The Miracle of Positive Thinking Explained by Van Dorn

Fanden reads The Miracle of Positive Thinking

A book that will allow you to live in harmony with yourself and extinguish all pain. After reading this book, you will realize that there is little in life that is so-called difficult, and if you can learn to keep positive thoughts, you will become at peace in a second. If you believe that you can live a light and joyful life and are willing to work for it, be sure to check out this book, The Miracle of Positive Thinking.

On the subject of how to deal with life's endless situations and the anxiety within us. I recommend that you study this book, "The Miracle of Positive Thinking", this book is particularly helpful to me, since I read this book, I found that I have become a lot more calm in my life, this is not through a simple what we call grinding can be produced, there is a method, and this method is not mastered, then you will never know how to face their negative emotions.

The core of this book is, what is the biggest miracle in life, it is not that you are able to fly through the clouds, it is not that you are able to run through fire, it is that you are able to exhale a breath every day and still be able to inhale it in. One breath out and you can still breathe in. This way your body will run, you can live as a person, when you can focus on their own breath between one inhalation, so that you are aware of the condition of their own body, this state is called positive thinking, this is the most important miracle of life, when you mastered this miracle of positive thinking, you will find that in fact, in the world of all sorts of negative emotions that bother us, just some superficial things.

Buddhism often say that this thing is empty, many young people do not understand what is empty, empty is not ah, but I really angry ah, in fact, Buddhism inside the empty is not no, this is called practice is not self-explanatory, the so-called law is not self-explanatory is the phenomena of the world of all phenomena are generated by the karma and the combination of no independent and unchanging body. For example, this table must be a table? At this moment, he is a table because of karmic harmony, but in two years, his karmic harmony dissipates, he is chopped into firewood, burned into ashes and thrown into the grass, and grows into a plant or is eaten by an animal and grows into an animal, and then he becomes another state of being, which is called the law of no self-nature. If you can penetrate the surrounding external where these things are empty, is no self-nature, you find that the only real thing you can pay attention to is the heart of your mind, observe him, he will naturally gradually dissipate.

The author of this book is Zen Master Yixing, a Vietnamese man who stayed in France and traveled throughout Europe and the United States between the wars, calling for an end to the wars. The following two stories are from Zen Master One Line's book:

The cup in your hand

In the United States, I had a man named Jim Forest. In the United States, I have a close friend named Jim Forest, who worked for the Catholic Peace Fellowship when I first met him eight years ago. Last winter, Jim came to visit me. I usually do the dishes after dinner and then sit down and have a cup of tea with everyone. One night Jim said he could do the dishes and I said, "Sure, but if you're going to do the dishes, you need to know how to do them." Jim replied, "Come on, you think I don't know how to do the dishes?"

I replied, "There are two ways to wash dishes. The first is to wash the dishes for the sake of getting them clean, and the second is to wash the dishes for the sake of washing them." Jim happily said, "I'll go with the second - washing the dishes for the sake of washing the dishes." From then on, Jim knew how to do the dishes. I gave him that "responsibility" for a whole week.

If, while doing the dishes, we think only of the next cup of tea, and therefore rush through them as if they were an abomination, then we are not doing the dishes 'for the sake of doing the dishes'. To take it a step further is to say that when we wash the dishes we are not living in the present moment at all; we are standing in front of the sink, completely incapable of experiencing the miracle of life

.

If we don't know how to do the dishes, we probably don't know how to drink tea either: and while we are drinking tea, we are only thinking about something else, and are hardly aware of the cup of tea in our hands. In this way we are being sucked away from the future - not being able to live realistically, not even for a minute.

Eating an Orange

I remember a few years ago, when Jim and I first traveled to the United States together, we were sitting under a tree sharing an orange. He started talking about what we were going to do in the future. As soon as we talked about an appealing or exciting plan, Jim got so y involved that he completely forgot what he was doing in the moment. He threw a petal of orange into his mouth and was ready to throw another petal into his mouth before he even started chewing. He barely realized he was eating an orange. I also had to tell him, "You should eat the orange you already have in your mouth first." It took Jim a moment to realize what he was doing.

