Search results for: "consciousness"

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  2. Feeding on Open Wounds
     … contact at the senses, consciousness at the senses, and then what he calls intellectual intention, which basically comes down to your intentions in general. We constantly have to feed off these things. For instance, with contact: If we didn’t have sensory contact, if we were put into a sensory deprivation tank and stayed for a long time, the mind would go crazy. Without … 
  3. Dependent Co-arising Right Now
     … Then these fabrications, in turn, will affect your consciousness. Your consciousness will affect name and form. Name and form is basically the five aggregates. And those are right here, too, simply that fabrication is divided up here into a few other categories: attention, intention, and contact. You look at how you pay attention to the breath. You can look at your intentions in staying … 
  4. Not-selfing Your Selves
     … With all the various skills we’ve learned in making use of the body—making use of our feelings, our perceptions, thought constructs, even our consciousness: The reason we hold onto these things is because we’ve found them useful for finding happiness. Now, the problem is that our notion of happiness may be limited, and we may be turning a blind eye to … 
  5. Appropriate Attention
     … You’re clinging to the five aggregates of form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness. And why are you doing that? Because of craving. Now, that right there is pretty radical. Most of us, when we suffer, tend to focus on the causes coming from outside. This person did that, that person did this, the society’s like this, the weather’s like that … 
  6. Think Calmly about Death
     … As he saw, consciousness doesn’t need to depend on the body. It can depend on craving. He said it’s like a fire going from one house to another. The fire goes on the oxygen in the wind and then there it is, in the other house. In the same way, your consciousness doesn’t have to depend on the house of this … 
  7. The Brightness of Life
     … Even the five aggregates—form, feeling, perception, thought-fabrications, and consciousness: The Buddha says that they do have their pleasant side. They’re not all suffering. So his understanding of life, his understanding of the world, had a lot more nuance—and was a lot more useful. He didn’t say life is suffering. When he made his shortest explanation of suffering, he says … 
  8. The Not-Self Discourse
     … feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. They’re not-self. You might wonder why he brought up the topic of not-self. After all, all five of the brethren had attained the Dhamma eye, and one of the consequences of that attainment is that you let go of identity views—views in which you define yourself either as an aggregate, as the owner of the … 
  9. No Extra Arrows
     … It’s focused on form — the form of the body — feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, acts of consciousness. And it comes from craving. Craving, too, is desire and passion. The relationship between the two is like this: The word for craving in Pali is “thirst.” The word for clinging — upādāna — is “to feed.” So the desire and passion that’s looking for something: That’s … 
  10. Don’t Objectify
     … What way of breathing feels best for the body? What perception can you hold in mind that helps the breath become more comfortable? Sometimes we have some hidden ideas based on who- knows-what from who-knows-when on how the body breathes, so that when we consciously breathe, we force it into a particular pattern. You’ve got to notice how that pattern … 
  11. You Can’t Clone Awakening
    It may seem incongruous or ironic that here we are, hoping for total release from suffering, stress—the freedom of nibbana—and on the way there, we’re hoping for states of infinite space, infinite consciousness, bliss, rapture, and yet what are we doing? We’re focusing on our breath. We’re sitting here in a posture that may or may not be comfortable … 
  12. The Kamma of Self & Not-self
     … You take the potential for form, the potential for feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness, all of which come from past actions, and you actualize it. Then you identify with it. But your identity can change from moment to moment. Sometimes you’re focused on feelings, sometimes on perceptions, sometimes on the body, either seeing yourself as identical with these things, or as possessing these … 
  13. Our Sense of Self
     … Or you can learn consciously not to identify with them. In other words, you want to take this process of selfing and not-selfing and bring it up into consciousness by trying to articulate it. It’s like talking-cures in psychotherapy: that strange process of finding that simply being able to talk about things can often help solve a problem in the mind … 
  14. Strategies for Happiness
     … The same holds true for feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, and consciousness. But the Buddha doesn’t have you just drop and abandon these things — he has you turn them into the path. In other words, you take these things you identify with and you turn them into tools. Once they’re tools, it’s possible to get a sense of distance from them and … 
  15. Sensitive to Fabrication
     … This is why we consciously think about the breath. It allows us to bring some new perceptions to bear. The idea that the breath is an energy throughout the body is not one that’s really normal in Western culture. I know a lot of people who’ve said it’s impossible. They think that breath has to be the air coming in and … 
  16. Recollecting the Devas
     … The question is, ‘Where does the physical universe find no footing?’” And the reply is consciousness without surface or consciousness without feature: the consciousness of the awakened one. So even the great Brahma has limits on his discernment. But this doesn’t mean that the devas are all ignorant. There’s another story about a monk living in the forest. He goes down to … 
  17. In the Elephant’s Footprint
     … But there was a consciousness. The Buddha calls it “consciousness without surface.” So your sense of “I am this” or “I own this,” gets shaken up. But there’s still a lingering sense of “I am.” That’s why the Buddha, when he was giving his first two sermons, saved the issue of not-self to the second sermon. This was something he delivered … 
  18. Only Natural
     … They’re like politicians who say, “You’ve got to choose the lesser of two evils.” There was that great anti-two-party ad years back when they went around asking kids, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” And one kid said, “I want to vote for the lesser of two evils.” I mean, nobody consciously likes to think in … 
  19. Skillful Selfing
     … The path that did work was to focus his desires on taking these aggregates, these raw materials from which we create our sense of self—the form of your body, feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness: taking these things that we normally grab onto to create a sense of self in a particular becoming, and turning them into a path. Even though there may … 
  20. Don’t Hang Around Your Corpse
     … Some people might say, well, your imagination of space and your imagination of consciousness depend on the body. But the actual experience of space, the experience of consciousness, doesn’t necessarily have to depend on a body. There are formless beings. This, the Buddha said, is one of those things that he couldn’t prove to you ahead of time but he said that … 
  21. Mindfulness Immersed in the Breath
     … If that doesn’t work, you can consciously ignore those thoughts. You know they’re there, lurking in your mind, but you decide to pay no attention to them. You’re not going to get involved in the conversation. You’re not going to let them pull you in. That’s another way of dealing with distractions. They can have one corner of the … 
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