Search results for: "Form"
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- 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 …
- Second Wind… Can you allow the world to form and then not go into it? See what happens. When you go into it, it’s like blowing a bubble and then getting inside the bubble and floating through the ari with it. It’s going to pop someplace, and you fall out. You land someplace else. But here you can watch the bubble go away. And …
- Things as They’ve Come to Be… Which means that when we’re focusing on these immediate forms of bodily, verbal, and mental fabrication right here, right now, we’re at the source of our karma. In dependent co-arising, these things come even prior to intention. But they actually are a form of intention. When you do something with your body, you have to start with the breath. Otherwise your …
- The Strength of Heedfulness… It’s a higher form of pleasure, a subtler, more refined form of pleasure. Then finally, the fact that you’ve been learning how to put this mental state together makes you more aware of the processes of fabrication in the mind. You begin to see that even though this is a greater pleasure than you’ve had before, it still has its drawbacks …
- Knowing & Acting… The Buddha said that right concentration forms the center of the path. There are eight factors all together in the noble path, but right concentration forms the heart. All the other seven factors, he said, are requisites to help look after concentration to give it the right balance, give it the right tone, give it the right level of alertness. The concentration, though, is …
- Smart vs. Wise… But he classed the idea that there is no self as form of wrong view, just as he classed the idea that there is a self as a form of wrong view. He did note, however, that we have a process called “I-making and my-making,” where we keep creating a sense of self. And if you read the texts, that’s one …
- Ignorance… Often the things we like turn out to be forms of suffering, but we’ve desensitized ourselves to the fact. But if we learn how to look carefully, we begin to see how these things we like are really stressful. You want to learn to see them from that perspective so that you can develop a sense of dispassion toward them. Otherwise you just …
- Perceptions of the Breath… From the Buddha’s perspective, that’s “form.” Breath is an aspect of form. In fact, it’s the most important of the various properties that constitute form. There’s earth, water, wind, fire—or solidity, liquidity, energy, warmth. Don’t think of them as foreign concepts. Think of them as a useful way of looking at something you already sense: where the body …
- The Reality of Emotions… Although the happiness of nibbana is not a feeling, every other form of happiness is a feeling, and every feeling is fabricated. This means that all feelings have an intentional element. We put them together for a certain purpose. We want a particular feeling if for nothing else than to establish who we are and what we want. There is a purpose—many times …
- The Power is in Your Hands… name and form, fabrication, ignorance. All these things are happening inside. This system of analysis may sound kind of abstract. And when things are laid out in a line like this, it sounds impersonal. But the Buddha wants you to develop this impersonal perspective on things that are actually very personal right now because we tend to be very attached to the personal things …
- Feeding your Attack Dogs… And you’ve got to be prepared to notice the stirrings in the mind when they’re just an incipient form, so you can catch them in time and reaffirm your intention to stay here with the breath, to enjoy the breath. So you’re dealing with a complex issue: a combination of past karma and present karma. While you’re here, you want …
- Life in the Context of the Practice… After all, each of them is a form of becoming, and every form of becoming involves suffering. If you want to be defined by your culture, that means you want to be defined by your suffering. And you can ask yourself, do you really want that? How about creating a larger context? That larger context is made up of the values of the Dhamma …
- At Play… It’s your opportunity to play with name and form. And because it’s dealing on this level, you get very close to understanding where your ignorance is. You also see the potentials of name and form: what you can do with them. That’s how you develop knowledge—knowledge that you’ve explored on your own. When Ajaan Fuang would teach, even though …
- The Raft… That’s a part of the body, part of “form.” Then there are feelings: the feelings of pleasure you try to create by the way that you look at the breath. There are perceptions—saññā—the images you have in the mind about how the breath comes into the body, where it comes in, where it goes out, where you would like it to …
- 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 …
- Stay with the Knowing… It is a form of becoming, but it’s a useful form of becoming. It allows you to see a lot of things that other forms of becoming don’t. In particular, it pulls you back a little bit from your knee-jerk reactions and especially from the knee-jerk reactions where you’re totally confident that you know what to do—and you …
- Getting the Most Out of the Present… Goodwill, he said, is a form of wealth, as are conviction and a sense of shame—the sense that certain actions are beneath you. That’s a form of wealth. Compunction, the attitude that’s not apathetic about the results of your actions that really does want to do things well; virtue, learning, right-effort: These things are forms of wealth that we develop …
- A Concentration Checklist… Even so, Anuruddha said to the Buddha that he would try to get his mind to stay centered, and he was actually having visions of light and forms, but then they would disappear. He wondered why. The Buddha talked about how he himself, as he was practicing before his awakening, would have visions of light and forms, but then they would disappear. So he …
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