It was like he wasn't eating the orange at all. If he was eating anything, he was 'eating' his future plans.

An orange has many petals. If you know how to eat one petal well, you probably know how to eat a whole orange. But if you can't even eat a petal, then you can't eat an orange at all. Jim understood. He slowly dropped his head and focused on the slice of orange that was already in his mouth. He chewed it carefully before reaching for another.

Later, when Jim was imprisoned for his anti-war activism, and I was worried about his ability to tolerate the four walls of his prison confinement, I wrote him a text message, "Remember the orange we shared? Your life there was like that orange. Eat it and be one with it. Don't worry about what tomorrow brings."

The above story about washing the dishes and eating the orange, in fact, when you know that right mindfulness means retaining awareness of the reality of the present moment, every moment of life becomes an opportunity for you to practice, not just when you are meditating.

When you are walking along a country road or a boulevard, or even under the hot sun, you can be aware of the seedlings, the green trees, or the sunlight around you, and know that you are walking mindfully at the moment. Instead of the body walking and the mind hanging on to something else. It is not a real miracle to be able to ride on clouds or walk on fire, the real miracle is to walk on the earth, and when you can become one with the walking, that is the miracle.

So how do we practice right mindfulness? The answer from a Zen master is to focus on your work, to stay alert and awake, to be ready to respond to any situation that may arise, to improvise. This is right mindfulness. Separating work from practice is difficult to achieve, and that is not a good way to think about practice. Wang Yangming once wrote a letter to his student to teach him a lesson, saying, "Why did I ever say to you that you should dedicate a time to practice? Isn't the daily breaking of a case a practice of one's own mind?

When we are angry, we ourselves are anger itself; when we are happy, we ourselves are happiness itself. We are in time our own mind and the observer of our mind. So the important thing is not to repel or cling to any thought, the important thing is to be aware of that thought. A scattered mind is still a mind, just as a wave is still water. When the mind looks after itself, the confused mind becomes the real mind. The true mind is the Self, which is the Buddha. As the saying goes, the clear mind sees the nature.

I like to walk alone on country paths lined with rice crops and weeds. I take each step in right mindfulness, sensing that I am walking on this incredible earth. In moments like these, existence itself is an amazing miracle. Generally speaking, people think that walking on water or in the air is what is called a 'miracle', but I feel

that the real miracle is not walking on water or in the air, but walking on the earth.

Every day, we are in the midst of wonders we don't even recognize: blue skies, snow-white clouds, turquoise leaves, the curious black eyes of a child - our own eyes.

Everything is a miracle.

Fanden reads The Miracle of Positive Thinking, Version 2

We read books to solve problems, and this book teaches us how to face the endless situations in our lives and the problems of our inner anxieties.

After I finished reading this book, I felt much lighter inside and it helped me to a great extent to control my emotional problems.

What do you do when you have negative emotions? This book can give us what methods to help us soothe all kinds of negative emotions~

The core sentence of the book "The Miracle of Positive Thinking" is what is the biggest miracle in life? It's not being able to ride the clouds or step on a wind turbine, but rather, it's being able to focus on your breath every day, which is the state of positive thinking.

Buddha said: "Everything is empty", "empty" is not nothing, the core is the law has no self-nature. The core of this is that there is no self-existence in the law. There is no definite nature of each thing, and the state will change. A table is a table at the moment when karma is in harmony, but after a few years, the karma dissipates and it becomes a pile of wood, which is burned to ashes as fertilizer and exists in a different state. And a person, at this point in time, karma and harmony is a person, but after a number of years it is possible to become ashes, a ghost or an immortal. So we will find that everything around us is empty, and the only thing we can focus on is our own mind at this moment, and then observe it, and it will naturally dissipate.

So let's start following the vein of this book~

The author of this book is Zen Master Yixing, a Vietnamese, who traveled around France and the United States during the Vietnam War, calling for peace and truce, and founded the "Plum Village" in France. He accepts visitors from all over the world who want to practice right mindfulness.

