Search results for: "Fabrication"
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- The Return of Chickens from Hell… You’ve got perceptions, the labels you put on things, and you’ve got the intentions that are fabricating these things, and then you’ve got consciousness, which is aware. Those five activities—form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness—are the aggregates. And as the Buddha said, if we cling to them, we’re going to suffer. Particularly if we cling to them with …
- Fixing the Present… Our experience of the present comes because we’re shaping things with bodily fabrication, the way we breathe; with verbal fabrication, the way we talk to ourselves; and with mental fabrication, images and feelings. These are things we can change. It’s because we have these forms of fabrication—taking the raw materials and turning them into our experience of the present moment—that …
- The Power of Intention… He was concerned with causality as it relates to your intentions, starting with ignorance of the fabrications in your mind. What are fabrications? They’re intentional actions. If we do them with ignorance, they create suffering. But if we bring knowledge to them as we do them, we can come to the end of suffering. So your intentions are powerful. They make the difference …
- From Compunction to Release… As we’re meditating, we are fabricating a state of becoming. You’re doing an action and you’ve decided it’s worth it. That decision is based on an understanding of karma, fabrication, and a value judgment: that the effort that goes into sitting here looking at the breath night, after night, after night is effort well repaid. The rewards may not be …
- The Second Frame of Reference… As he says that, for the sake of having a feeling, we fabricate these feelings. We take a potential for a feeling and, through our intention to have a feeling, turn it into an actual experience of a feeling. You wouldn’t think that we would want to fabricate pain, but we’re not skillful in our fabrication, so that’s what we sometimes …
- Our Variegated Minds… The Buddha’s teachings on fabrication are helpful here. He talks about three kinds of fabrication: bodily fabrication, verbal, and mental. Bodily fabrication is the in-and-out breath. Verbal is directed thought and evaluation. Mental is feeling and perception. These are the things we’re trying to train here as we concentrate on the breath. Take the breath as your object; That’s …
- Contentment… After all, the Buddha said the purpose of our practice is to learn what he called fabrication—saṅkhārā in Pāḷi—and there are three big types: bodily fabrication, verbal fabrication, and mental fabrication. The interesting thing is that when the mind is concentrated on the breath, all three of those are right here. Bodily fabrication is the breath itself, because it’s the factor …
- Calm & at Ease… The Buddha teaches how to induce it through fabrication in his instructions on breath meditation. You work with bodily fabrication—in other words, the way you breathe. You try to breathe in a way that’s refreshing, that gives you energy. Then you allow it to calm down. The Buddha also speaks of mental fabrication: your perceptions and feelings. You try to develop intense …
- The Particulars of Your Suffering… You’ve got hands-on experience with all these fabrications. In fact, one of the most important insights in all of this is to see how all of these different aggregates are fabricated. There’s an intentional element in each, even in your experience of the form of the body. For instance, you have hands all the time but you’re conscious of them …
- Pain… He talks about perceptions, which, of course, are mental fabrications. But mental fabrications come together with verbal fabrications—in other words, the way you talk to yourself. Fabrications also come together with the act of attention in the factor of name and form in dependent co-arising. Attention has to do with the questions you ask. Verbal fabrication has to do with the stories …
- Two Eyes, Not Just One… They talk about seeing your breath as a bodily fabrication. Well, that’s an insight aspect right there, seeing how you’re fabricating things. You look at your feelings and perceptions as mental fabrications to see what influence they’re having on the mind. And then in both cases, you try to calm the effect. Try to fabricate more tranquil states in the body …
- All Four Tetrads at Once… The next step is to be sensitive to mental fabrications, which are feelings and perceptions. The step after that is to calm mental fabrications. This is where perceptions play a big role. You want to find perceptions that will create calmer feelings, because you’re going to go from rapture down to pleasure and then ultimately to equanimity. What kind of perceptions help with …
- A Good Mood to Meditate… Deeper than that are what fabrications in the mind. Directed thought and evaluation are called verbal fabrication. They’re things the mind says to itself. Then there are mental fabrications, which are feelings and perceptions: the labels you put on things, and the actual feeling-tones themselves—pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. All these things get mixed together and fabricated into emotions. So …
- Where Perceptions Can Take You… The perceptions that lead to penetration, of course, are the perceptions having to do with seeing all things as fabricated and unworthy of attachment. You see that there’s an intentional element that goes into everything you’ve experienced. You also realize that everything fabricated through that intentional element is going to end. To induce dispassion toward fabrications, the Buddha sometimes talks in terms …
- Boxed Stories… That, too, is a fabrication. Learn how to question it. So this ability to see these boxes as fabricated, and the realization that you can create a more skillful box to encompass a less skillful box, or get you out of the unskillful box: That’s an important ability in the practice. In addition to mindfulness, it’s useful to have a sense of …
- Dependable Friends… Of course, the breath is a fabrication, and ultimately the time will come when you can let go of all fabrications. But to get there, you need fabrication. After all, the noble eightfold path, as the Buddha said, is the ultimate fabrication, in other words, the most useful one. But it is something you put together, something you have to look after, even though …
- Insight from Jhana… Then there’s fabrication. In the beginning, it’s verbal fabrication: directed thought and evaluation. These activities allow you to settle down as they massage the breath into something you can find pleasure in, something you can feed on. Then the fabrication gets more and more refined. In the later stages of concentration, this kind of fabrication gets used again as you pull yourself …
- Toward Release… In steps seven and eight, he tells you to breathe sensitive to mental fabrication—feelings and perceptions—and then to calm mental fabrication. Now, seeing things in terms of fabrication is one of the basic principles of insight and discernment: getting sensitive to how the actions of the breath fabricate your sense of the body, and how the actions of feelings and perceptions fabricate …
- No Who or Where… This is why the Buddha talks in terms of fabrication, because fabrication comes before becoming. You’re engaged in fabrication right here. You’ve got the breath coming in, going out—bodily fabrication; the way you talk to yourself—verbal fabrication; perceptions and feelings—mental fabrications. And just leave them there. The question of who’s doing them and where they’re being done …
- Exploring the Basics… The Buddha classes it as a type of fabrication, bodily fabrication—the in-and-out breath. You want to be sensitive to how you breathe. Bring some awareness to the process of breathing so that it causes less suffering, less stress, less tension, less blockage in the body. You can bring that sense of ease to bear the other forms of fabrication. The way …
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