Search results for: "Thought"

  1. Page 95
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. Don’t Stop with Awareness Itself
     … That sense of “my thoughts, my feelings, my emotions” got weaker and weaker. The awareness was one thing. You did tend at that point to identify with the awareness, so anything else that came up that was separate was obviously not you. You were in a good position to let it go. But then this attachment to your awareness, you’d have to do … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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