Search results for: "consciousness"
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- Ultimate Reality… One is that it is a kind of consciousness. You don’t blank out. Two, it’s pleasant, the ultimate pleasure. Three, it’s true, it doesn’t change. Four, it’s freedom. In fact, that’s what “nibbāna” means: unbinding, total freedom. We live in this sense of ourselves, inhabiting this body, inhabiting this mind. We’re trapped in our inner world here …
- In the Context of the Deathless… There’s consciousness, your awareness of these activities. Even though these concentration aggregates ultimately will show that they, too, are inconstant, stressful, and not-self, you’re trying to fight against those characteristics for the time being. Try to make your concentration as constant as you can. Make your mindfulness, your alertness, your ardency as constant as you can so that you can give …
- Overcoming Complacency… And so on with perception and consciousness as well. An act of creating that’s going on all the time. And then, on top of that, once we have those aggregates, once they’re present to our awareness, we can create our sense of self out of them: “I’m this. I’m that.” And our sense of self will change over time. But …
- Putting out the Flame… Attachment to form, feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, consciousness: Wherever there’s attachment, there’s going to be a being. You’ve taken on the identity of being a being through your attachments. But by taking those attachments apart, you go beyond being a being. When you’re a being, you have to feed. Just as a fire feeds off the wind, you’re going …
- The Basic Pattern… All too often, when people reach, say, a sense of infinite consciousness, they slip off and identify with the infinite consciousness as their “true being” or the “ground of being” from which all things come, and to which they all return. They make all sorts of assumptions based on that perception. Or they can go into the state of non-perception, where there’s …
- Doing Aggregates… That’s the mind’s discussion of what’s going on, and consciousness is your awareness of all these things. You can see that when the mind slips off, it’s engaging in perceptions and thought fabrication. There’s usually a feeling. When you’re here with the concentration, you’re adding the form of the body as an anchor. But still, there’s …
- Control… Forms arise, but they have to pass away; the same for feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness. You can’t always say, “I want my body to be like this. I want my feelings to be like that,” and expect them to be that way. Simply telling them to do things doesn’t necessarily make them do it. You can tell the body not to …
- Fabricating against Defilement… Find where the breath has been changed by that emotion, and consciously breathe in a different way. It doesn’t necessarily make the emotion go away, but it does weaken it. It also gives you a place to stand. You can stand in a much more comfortable sense of the body and look at the anger, look at the lust for what it really …
- Self-hatred… passion for form, the form of the body as you feel it from within as you’re practicing concentration; passion for formlessness, the formless states—the dimensions of infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness; restlessness, wanting to make progress; and conceit, the sense of “I am,” that “I’m responsible for doing this. I can do this. I will benefit from doing this. I can …
- Marshalling the Emotions… As long as you’re controlling the breath anyway, try to do it consciously, skillfully. And what is it that controls the breath? There’s an intention and there’s a perception. Can you be clear about your intentions and perceptions? Can you change your intention to be more sensitive to what the breath really needs? Can you change your perception of the breath …
- Empathetic Joy… You see this much more clearly when you consciously shape things, when you experiment with your perceptions. Take your perceptions about the breath: When it comes in, where is it coming in? We know that the air is coming in and out of the nose, but what about the other sensations in the body that don’t correspond with what we’ve been told …
- Inner Strength, Inner Wealth… There’s form, feeling, perception, fabrications and consciousness. You can probably think of lots of other ways of dividing up the activities of the mind. But these five are especially relevant to the way you feed, both physically and emotionally, intellectually. Form would be, on the one hand, the form of your own body, which you need to keep going. Then there’s the …
- To Comprehend Suffering… These are the activities of form, feelings, perceptions, thought-fabrications, and consciousness. But theimportant word there is the clinging, because there are places where he says that the aggregates on their own are experienced by arahants. Arahants have form, feelings, perceptions, thought-fabrications, consciousness, but they don’t suffer, because they don’t have the clinging. So, the first noble truth: To comprehend dukkha …
- Dhamma for Laypeople… And he gets to the last item in the list, where he recommends training oneself, “My consciousness will not be attached to consciousness.” And Anathapindika starts to cry. Ananda’s concerned that Anathapindika is losing his grip, but Anathapindika says, “No. It’s just that for all these many years I have been visiting the Buddha, and he never mentioned anything like this.” Sariputta …
- Deconstruction… clinging to the aggregates of form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, and consciousness. The clinging is in the desire and passion you have for those things. The suffering is the clinging-aggregates altogether. Think of this in terms of the image of feeding. You’re hungry: That’s the craving; that’s the desire and passion. You find something you want to eat, so you …
- Concentration that Bears Great Fruit… As the Buddha said, consciousness doesn’t have to depend on the body; it depends simply on fabrication and craving. It can find a new body that way. The question is, how does it go from here to there? Actually, consciousness never leaves “here.” It’s always “here.” It’s just the question of which body is “here” right now for you. It’s …
- Discernment: Commit & Reflect… Consciously be more generous, consciously be stricter with yourself about the precepts, and notice what happens. If you’re going to be stricter about the precepts, you find you’re more careful. If you’re more generous, you find there’s a good quality—a spacious, wide-open quality—that develops in the mind. The lessons you’ve learned there then give you a …
- Using What You’ve Got… You’ve got the body, you’ve got feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, and consciousness. For the most part, we tend to carry these things around like baggage. The trick is to convert them into the path. So what have we got? We’ve got the breath: That’s the main factor in the body, so focus on that. Then you notice that there are …
- How Much Concentration Is Enough?… Feeling feels, perception perceives, fabrications fabricate, and consciousness cognizes. Even form, the Buddha says, is a type of activity: It’s constantly de-forming. All of these things are present right here. The form, of course, is the breath. The feeling is the sense of ease you try to create with the breath—and you learn a lot about creating feelings. Feelings don’t …
- Not Siding with the Hindrances… You have to consciously sew one moment of alertness to the next one, to the next one, to the next one, if there’s going to be any continuity at all. Partly it’s a matter of interest: If you find something really interesting, you tend to find it easy to sew things together. So that’s where the second issue comes in, interest …
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