Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Thinking (4)

Watch deeply the following Thay's Dharma talk video on 'Taking Care of our Thinking'. 
https://www.facebook.com/thichnhathanh/videos/vb.7691064634/10154446854299635/?type=2&theater
The followings are excerpts from the above video.

Quotes:
(from -33:35)
Within ourselves there is a territory of depression, a territory of hell. And our negative thinking and emotions, they are spinning out from these territories. But we know that in ourselves there is a territory of the Kingdom of God and there is a territory of the Buddha Land. There is a powerful seed of compassion and wisdom in us. And if we give them a chance, they will come in order for us to be rescued. 

They have a power to recognize our thoughts. They have a power to recognize our feelings, our emotions, our perceptions. We don't have to suppress them but we want to have the time and space in order to look at them, to recognize them as they are. This is the basic practice. And in order to do that, we have to stay present to be there in the here and the now. Very often our body is there but our mind is elsewhere. And our children do not feel that we are truly present

If we come to a house, we want to meet someone in the house. You ask, "Is anyone home?" And if someone says, "Yes", and you will be happy. You don't want to go to a house where there is no one. But very often we live ourselves without us. We are not home. We are lost in our thinking, in our worries, in our projects, in our anxiety, in our fear. We are completely lost. We are not there in order to be aware of what is going on. And that is why the practice that is offered to us by the Buddha is not to be on automatic piloting but on conscious breathing, the practice of mindful living. 

If you have a depression, or if you are afraid that you go fall back into a depression, this is the way out. If you can stay present, if you can identify the kind of ill-feeling and thought that are responsible for your depression, and then you can be free. You know that these kinds of thinking, these kinds of feeling, will cause a relapse. And that is the beginning of the healing, the beginning of your freedom

To be there and to be aware of your thinking, of your feeling. The feeling that you get in your body, the feeling that you get when you remember something, you are not afraid.  If you are truly there, you can allow the difficult materials to come for you to recognize before they go. And you can do something in order to invite the wonderful materials to come for you to recognize. And you may like to ask these wonderful materials of the mind to stay with you to help you to possess the documents that you need to process.

The Kingdom of God is not an idea. It is a reality. Every time we are mindful, every time we are concentrated, every time we get a little bit of freedom, and then we can get in touch with the Kingdom of God for our transformation and healing. Of course, hell is there in the present moment but the Kingdom of God is also there in the present moment. And we have to select, we have to choose between the two.
:Unquote

(To be continued)

(My Commentary)
Everything depends on who we are. We can select hell or the Kingdom of God to live in. However, if we are ego, we can't recognize what's going on inside and around us. So, ego lives in hell without knowing that there are options to select. Therefore, we need to return to true self by stopping thinking through the insight of the root cause of the suffering.

(Cf.) http://www.slideshare.net/compassion5151/3-versions-of-oneself

Thich Nhat Hanh