Search results for: "Form"

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  2. Attention & Intention
     … The who concerned the issue of whether, in forming their views, they paid attention to the teachings of the noble ones. This pairing of attention and intention runs very deep throughout the whole teaching. Attention basically comes down to paying attention not only to what you believe is true, but also to what you believe is important to know about, what’s important to … 
  3. Things as They’ve Come to Be
     … A little stirring forms and you can tease it out, un-form it, zap it. If you’re not quick to zap it, the mind will identify it as a thought about this or that, and then you create a whole thought-world based on the way you labeled the stirring. The best way to see the stages in how that happens is to … 
  4. Feeding on Right Resolve
     … The most important forms of nourishment for the mind, though, are your intentions: The way you feed the mind through your intentions is what makes the difference between having a healthy mind and an unhealthy mind. Health food for the mind comes in the form of right resolve—one of the factors of the path. You resolve on renunciation, resolve on non-ill will … 
  5. Genuine Satisfaction
     … Right view is what makes a difference between actions that form a wrong path and those that form a right path for the end of suffering. So try to get in touch with your hungers. It was hunger that drove you to be born here in the first place. You couldn’t stay where you were before, so you set out looking for another … 
  6. The Open Committee
     … Even in situations that seem very far away from meditation, you find you’ve got to maintain your proper form. There’s a book on swimming technique that says even when you let up in your practice, the important thing is that you maintain good form all the time. It’s the same with the mind. These rules of parliamentary procedure have to be … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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