Thanissaro Bhikkhu:

When we think about karma, we tend to think about things you did in a past lifetime that are totally unknown, and they just come in and smack you up against the head without any warning. But that’s not how the Buddha taught it. He taught it more as a process by which we can shape our experience right here, right now, and learn how not to suffer from good or bad things that are coming up.

From: The Lessons of Equanimity by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Thanissaro Bhikkhu:

...one of the central features of the Buddha's strategy as a teacher was that even though his primary focus was on the mind, he nowhere defined what the mind is. As he said, if you define yourself, you limit yourself. So instead he focused his assumptions on what the mind can do.
From: Freedom From Buddha Nature by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Thanissaro Bhikkhu:

I read somebody complaining that they had seen a passage where someone had said that jhana is necessary for awakening, and he said, “No, that can’t be the case. My teacher says you see your defilements most clearly when they’re really strong: strong lust, strong anger. That’s when you’re going to gain awakening.” That’s what he said, but where are you in relation to that anger, where are you in relation to that lust when you’ve allowed these things to grow strong? When they stir up the mind, you can’t see things clearly. There has to be at least part of the mind that’s standing very still and watching whatever is happening, not the least bit stirred by those things. Otherwise you just slip along with them, accepting this as the normal way of the mind.
From: Accepting the Buddha's Standards by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Thanissaro Bhikkhu:

There’s a lot to be covered in training the mind. It’s not just a matter of mastering one single technique. I was once asked the question, “How does someone who’s mastered meditation overcome the problem of pride?” After all, you’ve been able to master this technique; you’re pretty sharp. Well, that happens mainly in places where everything is reduced to *a* meditation technique, in meditation centers where the people who meditate don’t have anything else to do. Everything gets channeled into that one shoot at the end of the banana tree. Things may happen fast, but there’s no shade. It’s an incomplete training.

The complete training has to go all around. It has to deal with the way you treat other people, how you handle difficult situations. Your whole life is part of the training, and in the course of the whole-life aspect of the training, you need to learn how to see how you’ve been sloppy, how you’ve been stupid, how you’ve been ignorant, how you’ve been thoughtless and careless. If you don’t see those things, you’re not going to learn anything. The experience is chastening instead of pride-inducing. When the training is complete, every aspect of the mind has been trained, so that you’re skilled at all kinds of activities, with an attitude nicely balanced between humility and pride.

From: Cleanliness is Next to Mindfulness by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Thanissaro Bhikkhu:

The stronger the sense of oneness, the further and further away the hindrances go. They may nibble at the edges of your awareness here and there, but you really don't have to pay them any attention. You don't have to chase them away. If you chase them away, you drop the breath and they've got you. So you don't want them to trick you in that way. Whatever thought comes passing by, just let it go passing by. But the greater the sense of unity or unification here, the less the hindrances are going to be a problem. That right there is enough to get you solidly based.
From: The Four Jhanas by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Thanissaro Bhikkhu:

People often come to the Dhamma thinking that we're here to get beyond concepts. But they run into concepts in the Buddha's teachings, and therefore they feel that the Buddha's being inconsistent. What's inconsistent, though, is their misunderstanding. The Buddha never says that we have to drop concepts from the very beginning. He says you use concepts to get beyond concepts.

Many people in the modern world come to Buddhism suffering from their conceptual framework. They're raised in a materialist worldview whose basic concepts — that life comes from nothing and returns to nothing, with a brief chance to pursue pleasure in the interim — are pretty dismal. They believe that if they could free their minds from these concepts and simply dwell in the present with no thought of what happens at the end, they'd be happy. They'd be able to squeeze as much pleasure out of the present as they could before the inevitable hits.

