Search results for: "Form"
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- Passion, Dispassion, Compassion… Then there’s dispassion for form and for formlessness. In other words, once you’ve mastered jhana, then you develop dispassion for it. It sounds kind of sad, doesn’t it? You master it and then you’re no longer obsessed with it. You have to go beyond it. People don’t like to hear that, or think about the implications of dispassion. It …
- Twigs & Branches… Form is the sense of the body as you feel it from within—in other words, your experience of the body that no one else can share. “Form” also refers to how the body looks. That’s something you do share with other people. But the Buddha wants you to be more interested in how you feel it from within. That’s the part …
- Wearing the Breath… You’re going to miss an important step in the meditation, which is to see thoughts as they arise and catch them when they’re still in the process of forming. At that point, they haven’t turned into becomings yet. A becoming is a world in the mind. You have a desire, and then a world forms around it—the world where that …
- Construction Techniques… But it’s pretty much one note: “It’s like this, like this, like this.” All the other forms of fabrication go underground. The problem is, they’re already done in ignorance, which is why we suffer. And denying that you’re doing them just adds more ignorance and more suffering on top. So you need a technique that allows you to be more …
- Meaning & Importance… As the Buddha says, we take the potentials for form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness, and we fabricate them into actual forms, feelings, etc., for the sake of something. Usually for the sake of happiness, which means that every present moment has a for-the-sake-of in it. It’s moving in a direction. It’s a means to an end. That’s …
- The Path is Fabricated… It’s had enough of a particular type of activity; enough of fabrication - so it lets it go, in whatever form. And that includes even the highest form of fabricated Dhamma, which is the path. But in the meantime, before we let go of the path, we have to develop it—to fabricate it well. It’s important to keep this in mind as …
- Tuning Your Lute… One of them is that on the days when you don’t have much time to practice, you put a lot of emphasis on at least getting your form right. It’s the same when you’re sitting and meditating and you only have a short period of time. You want to be really careful about the posture of your body. And think about …
- 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 …
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