, what they call “proprioception.” Learn how to get your center of gravity in here instead of pointing out or … 
  21. Good for What Purpose?
     … But he’s thought very carefully about where these fabrications lead: what happens when you adopt them, what happens when you breathe in line with his instructions, what happens when you talk to yourself in line with his instructions, what happens when you use his analogies and similes to look at your life. If you see that the results are good, okay, adopt them … 
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