Search results for: "consciousness"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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.
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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