In many suttas, we read that we should not indulge in any sensual, ill-will, harming thought and should remove it completely.
But is it not said?
It's not said how.
In our tradition, we can say, just note it and move on, I guess is what that means.
Yeah, not indulging in the three types of mitya-sangapa, wrong thought, is actually a little bit more than just noted.
Because there's an aspect of the teaching here that the Buddha is telling us to remind ourselves not to do the opposite, which is not to follow the thoughts.
And in meditation you have to do that.
You can't note something until you get it into your head that you should be noting.
So the teaching here is actually on two levels.
The preliminary aspect is where you remind yourself, hey, I should stop daydreaming or hey, I should stop plotting revenge and realize that that's not the proper way to behave and then get into noting.
So
When the Buddha says removing it completely and not, I think how he puts it, basically not indulging in it, not harboring it, I don't know what the word is, not indulging in it, not allowing it to cultivate,
There's two aspects to that, I think, practically.
As I said, the act of giving it up and the act of then...
neutralizing it by just saying thinking thinking or liking liking wanting wanting or angry angry disliking and so on but thoughts are something that you have to deal with intellectually first and and reprimand yourself and say this is not or not reprimand necessarily but question yourself and and and
investigate and see for yourself that that's not helping you.
Ideally, this can just work by noting, and as you note, you start to realize that the thoughts are useless and not beneficial, but there is a sense of intellectual activity where you tell yourself, you know, look, you know where this is leading, and catching yourself and saying, oh, I should be meditating.
That person had another post, a couple of follow-up questions.
They said, are some contemplative practice, maybe, the least probable would be to just repress it inside us, question mark?
Yeah.
Yeah, repressing is an interesting idea.
I think I've talked about this before.
It's not really clear that you can actually repress something.
What you're doing when you say repressing is actually reacting negatively to it and building up a habit of negative reactions.
So it's not really good.
But there are cases where the Buddha says you should do just that when there's no other choice and it's just bugging you and where you just can't get it out of your mind.
You have to then be strong with yourself, be firm with yourself and say no.
And that comes up in different ways in meditation where you have a persistent state of mind.
And instead of noting it, you have to reprimand yourself and say, no, this is wrong.
And so we actually will encourage meditators sometimes to just say to themselves, stop.
And their minds just make a mental note, stop.
And then it'll stop.
It can stop.
It's not totally under your control, but this is a stopgap measure that you use while you're finding your feet and learning how to note.
But it can be useful at times.
The best is just to note.
If you can remember to note, just note the thoughts, note the emotions.
pick it apart, see it for what it is and realize that, you know, teach yourself that these thoughts are causing you headaches and suffering and stress and getting you lost and leading you nowhere.
Most importantly taking you away from reality because it's easy to get lost in illusion and fantasy even for a long time because it's much preferable to reality.
In every aspect, illusion is preferable to reality in every aspect, except that it's not real.
So it messes with you, it messes with reality.
This is why reality is changing in some bad ways now.
If you look at our reality, all of us sitting in front of this computer, it's not really as pleasant, I mean from my point of view, as pleasant as maybe sitting on a rock in the forest.
but we've we've changed a lot and a lot of it has to do with our addiction to entertainment I used to give talks in Second Life and we're just talking about this last night I was showing my old videos from Second Life to Laurie before he left and
Second Life is really a good example of this, where we go to this place that's so beautiful and in the forest and people make houses there and have beautiful bodies and beautiful houses and everything wonderful.
But the truth is they're just sitting in front of a black box.
You know, at a desk somewhere.
And that's kind of the depressing thing is that the further we get engaged in illusion, and this has a lot to do with these three kinds of thoughts, the worse off we become in reality.
Our reality becomes less and less agreeable, less and less...
on two levels.
Mentally we become less appreciative of our reality and physically our reality changes.
It becomes more coarse and chaotic because we're not cultivating peace and harmony.
I mean, much better than that we should stay in reality and cultivate our... bring our dreams into reality, make our life a dream.
Not a dream, but...
bring our dreams to fruition rather than dreaming.
On the subject of meditation, one listener writes, Hi Bhante, I'm getting irregular heartbeat.
Oh, we better stop then.
Wait, that's a different question.
Let me stop this.