Search results for: "consciousness"
- Page 13
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Alternative Conceptions… It gets you down to the basic level where insight happens, what the Buddha called name and form together with consciousness. Form, of course, is the form of the body, how it feels from inside as we’re sitting right here: the sense of warmth, which is the fire element; the solidity, which is the earth element; the liquidity, the water element; and the …
- Everything You Need… You don’t have to identify with your feelings, your perceptions, your thoughts, even your awareness at the senses, your consciousness. You don’t have to identify with these things if identifying with them leads to suffering. You have that choice. We talk about the committee of the mind and that’s only part of the range of what you can latch onto here …
- Habits & Practices… the form clinging-aggregate, the feeling clinging-aggregate, perception, fabrications, consciousness clinging-aggregate. That’s because we’re not familiar with our clinging on this level. It’s easier to relate to the different clingings that the Buddha says get applied to these five aggregates. In fact, that’s what the whole issue of comprehension is. First, to get familiar with how you experience …
- Oneness… Ajaan Fuang noted that this sense of total oneness or unification with the object can take you all the way up to the dimension of the infinitude of consciousness. It’s simply a matter of the perception you hold in mind. After the fourth jhana, you drop the perception of the form of the body — the still breath allows you to do this — and …
- Constructing & Deconstructing… Into the future, it sends us warnings: “Watch out, there’s a pain here.” That perception shapes your next moment of consciousness, and your next moment, and then your next moment. It drags them down, fastens them to the pain. You want to watch out for that. Learn how to take that process apart, because it’s the perception that makes the pain invade …
- The Pursuit of Excellence… One is that it’s a type of consciousness. There’s an awareness, but it’s an awareness without an object. The image the Buddha gives is of a sunbeam. He asks the monks, “Suppose there’s a house with a window in the eastern wall. When the sun rises, the sunbeams go through the window in the eastern wall. Where do they land …
- Tools of Perception… The perception of form is gone, and what you’re left with is feeling, perception, thought fabrication, and consciousness. But even these aggregates are not the ultimate terms. In the commentaries they talk about this being the ultimate description of reality: the five aggregates. But the Buddha advises us to go on to perceive whatever arises and passes away simply as stress arising and …
- Train Hopping… One is simply consciously to ignore that train of thought. You’re sitting here with your full-body awareness. The trains of thought can go through and you don’t have to focus on them. Focus on the body side of your awareness and keep that as comfortable as possible. There will be these little thought trains going through like the cosmic rays that …
- Taking Your Own Medicine… As you’re doing it consciously, you begin to catch the more subconscious ways you’ve been manipulating the breath without even realizing it— sometimes in ways that are not especially good for the body or mind. So make this your conscious activity, your conscious endeavor right now, to see what kind of breathing feels good and to see what way of adjusting the …
- To Discern Suffering… And then there’s consciousness, your awareness of these things. We hold on to these things. This is how we suffer. The word for clinging in Pali means basically to feed on things. The image comes from fire. Back in those days, they felt that fire clung to its fuel and, in clinging to the fuel, that’s how it fed itself. At the …
- Twigs & Branches… form, feeling, perception, fabrications, consciousness.” There’s another passage, though, where twigs and branches are a symbol for the path. You lash together twigs and branches to make a raft and, holding onto the raft, you can cross over the flood. So in the second case, the twigs and branches are something you hold on to provisionally, for the purpose of getting across. Of …
- Dharma Medicine… for example, the five aggregates of form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness. This is the Buddha’s analysis of suffering. When you suffer, there is going to be clinging to one of these five things. So it’s useful to look at whatever the suffering is in these terms, whether it’s an uncomfortable experience in the body, or an uncomfortable state of mind …
- Three Levels of Evaluation… That sense of oneness can take you all the way to the dimension of the infinitude of consciousness. But to get to that, you’ve first got to evaluate things to get everything fitting snugly together and well-connected together inside. I once made the mistake one time, when talking to someone in Thailand, of saying that it’s like a dog lying down …
- Wind, Fire, Water, Earth, Space… Then there’s consciousness that knows these things. All of these things can be seen as impersonal properties. Space and consciousness are useful for getting beyond the form jhanas into the formless states. In other words, once you’ve got the breath still and you’ve got the other elements in balance, try to maintain that sense of being balanced right here. You’ll …
- The Skill of Restraint… The Buddha counts sensory input among the four foods for consciousness. It actually includes three of the four: contact at the senses; intentions at the senses — why you’re looking at these things, listening to these things to begin with; and then consciousness of the act of sensing. These three aspects of sensory input are what the mind is feeding on all the time …
- Load next page...