So they look for a way to be free of all concepts. When they come here, though, they run into concepts. They see the Buddha's teachings on kamma and rebirth, and they say, "This is invalid; you can't make presuppositions about these things. Nobody knows anything about what happens before we're born. Nobody knows anything about what happens after we die. Doesn't the Buddha say that you have to prove things before you can accept them? All we know is that you can blot these issues out of the mind and be in the present moment without any concepts, and that's happiness." So that's what they want the Buddha's teachings to be. They don't realize that they're judging the Buddha's teachings by the very concepts that are making them miserable. The idea that we can't know beyond our immediate sensory experience, so therefore we just try to heighten our immediate sensory experience: That's a concept itself, and although it may aim at going beyond concepts, it doesn't really get you there. The Buddha's concepts, though, actually give results. They're very open about the fact that you have to use concepts to get beyond concepts, and their idea of what's there when the path has freed you from concepts is more than just a pleasant oblivion in the present. It's another dimension entirely.
From: The Raft of Concepts by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Thanissaro Bhikkhu:

People like to think of interconnectedness as light reflected in multiple mirrors, or light-beams going from one jewel to another in Indra’s net: each jewel illuminates and is reflected in the other jewels. These are all pretty images, but that’s not the way interconnectedness functions in the actual world. One animal feeds on another. One person feeds emotionally on somebody else.

When the early Buddhist texts teach causality to young novices, they start with a simple fact: All life depends on feeding. So interconnectedness is not simply light-beams going from one person to another. It’s a process of feeding — which is not always a pretty process.
From: Interconnectedness by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Thanissaro Bhikkhu:

When you focus on breathing, it’s not just the air coming in and out of the lungs. It’s a sensation of energy that flows through the whole body, and you’re sitting in the middle of this vast breathing process that affects every nerve, every muscle. The whole experience of your body is related to the breath. The more you can perceive the breath in that way, the easier it is to settle down. And the easier it is to stay settled down, working on what the Buddha calls the enlarged mind — mahaggatam cittam — an awareness that’s all around. That kind of awareness is what allows you to see things for what they are. It’s the foundation for the vipassana side of jhana practice. In other words, the Buddha doesn’t say to stop doing jhana in order to start doing vipassana. He just says to learn how to look at the jhana in a different way, as a process of fabrication, how it’s put together.
From: Things as They've Come to Be by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Thanissaro Bhikkhu:

....you have a property of awareness larger than everything it knows, that goes deeper than everything it knows. It can encompass everything. Hold that image in mind. And that awareness keeps on knowing regardless of whether the body feels strong, weak, sick, whatever. Ajaan Maha Boowa even advises, at the moment you’re about to die and there’s pain in the body, that you try to get in touch with that sense of awareness and ask yourself: “Which is going to disappear first, the pain or the awareness?” The pain is going to go first. As long as you can keep that perception in mind, it gives you the strength to deal with a lot of things that otherwise you couldn’t bear. You’re less likely to be overwhelmed.
From: Broad, Tall, & Deep by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Thanissaro Bhikkhu:

When the Buddha talks about goodwill, he uses two words to describe it. In one case, he talks about it as a type of right resolve. The word resolve here can also mean intention, a way of thinking that you set your mind on. In the second case, he talks about goodwill as a kind of mindfulness, something you determine to keep in mind.

In neither case is it a feeling. In other words, we’re not asked necessarily to have feelings of warmth or love or even liking for other people. Goodwill is an intention we want to develop: that we’re not going to do harm, and that we would like to see other people act in ways that are not harmful, either toward us, toward other people, or toward themselves. So it’s perfectly normal that there are people out there that you don’t like and yet you can still have intentions of goodwill for them. This is what the mindfulness is for: You keep in mind the principle that regardless of whether you like somebody or not, you will not act in ways that are harmful for them.

This is an important distinction, because many of us know that there are people out there we have grudges against, people we don’t like, and we feel guilty because we don’t like them. We feel somehow that we should feel love and warmth for them instead. One of the reasons for this misunderstanding is a mistranslation of the passage in the sutta we chanted just now that talks about caring for your sense of goodwill in the same way that a mother would care for her only child. Sometimes that’s mistranslated as having a love for all beings in the same way that a mother would love her only child. But that’s impossible. The love you have for your child is very different from the love you would have, say, for someone else in your family, and even more so for other people outside the family, or for people who’ve really wronged you, or people who’ve wronged those you love.

What the Buddha is actually saying here is that you want to look after your goodwill the same way that a mother would look after her only child. Meticulously. Thoroughly. Always keeping it in mind. Sacrificing your life for it, if it comes to that. You’re trying to protect your intentions, because you know that your intentions are even more important than your physical survival. They shape your life now and can shape it far into the future.
From: Feeling & Intention by Thanissaro Bhikkhu