This book is a long letter written by Zen Master Yixing to a friend. It does not elaborate on the theory of Buddhism, but from this letter alone, we have learned what is meant by right mindfulness, and why right mindfulness is a miracle.

The book opens with a scene: a young man who had been practicing with a Zen master gets married and finds that he has to work, take care of his wife's moods, change the children's diapers,, and has less time for his own practice. He then tries to apply the practice of right mindfulness to his life, and realizes that being with his wife and his children is also his time. There is no such thing as your time or my time. When you spend time with your children, you always think that your work is not done yet, and it doesn't help you solve the problem of children and work, but rather, it is more painful and anxious, so when you spend time with your children, focus on spending time with your children, and when you are working, work well, and always keep your positive thoughts, so that you can keep your thoughts focusing on the things in the present moment.

The conversation turned to the example of washing dishes.

Many people feel that washing dishes is not an easy thing to do, especially when your friends are waiting for you to play mahjong or drink tea with them. The old thought of washing quickly to do other things,

How is the correct dishwashing?

Keeping the right mindfulness means that when we wash the dishes, we should just wash the dishes, that is to say, when we wash the dishes, we should keep a full awareness of the fact that we are washing the dishes. In the moment of washing the dishes, I am my complete self, following my own breath and being aware of my thoughts and movements. This is right mindfulness, and this is the miracle of right mindfulness.

If all we think about while doing the dishes is the cup of tea we are going to drink next, or the need to hurry up and join our friends in a conversation or? or a game, or watching a favorite TV show, if you will be in a hurry to rush through the dishes as if washing dishes is a disgusting thing to do, but the process of washing dishes is also a part of your life, and you yourself have created a disgusting thing to do in life. Then we are not washing dishes for the sake of washing dishes. In other words, we are not living in the present moment when we wash the dishes. In fact, we don't experience the miracle of life at all while standing at the sink.

The Middle Kingdom says, "There is no one who does not eat and drink, but few who know taste." We eat every day but few people feel the flavor of it, the meal comes up what we think, think: "After eating where we go, to do what?" We think, "Eat quickly, don't delay things," or take a picture and tweet it to our friends first, without really experiencing the flavor of the food. Practicing mindfulness even requires us to feel the flavor of every bite of food.

And how does practicing mindfulness really help us?

A Zen master was once eating an orange with one of his students, Jim, and Jim didn't finish the piece in his mouth before he went to break off the next piece, and a line of the Zen master said, "You should have eaten the orange in your mouth first." Only then did Jim realize that he was not in a state of right mindfulness. Focusing on eating each petal of the orange is the only way to really know how to eat an orange.

Later when Jim was imprisoned for being anti-war, the Zen master wrote him a letter, "Remember that orange we ate together? Your life there was like that orange, eat it and become one with it. Tomorrow everything will pass." Is there a difference between sitting in prison and sitting at home? There is, because there is no freedom sitting in prison right? You cannot go where you want to go, you feel bound, so inside you feel miserable. But there is no difference in this action of sitting, because when you sit in prison your positive thoughts run away and you yearn for the outside world, that's why you suffer inside. Feeling the present moment and understanding the state of this moment is the miracle of right mindfulness.

The Miracle of Positive Thinking brings us to the simplest practice, which is to let our mind and body converge into the body and understand the state of the moment when we encounter any problem.

Whether it's washing the dishes, eating an orange, or any other situation in life, when we know that "mindfulness" means "retaining awareness of the reality of the present moment," every moment in life becomes an opportunity for you to practice. Not just during meditation. When you are walking on the road, even when the sun is blazing, you can be aware of the green trees and the sunlight next to you, and you can know that you are walking with a clear mind at the moment. Instead, your body is walking and your mind is thinking about other things. Waiting for a bus, a meeting, a delayed flight, these are all processes in our lives, and it's important to stay mindful and focus on what you're feeling inside.

Well, I think it's hard for individuals to do that, walking with other things on their mind, and it's still hard to control yourself when you're sad, and it's a long way to go to cultivate yourself.

