Search results for: "Fabrication"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
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