Search results for: "Thought"
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- Unentangled Compassion… In other words, if unskillful qualities come up, if you find yourself distracted, forgetful, your mind is wandering around making plans for tomorrow or next week or whatever, the effort there is learning how to disentangle yourself from those thoughts and get back to work. And you find it’s pretty amazing. The mind is sitting here watching the breath and all of a …
- Infinite Good Humor… Sometimes I thought I had the strength of two people.” “And how about now?” “Well, now I’m 80 years old and sometimes I mean to put my foot in one place and it goes someplace else.” There you have the principles of inconstancy and aging. The world offers no shelter; there is no one in charge. Ratthapala illustrates this one with illness. It …
- To See What You’re Doing… This means any thoughts about the world right now, about how you want things to be a certain way and you’re happy or not happy that they’re the way they are. Just put those aside. You can deal with those issues some other time. Right now, you want to get in touch with this body, this breath that you’re going to …
- Close to What You Know… This is one of the reasons why the breath is so useful, because you can step outside of a lot of your thought worlds by stepping into the world of the breath. You can always tap into the breath because it’s always here as long as you’re alive. And from this perspective you can look at action and its results in a …
- Defiant Like the Buddha… And that thought can actually open your heart. The problem with grief is the sense that “It’s happening to *me. *Why is the universe dumping on me?” Try to get the “me” out of there. It does tell you that a lot that grieving for somebody else often has to do more with your sense of what you’re lacking rather than grieving …
- The Self-correcting Mind… But he also found that the path was something that had to be done within the mind—because we suffer from our lack of skill in how we handle sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and all the thoughts of the mind. No one else can make us skillful. Other people can show us by example that the skill can be mastered, they can …
- Choosing Not to Suffer… As for whatever other thoughts come up, you can just let them go, let them go, realizing that the time has come to let go, totally, and nothing is served by holding on. Then you can ask yourself: Which will end first, the awareness or the pain? The awareness will outlast the pain in every case. There’s a story in the Canon of …
- We All Start with an Impure Heart… Some people like that thought, because they think it lets them off the hook, but you see where it leads: simply to more suffering. The Buddha says there’s a way out. It starts with the assumption that your actions do make a difference. And the desire to do something skillful is skillful in and of itself. As the Buddha said, “All things are …
- Ego… realizing that your actions really do make a difference, and that what may seem like an innocent train of thought because no one else is involved, really can have consequences that harm you in the future and harm other people too. So a healthy ego is able to foresee the consequences and take them seriously. If you have a healthy ego, you can get …
- Mindfulness, the Gatekeeper… We can’t be responsible for other people’s thoughts, words, and deeds, but we can be responsible for our own. This is why any training in which we become more responsible, more skillful, less harmful, is going to be good not only for us but also for the people around us. It all has to begin here. In training the mind, there are …
- Samvega & Pasada… That’s a chastening thought. Then you can use your sensitivity to the breath as a foundation to look at other ways you pursue pleasure in your life: through relationships, through sensual pleasures, through the desire to gain this, to get that, become this, become that. You realize that you can get a lot of the sense of well-being you were searching for …
- Anger… If you carry that thought around, you make it more and more difficult to deal with your response in the present moment. So, drop any thinking about what the other person has been doing and turn around to look at what you’ve been doing and are about to do. To do this, it’s useful to divide the anger into three parts: one …
- Turning Points… Then the next question he asked himself was: “Why am I afraid of that pleasure? What’s blameworthy about it?” The more he thought about it, the more he realized that that kind of pleasure had nothing blameworthy. That’s how he got started on the path. He had to start eating again so that he would have enough physical strength to get the …
- Right Effort… It’s the work of the directed thought and evaluation, evaluating the breath so that it can give rise to a sense of ease at least in some spot of the body, and then being able to work that sense of ease and fullness throughout the whole body. That requires that you understand the process of breathing, you understand how you relate to feelings …
- Seeds of Becoming… There’s the breath, which is the physical fabrication; then there’s directed thought and evaluation, which are verbal fabrications; and then there are feelings and perceptions, which are mental fabrications. These are the basic building blocks from which you create this world, the world of a concentrated mind. You use your powers of directed thought and evaluation to work out the disturbances, to …
- Wild Horses… Now, the term ‘further becoming’ can refer to new states of becoming in your mind as you go from one thought world to the next to the next, but it’s also his word for rebirth. Remember that image he had of how, when you’re reborn, it’s like a house afire, and the flame goes from the house, carried by the wind …
- Interconnectedness… Some people think that interconnectedness is automatically a good thing, but when you remember that harmful actions are also part of the general web and they can have repercussions that go on for a long time, that’s a scary thought. Also, our happiness often depends on the actions of other people, many of whom we don’t even know. So how can we …
- Understanding Happiness… If you know how to find true happiness inside—how cultivate your breath, how to cultivate your thoughts in the proper way—then you can be a good example to them. And you can actually share your knowledge with them at the appropriate times. You’ve probably noticed: People who have that kind of glow from an inner happiness—you pick up some of …
- Sense Pleasures & Sensuality… This doesn’t mean that you have to uproot sensuality, simply that you put sensual thoughts aside. Sensuality and sensual pleasures are not the same thing. Sensuality is your fascination with thinking about sensual pleasures. We like to fantasize about sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, all the narratives that go around lust, the narratives that go around our desire for food—how you …
- Sensual Passion… What he’s talking about when he says you’re aloof from sensuality is that you’re not thinking thoughts about sensual pleasures, planning them, going over sensual pleasures from the past. You get aloof from that so that the mind can be really quiet. Now, for a lot of us, that’s where we find our pleasures, our happiness: thoughts of nice sights …
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