Wise Awareness (​Kumāra Bhikkhu's Blog)

To progress spiritually, we do need to learn how to stop behaving unwisely. However, that is not enough—we also need to learn how to stop thinking unwisely. While unwise physical and verbal conduct can be stopped directly, the same is not true for unwise mental action. Why? Because trying to stop a mental action directly is itself another unwise mental action. Let’s take thoughts of self-criticism as an example. If you try to stop them, that’s another unwise mental action. Doing this is not only unlikely to work, it also causes you to suffer even more. Not clever, is it? So, instead of trying to stop such thoughts, try this: Accept the fact that these thoughts are happening. Regard them as “just thoughts”. Don’t resist them—or at least notice the resisting. When you’re no longer resisting, notice how having those thoughts feels: Are they peaceful or stressful? Imagine: how you would be without these thoughts? Do this every time such thoughts come up, and their st...

(Written in 2013, re-edited in 2026) At the feedback session of a course I conducted in 2011, a participant commented that I had “changed a lot”. He told the audience that when he first met me in 2007, he found me quite snobbish. In my mind, that was one of the best compliments I had ever received, and it still is. There were other nice things that he said about me, but that first comment had already made my day.  No doubt, I had been rather snobbish, although it didn’t seem so to me then. Whenever I think of this, I feel grateful for the change that has happened. I sometimes also feel a bit strange; the person that I was seems so remote now. “Snobbish” was what that man thought of me back then. I think he was being kind. “Arrogant” would have been more accurate. That’s the word my teacher, Bhante Aggacitta, used used to describe me. He said it many times, yet I couldn’t see how I was so. Perhaps it was impossible for me to see it, because I had ‘become’ it. Just as the eye can’t s...