Search results for: "Thought"
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- Dependent Co-arising in Fifteen Minutes… You can have craving located in your directed thought and evaluation; you can have craving located in perceptions or acts of attention. So even though craving comes after contact, it’s going to be centered on things that come prior to contact. That’s the second good thing to know. Finally, the third good thing to know about dependent co-arising is that it …
- Exploring Fabrication… That can involve bodily fabrication, which is the breath; verbal fabrications, which are directed thought and evaluation; and mental fabrications, which are feeling and perception. Now, all of this is to get you really sensitive to the process of fabrication. It’s not just a matter of things coming and going, arising and passing away. The mind has an intentional element in all of …
- Disenchantment… He says, “Wow, I was really fooled by that guy.” In the same way, the Buddha says that once you attain the first taste of Awakening, you look back on your old pleasures and realize how you’ve been fooled by the mind — that in finding your pleasure, what you’ve been feeding on is just forms and feelings and perceptions and thought constructs …
- The Noble Search… When the king asked, “What do you mean, ‘The world is swept away’?” he said to the king, “When you were young, were you strong?” And the king said, “Yes, sometimes I thought I had the strength of two men.” “How about now?” “Well, now I’m eighty. Sometimes I mean to put my foot one place and it goes someplace else.” Aging. “The …
- A Mental Fortress… Are these helpful ways of thinking or harmful? What kind of perceptions are you holding? What better thoughts and perceptions can I bring to bear? So looking at what’s going on in terms of these three kinds of fabrication gives you your weapons, so that you can protect the mind and protect whatever goodness you’ve got in there. And of course, the …
- Delusion… But the student was living in the situation—he thought it was just an ordinary everyday situation, he wasn’t alert to the fact that he was going to be stepping into a koan that day—and he really did have a blind spot. It was up to the master to see the blind spot, to try to point it out to the student …
- Boring… You sit for a while watching the breath and a voice in the mind says, “This is boring, nothing’s happening,” and you can go off and think about things you’ve thought about who-knows-how-many times and yet not find it boring. You can think about food. How many flavors are there in food? Not that many, really. Sexual fantasies: Whatever …
- Compunction & Awe… In the American meaning, it can also deal with the thoughts you might have at the prospect of doing something evil, the prospect of doing something callous and careless, and you want not to do that. I think the Buddha had the American meaning in mind, because he talks about compunction as a guardian of the world. It protects you from doing things you …
- Is ‘I Am’ the Problem?… One would be, “How could you function if you weren’t taking on the responsibility of doing something with what you see and you hear?” As one person once put it to a monk who taught in line with this school of thought, “Have you ever put on trousers and gone to work and tried out these teachings in the real world?” Then there …
- Doing the Practice… See the thought as one thing, but your awareness of breath is still there. The fact that there is a thought in the mind doesn’t destroy the breath. It may create a little world in which, if you enter into that world, you blot out a lot of your awareness of the body. But just keep reminding yourself, come back to that basic …
- Patient & Inquisitive… When a particular unskillful thought comes up in the mind, what is the particular trigger, what is the particular allure of that thought? You have to be quick to see these things. They’re like the subliminal messages on TV. They’re there right before your eyes, but they’re so quick that you miss them. We slow things down by staying with the …
- Firmly Intent… Now, the results that come out may be different from what you intended.** **Basically you thought that causality worked in one way, but it was actually working in another way. So straightening out your views basically means straightening out your understanding of causality, that the quality of your intentions is going to make a difference. It’s going to be the factor that makes …
- Capture Your Imagination… As you may have noticed, when you’re thinking about things, there’s a spot of tension or a pattern of tension someplace in the body that goes along with the thought. This means that any act of the imagination, any act of the mind, will involve an aspect of the body as well. This is why, if you don’t occupy the body …
- Training Your Intentions… basically, your intention is to fabricate thoughts. You start with perceptions of things, feelings about things, and then you make comments on them. Of course, you have a purpose in doing this. You may not be all that clear in your purpose, but the mind is always heading in a certain direction. That’s the nature of fabrication. But then fabrication also covers all …
- Learning How to Learn… But then, if the person did admit to a mistake, then the next question was, “How would you do it differently to avoid that mistake the next time around?” If the person hadn’t thought about how he or she might do it differently, again: not accepted. You want people who try their best, who recognize a mistake for a mistake, and then immediately …
- Right Speech… What this means is that you apply the same three questions to your thoughts that you do to your speech. One, is it true? If it’s not true, don’t think it. Two, is it beneficial? If not, don’t think it. And if it is beneficial, then three, is this right time for this kind of thinking? Is this the time to …
- Gratitude & Trust… And it’s good to reflect on how much we owe to the people who first thought up the idea of having this monastery and to the people whose gift of land and whose development of the land into a monastery have provided us with an opportunity to practice. Here there are two themes worthy of reflection. First is the Buddha’s saying, Vissasa …
- Exercising the Mind… We’ve already started with thoughts of goodwill. “May all beings be happy. And may I be happy.” Tell yourself that: “May I be happy. May I find true happiness.” Don’t be embarrassed to think that. After all, true happiness is not a selfish thing. Because it comes from within, it doesn’t have to take anything away from anyone else. So it …
- Cooking the Mind… He’d ask you to try to give the matter some thought first: “What do you think you’re doing wrong? What do you think might work?” If you tried to come up with a solution on your own and then ran that past him, he’d be willing to talk about that. In other words, you had to take some responsibility for your …
- Basic Wisdom… You can drop some of that directed thought and evaluation and just be with the sensation of the breath coming and going out. There’s a sense of upwelling energy in the body and you can just sit there bathing in it. If the upwelling energy is getting a little too oppressive, you want something that’s more calm. More refined. This is a …
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