Vitakka and vicara are two Pali words that mean thinking. They’re classified as verbal fabrication. In other words, you engage in these two activities—thinking of something first and then thinking about it, or directing your thoughts to a topic and then commenting on it—and then you break into speech. Without having had those verbal thoughts in the mind, there would be no external verbal action. T…

When Ajaan Khao could no longer eat, his physical condition deteriorated rapidly, which was quite visible to everyone around him. When asked about how he was and whether he would depart from the world, he gave the most impressive exposition of the nature of his condition, saying: What is there to this body? When it dies, I’ll feel no concerns and no regrets at all. All I can see in this body is a…

Householder What is the mind? The mind doesn’t have any form. That which receives impressions, both good and bad, we call mind. It is like the owner of a house. The owner stays at home while visitors come to see him. He is the one who receives the visitors. Who receives sense impressions? What is it that perceives? Who lets go of sense impressions? That is what we call mind. But people can’t see i…

It can be helpful to consider spiritual practice as a generative process, generative in the sense that when we are sufficiently prepared, when the basic elements are rightly established, the process takes over and does itself. It becomes less predictable and we need to be ready to step back. To always be thinking that it is up to us to do the awakening can create unnecessary problems on the journe…

The world is our moods, our preoccupations. Our preoccupations are the world. If we aren’t acquainted with the Dhamma, aren’t acquainted with the mind, aren’t acquainted with our preoccupations, we grab onto the mind and its preoccupations and get them all mixed up. “Whew! My mind feels no ease.” It’s like you have many minds, and they’re all in a turmoil. Actually, that’s not the case. You don’t…

In the practice, there is a lot of emphasis on coming into the body: being aware of your body, feeling it more fully. Can you get your breathing? Can the breathing become long, complete, involuntary, pleasant, so you’re not struggling around it? Can you tune into that? Now, you might take these instructions to mean ‘hurry up and get mindful of the breathing, hold it together, focus intensely on it…

The Buddha recognized various obstructions to the realization of truth. One of the most primal ones is referred to as the ‘underlying dispositions’ (anusaya), sometimes translated as ‘underlying tendencies’ or ‘latent tendencies’. Although various qualities are referred to as underlying dispositions, the standard list comprises seven: sensual lust (kāmarāgā), aversion/repugnance (paṭigha), vie…

Going without sleep, however, was a different matter. Mae Chee Kaew passed most of the second month of her retreat in three postures: sitting, standing and walking, but never lying down. She started the “sitter’s practice” as another experiment, an attempt to find a practical way of accelerating her meditation that took advantage of her natural strengths. She discovered that refraining from sleep…

Mae Chee Kaew experimented with fasting, going entirely without food for several days at a time. But she discovered that lack of food left her feeling mentally dull and sluggish, and vulnerable to changing moods and wayward thoughts, as if the flow of her spiritual energy was somehow constricted. That subtle hindrance seemed to lessen her motivation to intensify in meditation. She knew that many o…

I also used to think: ‘My mind is too alert and bright; I’ve got so much restless movement in my mind.’ Because I had always wanted to have an interesting personality, I trained myself in that direction and acquired all sorts of useless information and silly ideas, so I could be a charming, entertaining person. But that doesn’t really count; it’s useless in a monastery in North East Thailand. When…