Search results for: "Thought"
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- 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 …
- How to Look, How to Listen… The image is of a seed that you planted and it’s beginning to grow, but it doesn’t quite look like the tree you wanted, or whatever plant you wanted, so you push it and pull it and basically shred it, because it’s not what you thought it should be. This is another image that’s very common in the forest tradition …
- Switzerland Inside… So, put those thoughts up as a fence. And second, you want to develop some good qualities in the mind because the more your wealth is inside, then the less you have to worry about outside. This doesn’t mean that you’re not concerned with the outside at all, but simply that you realize you’ve got some safe wealth in here. It …
- Your Inner Teacher… You can change things in the body simply through the power of thought. Notice the sensations that you didn’t notice before. Connect things in ways you never connected them before. When you’re doing this, the student and the teacher are working together, and the disciplinarian falls into the background. Concentration that’s kept going simply through force of will is not very …
- Make the Most of This Breath… the verbal fabrications, the directed thought and evaluation that run your meditation will have been exercised. After all, the mind talking to other people is the same mind that’s talking to itself. So you want to be really clear about what’s happening, how you describe things, making sure to be as accurate as you can. After all, when you’re going to …
- Precarious Knowledge… It’s in feelings and perceptions and thought constructs and consciousness, all of which are based on very changeable factors. When I was doing that collection of similes by Ajaan Chah, I noticed he had several similes where talked about the issue of scholarly knowledge versus meditation knowledge, or the approach of, say, Buddhist scholars as opposed to the approach of meditators. Scholars, as …
- Stick with It… If you’re with the breath for a little bit, then wander away, come back for a little bit, wander away, it’s no different from any other thoughts you may have in the course of the day. When you meditate, you’re trying to see what happens to the mind when you stay with one thing consistently. So you have to learn how …
- Angry… bodily fabrication, the way you breathe; verbal fabrication, directed thought and evaluation, which means the way you talk to yourself about things; and then mental fabrication, feelings and perceptions. When you fabricate anger, one, you breathe in a certain way that gets the breath all constricted. Two, you talk to yourself about why it’s good to get angry and why that particular person …
- Beyond Gratitude… Sometimes you pull yourself back to the breath and you notice that the thought that had distracted you has created a pattern of tension in some part of the body. Allow that to relax, dissolve away. Then the thought will go away as well. You have to learn how to use whatever tricks work for freeing you at least temporarily from that distraction. This …
- Contemplation of the Body… The thoughts that come barging into the mind can take total control if you haven’t developed the ability to counter them. Then there are all the indignities of aging. It’s as if the human body is designed to undercut any sense of pride we might feel. Other people have to wipe you; other people have to turn you over; whatever sense of …
- Proactive with Pain… You begin to realize it’s not as solid or as intimidating as you first thought it was. What you’re doing is putting yourself out of the line of fire, and you’re taking more pro-active approach to it so you’re not the victim anymore. You’re not the target. You’re the investigator. If you find it hard to do …
- Metta… Of course, simply thinking thoughts of goodwill is not going to uproot ill will. To uproot something like that you have to look at it when it arises, when it passes away; what its allure is, in other words, why you like it; and what its drawbacks are. That’s when you can gain escape from it. But in the meantime it’s important …
- Abandoning Craving… It grows in things like sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, our feelings around these things, our perceptions around these things, thoughts, acts of evaluation around these things, even craving for craving for these things. When you see that you’re suffering, first you have to remember, “Okay, what is the suffering itself?” This is why you have to comprehend it. You see that …
- Set Your Heart on the Breath… But if you keep reminding yourself that you’re directing your thoughts to the breath and you’re being alert to evaluate the breath—making sure it feels just right continually, continually, continually—those are the causal factors for right concentration. Now, you may come to the point where you don’t have to direct your thoughts any longer. You don’t have to …
- An Inside Job… What does an intention feel like? How do you know that an intention is formed? How do you decide to go with an intention or not to go with an intention? How do you change your mind? What is it like to do these things? As you watch in this way, you’re stepping out of the thoughts—out of the content and looking …
- Dhamma in Vinaya… But to what extent do you really know? It’s a sobering thought—and it’s very useful in helping to pry you loose from ideas that are not useful, and to look with a little bit of scepticism at the content of your thoughts. Then there’s the truth of giving an account. Again, it’s your account to yourself. When you meditate …
- The Whole Story… So he went up to sit in a hollow spot in the chedi of the monastery where he was staying and thought through the story: What would it be like if he disrobed? The beginning of the story is nice. He gets a good job. And then it starts getting super nice, to the point where it’s unrealistic. He gets a woman from …
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