Search results for: "consciousness"
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- An Inside Job… And if you don’t work on those skills, do you really love yourself? Do you love the people around you? If you consciously do something you know is going to give you a little bit of pleasure right now but a lot of suffering down the line, why do it? Look into your sense of self. What’s unconnected there? What’s lacking …
- Appropriate Attention… It could be about your body, it could be about your feelings, the images you have in mind, the thoughts with which you talk to yourself, or even just your consciousness. As you cling to these things, that’s suffering. The clinging can be divided into the act of passion and desire, which is craving itself, and the fact that it’s latched on …
- Focus on Your Intention… Form deforms, feelings feel, perceptions perceive, fabrications fabricate, and consciousness cognizes—the point being that these are activities. The word “aggregate” has an unfortunate connotation. It sounds like gravel, little bits and pieces of rock. The aggregates probably got that name in English from a convention in early modern European philosophy which said that groups of things were either systems or aggregates. Systems were …
- Feeding on the Breath… sensory contact, sensory consciousness, and what are called the intentions of the intellect, in other words the thoughts and intentions you churn out. As we sit here meditating, there’s not much new in terms of sensory contact or sensory consciousness, so the mind’s going to churn out a lot of intentions until you give it something better to feed on. This is …
- Patience & Consistency… Now, there are ways that you can induce extreme experiences in the mind either consciously or unconsciously, but that’s not the point of the meditation. You’re trying to develop mind states that you can watch over periods of time so that you can understand: How does a mind state form? How do skillful states form? How do unskillful states form? In the …
- Mental Movements… clinging to your body or forms of any kind; clinging to feelings, perceptions, thought-constructs, consciousness. There’s clinging only when there’s craving. So, these are the issues we have to watch out for. He says suffering is something you have to learn how to comprehend: understand why it’s happening, how it’s happening. To do that, you have to get the …
- Clinging to Karmic Diarrhea… The concentration we’re doing right now has form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness—all right here. We want to get to see that when we put these aggregates together in this way, even though they do involve effort and there is some pain in the practice, it’s worth the effort so that we can look dispassionately at other, more blatant forms of …
- The Buddha’s Good News… A state of consciousness that’s true, blissful, and free: the most excellent thing there is. Think about how the Buddha arranged his teachings. When you look at yourself, you can see that you’re torn between many different desires. There’s the desire to practice, the desire not to practice, the desire for immediate gratification, the desire for long-term happiness. There are …
- To Comprehend Suffering… As you have to look after your body or what’s going on in the mind, there are going to be feelings and perceptions and thought-constructs and consciousness: That’s all part of this life. It’s the clinging that’s optional; it’s the clinging that’s unnecessary. That’s what you’ve got to learn to comprehend. But first, to comprehend …
- Meaning & Purpose… There’s the immediate contact of your consciousness inside your body, where you sense the warmth, the coolness, the energy, the solidity of the body. And then there’s contact at the senses—the sense doors, or the sense media—where you see forms, hear sounds, smell aromas, taste flavors, make tactile contact with things outside, or think about ideas. As he focuses our …
- All for the Sake of Freedom… There’s the fabrication, the directed thought and evaluation, and then there’s consciousness of all these things. All five of these things—form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness—are aggregates. Even when they form a state of concentration, they, too, are inconstant, stressful, and not self. And when the mind is really ready, it can then let go of all these things. At the …
- Holding on Strategically… See your consciousness of your consciousness as something separate, something you want to let go, an activity you want to stop doing. So when you’re working on the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self, you learn how to apply them strategically. You don’t just drop everything all at once. In Ajaan Lee’s terms, that would mean letting go like a …
- A Trained Observer… And then consciousness, which is aware of all these things. As you reflect on these activities, you’re aware of how they’re inconstant, stressful, not-self. That provides an opening to the insight to release. That’s one way in which insight can arise, but living with Ajaan Fuang I discovered he had lots of different ways that he would recommend for insight …
- The Power of Your Actions… There’s the form of the body, and that’s an activity in the sense that you have to consciously keep reminding yourself that there is a body here—because as the breath gets really comfortable, it begins to blur out. The sense of where the body begins, where it ends, where the surface is—that begins to disappear. But for the time being …
- The Need for Right View… But if you find that they’re getting in the way or leading you astray, you’ve got to very consciously retrain them. Remind yourself, “No, that’s not a helpful way to go. No, that’s not a helpful way to think.” This is why we learn the Buddha’s teachings as part of our training. And the teachings don’t interfere with …
- Not Resolved on Self… They’re made out of feelings, perceptions, thought-constructs, the sense of the form of the body, your consciousness. So when you start taking apart the things that disturb you, you find that it begins to have an effect on what goes into making up your sense of self: who you are, who’s doing the practice. It’s like an avalanche as the …
- Escape Routes in the Present… space, consciousness, the infinitude of space, the infinitude of consciousness. Those are huge openings. When you’re not obsessed about the past or the future or the difficulties in the present, you find there are these openings in the present. As you make the most of them, then questions of patient endurance, equanimity, tolerance become a lot easier to handle.
- Pleasure & Pain… Then there’s your basic consciousness. You’re learning how to untangle these things: the actual physical sensation of the pain, the labels you place on it, and the awareness that’s in the midst of these things. All these things tend to get glued together in your ordinary consciousness. What you want to do is to be able to untangle the different threads …
- Attention & Intention… Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and ideas; form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness can be very pleasant. He doesn’t deny it. But he says that if you focus on their pleasures, it just gives rise to more passion. And it’s because of our passions that we keep getting involved in these things, craving them and clinging to them. From his …
- The Image of the Raft… The Buddha identifies suffering as clinging to the five aggregates—form, feeling, perceptions, thought-fabrications, consciousness. And there are four ways of clinging. You can cling in terms of sensual pleasure, sensual desire; you can cling in terms of your views; you can cling in terms of your ideas of what should and shouldn’t be done; and then you can cling in terms …
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