Mr. Fandang met his idol Liu Chuanzhi on the plane, and Liu Chuanzhi was watching "Durarara's Promotion", and Mr. Fandang was reading "Diamond Sutra", and he was curious to ask him why young people are reading this book, and he asked him why he was reading this book, and he said, "I don't want to see this. Look at this book, Mr. Fandang asked: "What do you think is the biggest pain in life?" Liu Chuanzhi said: "A person can never find what they want is the most painful." This is the Buddhist "suffering of not being able to find what you want". And Mr. Fan Deng says that the greatest pain in life is the pain that you don't think you should have. Suppose someone spends 5 million dollars to buy a lottery ticket and only has 2 million dollars left, you won't suffer and you may still find it amusing; do you suffer when someone else falls out of love? If someone else is in pain, you don't feel pain because you think you are different from others and you shouldn't have to bear such pain. How to let this pain as soon as possible to control and then extinguished it, the best way is to keep positive thoughts, when you keep positive thoughts, you will understand that this is just an experience, to be able to feel the existence of this moment I feel elsewhere I am the same thing.

When you know that right mindfulness is retaining awareness of the reality of the present moment, and that it can be practiced at all times in life, not just in Zen.

The "unity of knowledge and action" in Wang Yangming's Transepts is not what we routinely understand by the words and actions or the first? Or is it the latter? Mr. Fandang interprets the core of this word as your thoughts not running when you are doing something. Your mind is focused on what you are doing.

If we sometimes play with our cell phones while walking and playing WeChat, we will feel very tired because we are distracted and do not know what we are doing.

One of Wang Yangming's students, who was a high-ranking administrative official, complained to Wang Yangming that he did not have time to practice, that he was busy with mundane matters, and that he often had to deal with work. Wang Yangming replied to him, "When did I tell you that you need to find a special time to practice? When someone wants to win a lawsuit to give you money, you do not, practice their own do not be greedy, when a person is talking about talking unclear, you can not be annoyed, this is in the practice of your patience, when the case is complex and you can find out the clues, you can practice their own discernment of the heart. So all the time you can practice.

Our reading is just a method, and practicing also depends on our own creation and refinement. A line of Zen masters give us how to cultivate positive thinking method, the answer is first of all to focus on the work.

When we are working, we always think of eating, and think: "Why don't you get off work, I'm in a hurry." Once we have this kind of thought, we will feel anxious and painful. So all suffering comes from the separate mind. We sometimes see people in our WeChat circle say, "Today is Monday again, so painful," "I still have to add three days to the vacation," in fact, the vacation is not necessarily happy, vacation and the object of the fight, a good vacation is blown,, every thing is not of self-nature, is pain or pleasure, but rather stems from the definition given to it by one's own separate mind. Experience the feeling of going to class and going to work, because this is the day we are destined to be here in life, whether it is pleasure or pain, so enjoy going to work and put your whole heart and soul into it. If you go to work, you go to work, and if you go home or on vacation, you go to rest.

Going back to the first trick that Zen master Yogi gave us to practice: focus on your work. Stay alert and awake at all times, ready to respond to situations that may arise, and then improvise. This is to keep positive thoughts.

The hardest place to practice is at home, followed by work, followed by the temple. Because there are so many things that break positive thinking at home.

It's hard to separate work and practice.

The specific methods are:

1. Breathe with awareness. Deep breath, deep inhalation, know your own breath, know your own out of breath and counting method, when the later can do freely can not count the breath but focus on the breath.

2, walking, living, sitting and sleeping are Zen, work, eat, wash dishes, chat with friends, always keep positive thoughts.

eg: There was a man who became enlightened, and after a while, his disciple asked him, "Master, what did you do after you became enlightened? Is it different from before?" The master replied, "Hungry to eat, sleepy to sleep." The disciple said, "I eat when I'm hungry and sleep when I'm sleepy, so what's the difference between being enlightened and not being enlightened? The master said, I should eat eat sleep, have what to eat, there is a place to sleep, while you are picky about food and housing is a million choices. This is "the road is not difficult, only the choice of suspicion". Many of us will say, "Is this job better or that job better?" We say, "Is this meal better, or is that meal better?", "There is no other way to learn the Way, but don't be picky. Because you are too picky, there is a great deal of separateness, and suffering arises.

