Search results for: "Fabrication"
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- Remembering Ajaan Lee… It, too, is fabricated, and eventually you’re going to have to get rid of those fabrications. So you’re using fabrications to work against fabrications. There are a lot of paradoxical elements in the path. If you read a basic textbook on early Buddhism, it all seems very straightforward and a little bit too simplistic. A lot of people, when they’re looking …
- Do Jhana… Insight comes from looking at things in terms of fabrication, how they’re put together. The first type of fabrication you want to look at is bodily fabrication, how the breath has an impact on the body. When you breathe in, where do you feel it?—especially when you try to make yourself aware of the whole body. It’s not just at the …
- More than Just Letting Go… They include getting sensitive to bodily fabrication, getting sensitive to mental fabrication, and learning how to calm both. And in the course of dealing with the different steps, you’re talking to yourself, which is verbal fabrication. All the three kinds of fabrication that he says we do in ignorance get brought up to the surface and become the center of our attention as …
- The Hall of Mirrors… After all, the noble eightfold path is something fabricated. You take all the various fabrications of the mind and you try to turn them into a path. Then you can observe them to see how even when the mind gets shaped into something really good, there’s still an element of stress, there’s still an element of inconstancy. It’s still not totally …
- Meditate Because You Have To… As the Buddha said, we’re here to learn about sankhara, the process of fabrication, and what fabrications do you need to know? Well, there’s bodily fabrication, which is the in-and-out breath. That’s right here. Verbal fabrication, directed thoughts and evaluation: That’s right here as well. You’re directing your thoughts to the breath and you’re evaluating the …
- The Kamma of Meditation… There are the three kinds of fabrication: The way you breathe—bodily fabrication. The way you talk to yourself, what the Buddha calls directed thought and evaluation—verbal fabrication. And perceptions and feelings—mental fabrication. Those are your choices in the present moment. You can choose to breathe in different ways. You can choose to talk to yourself in different ways. You can choose …
- The Right Place to Look… When the Buddha gives instructions on how to deal with the breath, he talks not only about bodily fabrication, which is the breath, but also about verbal fabrication, i.e., the way you talk to yourself: When you tell yourself to breathe in this way; breathe in that way. “Try this. Try that. Breathe in a way that gives rise to a sense of …
- Large Perspective, Small Focus… One, it’s because to get the mind in concentration you have to deal with those forms of fabrication: physical fabrication, i.e., the breath; verbal fabrication, directed thought and evaluation; mental fabrication, which are perceptions and feelings—perceptions are the labels or images you apply to things, and feelings are feelings of pleasure, pain, or neither pleasure nor pain. You realize, when you …
- Isolating the Aggregates… what the Buddha calls “calming mental fabrications.” That brings us to the aggregate of fabrication itself. These are the questions you ask yourself about the breath. Your intention to stay here is also a fabrication. Your intention to change the breath is a fabrication. The way you evaluate how things are going: That’s a fabrication as well. The more clearly you can isolate …
- Tranquility, Insight, & Concentration… The Buddha gave sixteen steps in all for breath meditation, and the general pattern throughout the steps is that you see how things are fabricated in terms of the body, in terms of the mind; you learn how to energize that fabrication; and then you calm it down. Seeing in terms of fabrication: That’s the insight. The calming is tranquility. It all goes …
- Not What You Are, What You Do… After all, the path is a path of fabrication. The Buddha doesn’t tell you just to drop all activity at once, to be totally passive or totally devoid of any kind of intention. We hear that the goal at the end of the path is to be free from fabrication, so we think we’ll just stop fabricating and that should get us …
- Ironclad Technique vs. No Technique… If you’re not sensitive to what you’re putting into the present moment, how are you going to know whether a particular state is fabricated or not? There are strong states of Oneness that can come in the meditation. And the Buddha says, watch out: These are fabricated. The highest Oneness, he says, is a fabricated state. So you have to see the …
- Mindfulness of Death… You have to ask yourself, “Well, what needs to be done?” Look at the breath as bodily fabrication; the way you talk to yourself as verbal fabrication; and the perceptions and feelings you focus on as mental fabrication. What needs to be worked on in those three things? What insight can you gain into the process of fabrication as you work with them? That …
- The Reality of Your Thoughts… This is where the Buddha’s teachings on fabrication are useful. He says we fabricate our emotions in three ways: through physical fabrication, i.e., the breath; verbal fabrication, the thoughts and evaluations we make of a particular situation; and then mental fabrications, which are feelings and perceptions. The feelings here are feeling-tones: pleasure, pain, and neither-pleasure-nor-pain. As for perceptions …
- Question & Probe… You’re not given any help as to how not to get overwhelmed by the emotion, or how not to end up feeling trapped or trying to run away from it? Remember, the Buddha taught three types of fabrication. First is bodily fabrication, the in-and-out breath. You work with the breath in the body so that even though there may be difficult …
- An Ennobling Pleasure… Mindfulness itself is a type of sankhara, a type of fabrication. Your attention to the present moment is a type of fabrication. Your decision to watch the present moment: That’s a fabrication as well. But as you get the mind into this fabrication, one, you’re putting yourself in a better position to observe the grosser kinds of fabrication; and two, as your …
- What You Bring to the Moment… So let’s take a close look at how the Buddha describes fabrication. What is there along with the breathing? There’s also what he calls verbal fabrication and mental fabrication. Verbal fabrication is directed thought and evaluation, which is what you’re supposed to bring to the breath as you meditate. You direct your thoughts to the breath and then you evaluate how …
- Verified Confidence… You see that that state of the mind as something fabricated. And, as we all know, once you start thinking in terms of fabrication—that’s the way you breathe, that’s the way you think, talk to yourself, the perceptions you hold in mind, the feelings you hold, focus on; these things fabricate your sense of the body, they fabricate your words, they …
- The Joy of Renunciation… Then use whatever skills you have—the mind’s skills for fabricating things, which are already good at fabricating defilements: Convert those skills to fabricating motivation to practice the Dhamma, to finding joy in the Dhamma, joy in investing in the long-term. As the Buddha said, delight in the Dhamma, delight in abandoning, delight in developing: These are among the forms of delight …
- Disenchantment… You look at fabrication. The bodily fabrication is breath. Verbal fabrication is directed thought and evaluation. Mental fabrication is feeling and perception. These are the basic elements the Buddha has us focus on as we concentrate. First, of course, we learn how to dress them up in a new way. In other words, bring the directed thought and evaluation to the breath, to create …
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