Search results for: "Form"

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  2. Goodwill as Restraint
    Goodwill as Restraint July 25, 2015 There’s a passage where the Buddha talks about the development of goodwill—and by implication all the other sublime attitudes—as a form of restraint. We don’t usually think about goodwill in those terms. We think of it more as an opening of the heart, letting all its natural goodness come pouring out. But then, of … 
  3. The Fires of Sensuality
     … It helps the mind be more inclined to get into concentration, and then the concentration helps provide you with an alternative form of pleasure. After all, if you’re going to drop one form of pleasure, you have to find another one to take its place. This is why the pleasure of fully inhabiting the form of your body, which is a higher level … 
  4. Building Concentration
     … trying to create a state of concentration, noting what works, what doesn’t work, so that you can see how a state of becoming gets formed in the mind. The same applies for distractions. You can simply follow the distractions but, again, you won’t really know them that well. It’s when you fight against them—that’s when you know them. As … 
  5. Respect for the Mind
     … So whether it’s obvious or not, you have to keep reminding yourself that some forms of happiness will require that you sacrifice other, lesser forms of happiness. And you have to be happy to make the sacrifice. That right there is the essence of wisdom. When we think about Buddha’s wisdom, we usually think about dependent co-arising or emptiness—all very … 
  6. Chickens from Hell
     … As long as you’re willing to play along with the pretense, you’re going to be stuck with fully-formed thoughts, fully-formed emotions, which you try to feed on as they chew you up. But if you can begin to sense the points in the process where this decision or that decision has been made, you can nip it in the bud … 
  7. Appropriate Attention
     … You’re focusing on the breath—that’s form, the form of the body. You’re creating a feeling of well-being by the way you focus on the breath: not too long, not too short, not too heavy, not too light. Just right. You have a perception that you hold in mind as to where the breath is coming in, where the breath … 
  8. sBeyond Acceptance
     … There’s that passage in the sutta we chanted just now where the Buddha talks about how, with form, feeling, perception, fabrications, consciousness, it’s hard to say, “Be like this, be like that, don’t be like this, don’t be like that.” And for that reason, they’re not-self. It’s possible to take that as meaning that you can’t … 
  9. Xtreme Drama
     … Here is a form of pleasure that’s harmless, and you can then use that as your test case. Any pleasure that doesn’t pull you away from this, that doesn’t make it difficult for the mind to settle down, can be something to energize you on the path. Any form of thinking that doesn’t pull you away from this, helps you … 
  10. Borrowed Goods
     … That’s form. It’s one of the elements in the body. Then there’s feeling: There may be pains here and there in the body, but you’re trying to create a feeling of ease, a feeling of well-being, which can sometimes get so intense that it qualifies as rapture. You’re holding a perception in mind. When the breath comes in … 
  11. Keeping Your Values Alive
     … The other two forms of right resolve fall under this. On the one hand, there’s the resolve for renunciation. You want to wean yourself away from your sensual addictions because they cause conflict. There’s only so much pleasure to go around in terms of sensuality. As the Buddha said, even if it rained gold coins, we wouldn’t have enough for one … 
  12. Don’t Objectify
     … Even “form” the Buddha defines with a verb. He says it de-forms. In other words, once there’s a form, then there’s going to be change in it all time. Feeling feels, perceptions perceive, fabrications fabricate, consciousness cognizes: That’s how he defines these things. So they are activities too. And yet we turn them into things, latch onto them, turn these … 
  13. Respect Opens Possibilities
     … You come to see that engaging in those forms of stress or the things that cause those forms of stress is not necessary. That’s the whole purpose of the Buddha’s teaching. This is why he has you bring an attitude of openness and respect—because he’s going to tell you possibilities that wouldn’t have occurred to you otherwise. You can … 
  14. Talking to Yourself
     … It’s called the form world, i.e., you’re getting back in touch with how the form of the body feels from within. You’re learning about which parts can you change, which parts you can’t change, which parts could use some energizing, which parts could use some calming down. You learn to recognize when the breath feels so depleted that you … 
  15. One Thing Clear Through
     … Our actions matter, and some forms of happiness are more worth pursuing than others. Then, with experience, we get a better and better sense of what those greater forms of happiness are. There’s the practice of virtue, the practice of concentration, the development of discernment. In every case, there are things we have to give up in order to get something of greater … 
  16. Lavish Goodwill
     … Then, as the description says, “through the all surrounding universe, up and down and around… abundant, free of hostility… goodwill for the entire world.” As with any form of wealth, you want to protect it. That’s what the image of the mother and her child is all about. You have to remember that back in those days, if you were a woman and … 
  17. Going Out of Your Way
     … How often do you go out of your way for other people? Of the forms of goodness, it’s the one that can involve the most ingenuity—and this may be one of the reasons why the Buddha emphasizes it. You think of other people: What they might want? Or what they might lack? Or what they might need? Then you try to think … 
  18. The Riddle Tree
     … This is particularly true as you’re shifting from form levels of concentration to the formless. It’s a shift in perception. You’re right here when you go from, say focusing on the breath to the point where the breath gets really still. You begin to notice that the boundary of the body begins to disappear. It’s as if your sensation of … 
  19. Unentangled Compassion
     … The fact that the qualities are in you rather than things you have to get from someone else outside means that this form of happiness doesn’t take anything away from anyone else. But it does depend very much on you. The fact that it doesn’t take anything away means that it’s harmless. You’re not imposing any difficulties on anybody by … 
  20. Judgmental vs. Judicious
     … Before there’s contact at the six senses, you’ve got fabrication; you’ve got name and form. Part of fabrication, of course, is directed thought and evaluation itself. Part of name and form is attention, knowing what questions to pay attention to, which ones to ignore. That requires that you use your powers of judgment. As Ajaan Lee points out, this is the … 
  21. Renunciation
     … Because, after all, it is a better form of happiness. Not better in the sense of having somebody standing over you with a ruler saying you’d better do this, but better because once you gain this form of happiness and you look at the other pleasures you have in the world, you really see that this is a lot more gratifying, something you … 
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