Search results for: "Form"
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- The Brightness of Life… If you get yourself into an unskillful state of becoming, they tell you how to get out by giving you some clues as to how becomings are formed: They’re formed through fabrication. You can look at fabrication in terms of the five aggregates. You can look at it in terms of the three kinds of fabrication that are listed in dependent co-arising …
- The Skill of Restraint… Instead of being on the sensual level, it’s suddenly on the level of form, which is a higher level than the level of sensual desire. Even though there may be the desire to stay here at the level of form, it’s a skillful desire because it raises the level of the mind. You’re not so dependent on things outside for your …
- The Core of Experience… There are forms of happiness that don’t simply come and go in an instant. And third, long-term is better than short-term. The Buddha’s question here underlies the practice of what’s called merit: doing good things, being generous, being virtuous, having the restraint of goodwill for everybody. It’s interesting that goodwill is regarded as a restraint. It basically holds …
- Disenchantment… We’ve been eating form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, and consciousness. This is a lot of what clinging means. It means feeding and taking our sustenance off these things. But if you look at the raw materials and you think of what kind of happiness you’re trying to build out of them, you realize you’ve set yourself up for a fall. The …
- Skillful Distress… It’s meant to encourage you that there is a way out, and that the people who’ve followed the way out had qualities you have in a potential form. As the Buddha said, heedfulness, ardency, resolution: Those are the qualities he developed. You look at the texts and you see other people who were able to develop them as well. You know people …
- Recollecting the Buddha… It’s a form of conceit, but it’s conceit that’s useful on the path. As he said, “We practice to overcome conceit, but we need at least this much conceit that we feel that they’re human beings, you’re a human being; they can do it, you can do it, too.” The Buddha himself encourages a similar form of conceit when …
- A Goal Without Limits… So when the Buddha says that there’s no name or form in anidassana consciousness, he’s talking about nibbāna, because that’s where there’s no experience of name and form. Consciousness without surface is a type of consciousness but it’s not like the consciousness of the six senses, which depends on objects. This has no objects. The consciousness of the six …
- Explore & Experiment… When the Buddha talks about the causes of suffering, there’s one way in which he expresses dependent co-arising that goes down to consciousness on one side, and name-&-form on the other side. Nāma-rūpa is the Pali. Form, of course, is the four elements or properties. Name covers, among other things, acts of intention, attention, and perception. If you’re ignorant …
- Frustrated Desires… Sometimes you hear that that kind of thinking just creates one more form of self, and it does, but it’s a useful form of self to be the meditator. Ask yourself, when something comes up in the mind: What would a skillful meditator do with this? Try to use your ingenuity for getting around old habits, old patterns in the mind, so that …
- Samvega First… The state of concentration is a form of becoming as well, but it’s a form of becoming that can be part of the path. So here we are, in a good place. And even though the path may seem long, it’s better to be on this path than to be on other paths that wander around aimlessly, not knowing where you’re …
- Consciousness, Awakened & Not… And you have to be sensitive not only to the fact that actions have results, but also to whatever harm you’re causing, either gross harm or more subtle forms of harm, through what you do in body, speech, and mind. In fact, the path is one of getting more and more sensitive to the subtleties of where you’re causing unnecessary stress, unnecessary …
- Question Your Actions… You’ve got form—the form of the body. That’s not just the shape of the body, but also what the Buddha calls the dhātu, the properties or the elements of the body. The ways in which you provoke those properties can make you really irritable. When you get angry, you breathe in a certain way, and it’s become habitual. It builds …
- Food, Shelter & Work… But he left behind a lot of things for us in the form of his teachings. In fact, he was the one who thought up the idea of having a monastery here in the first place. It’s good to think about Ajaan Suwat’s teachings. And one of them was this: We’re trying to create a home for the mind here, a …
- The Unity of the Path… The happiness of concentration is said to be a happiness of form or pleasure of form, i.e., the body as you sense it from within. It’s only when you have this kind of pleasure, this kind of refreshment, that you really can learn how to go beyond your sensual concerns. As the Buddha said, if you don’t have this higher form …
- The Battle of Your Selves… You’ve got the form sitting here, the form of your body as you feel it from within. The breath, in particular, as you feel it as it goes through the body. That’s form, the first aggregate. The second aggregate is feeling. There may be feelings of irritation here, pain there, pleasure here, there. You want to focus on the pleasure. And in …
- The Second Noble Truth… This can happen on the level of sensuality, or sensual desires; or on the level of what they call form desire: the desire to stay in a form—like what we’re doing right now. As we stay with the sensation of the breath, we’re inhabiting the body from the inside: That’s called form. Another level of becoming is on the formless …
- Skillful Attachments… Not every form of attachment, not every form of desire is a problem. There are skillful attachments and unskillful ones. Ajaan Maha Boowa gives the analogy of climbing a ladder. Before you let go of a lower rung, you have to hold on to a higher rung. Once you’re holding on firmly there, then you can let go of the lower rung and …
- Greed for Outer & Inner Wealth… Conviction is a form of inner wealth. A healthy sense of shame and compunction: Those are both forms of inner wealth. Shame here is not the opposite of pride. It’s the opposite of shamelessness. It’s the realization that certain types of behavior are beneath you, and you wouldn’t want to stoop to them. That’s a form of wealth. Compunction is …
- Questioning Your Conviction… In his second sermon, he asked the monks: “Can you say, ‘May my form be thus. May feelings be thus. May they not be thus’?” The same with perceptions, thought-fabrications, consciousness: In each case, the five brethren said No. **So which is it? Can you do things, or can you not do things with these aggregates? Well, you can do some things. And …
- Things as They Function… You want to learn how to see them as they’re forming and stop them. By stopping them, one, you keep your original intention intact. And two, as you get quicker and quicker at stopping them, you begin to see the stages, the steps by which a thought world develops around a desire that forms the kernel, the nucleus. But you also see that …
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