Some people may ask whether life will be boring, uninteresting, and boring after practicing like this. As we say, "the middle way", the middle way is not boring, make do with things, almost, but refers to the appropriate extreme. Confucius never reached that level in his life, nor did he ever see anyone reach that level. When we cultivate to the undifferentiated mind, there are a lot of things we can pursue in life.

Why do we feel that we should pursue money, power, this is because of social inertia, we are manipulated by social inertia, always feel that "other people have a car, have a big house," I also want to have a car house, no, it will be very painful, this is all because we are in the way of social inertia. This is because the social inertia pulls you to run, so you can't face the inner self.

What is the real freedom, the real freedom is not to do whatever you want, a person to do whatever you want is the most unfree. Have we ever done something crazy and then wondered why, and then felt remorseful that we shouldn't have said what we did, or hit someone? Because that's us being controlled by our emotions, being slaves to them. And for us to be masters of our emotions, we need to mobilize our positive thoughts.

The practice of positive thinking, is the introduction to Buddhism, let go of everything, will find that everything is empty, are all appearances, there is no self-nature, a bad thing in a number of years and then look at it may be a good thing, and when the bad thing happened when we are immensely painful inside.

So try to practice our positive thoughts, give yourself a "positive thought day", one day a week to practice positive thoughts, this day every moment to remind themselves to keep positive thoughts, get up in the morning, brush your teeth, eat, angry - tell yourself. "I am angry at this moment", how to quickly do not get angry, is to know the person who makes himself angry, in front of the mirror, staring at the mirror in the angry person, said "this person is angry", the angry person will not be angry ~ if there is no observer, let the angry emotions If you don't have this observer, and you let the emotion of anger drive the anger, the emotion will never stop.

Facing our pain and taking care of it. Positive and negative emotions need to be taken care of because they both say they are part of our life and these emotions become more and more knowledgeable. You can't hold them in, you will hold them in.

We always think we are different from others, but everyone is the same and what others can suffer, I can too.

Socrates, when sentenced to death, said, "I now go to death and you will live, who is more unfortunate only God knows." In his view, there was not much difference between dying and living.

The author is a get high monk, so the second half of the book describes a height that ordinary people can hardly reach. Mr. Fandeng said that a passage in it is particularly good (but I may not be in a high realm, not very able to understand the deep meaning Orz): If one looks at the reality from a Buddhist perspective, you will become pessimistic, pessimism or optimism are too simplified the truth, the focus is on the way the reality is really presented, pessimism will never allow a peaceful smile to blossom, and that's the smile that floats on the face of the Bodhisattvas and other rightful persons, which is the true peaceful smile. is the smile of true tranquility. The most important thing is to maintain a state of right mindfulness, and with no separate mind, there is no such thing as pessimism or optimism.

And how to control our negative emotions? Whenever a good thought rises, cognize that a good thought has risen in my heart, when an evil thought rises, cognize that an evil thought has risen in my heart, no matter how much you dislike it, don't cling to it, try to eliminate it, to cognize it is enough, and if you have left the positive thoughts, you must also know that the left, and keep it also cognize that the positive thoughts are still there.

As Western psychology defines "I", "I am my observer". When you find my observer, you are practicing your own mindfulness, and we usually remove our observer. That's why Zen will sometimes give you a head start: "Where is the master?" ? Is it you who is the master within you?

When there is a problem that you can't solve, do what you can do first, put your heart at ease, and all sorts of other things will be done.

When the separate mind rises, know that you have a separate mind, the separate mind is weakened~

Finally, we may be difficult to maintain the miracle of positive thinking, but the practice itself is a fun thing, fun also because it is not easy, the realm is too high, can not be reached to be fun, if a thing casually get, it is not worth anything, too easy to be no fun.

Life, no matter what you do, work, study, life, as the process of cultivation, and can always experience their own difficulties and frustrations encountered in the process of cultivation, experience it and care for it, observe it in progress or regression, the process itself, but also the miracle of positive thinking.