Search results for: "consciousness"
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- Good Friends Inside… Infinite consciousness. Nothingness. Emptiness. They’re all right here. It’s a question of what you’re tuned-in to. They say that alcoholics, as soon as they walk into a house, very quickly pick up on were the alcohol is kept. The same with chocoholics: They walk into a house and soon know where the chocolate is kept. Well, you want to be …
- Step Back & Watch… As the mind reaches deeper and deeper levels of concentration and starts experiencing the infinity of space or the infinity of consciousness, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that you’ve reached the Ground of Being, that you’ve hit some metaphysical absolute. This is where the Buddha’s questions are important. What are you doing to experience this? As you make …
- A Strong Mind… You can consciously say, “No. Relax. There’s no need for me to tense up, no need for me to make myself miserable inside just because a situation outside is bad.” It was just an old habit you have, picked up who knows when. We’ve picked up so many habits, particularly related to our relationship to the breath, our relationship to the immediate …
- Comprehending Pain… We have passion for forms, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, passion for sensory consciousness. Our passion for these things is what constitutes stress. So you’ve got to cut through that passion by comprehending what’s actually going on. The other interesting duty is that we have to develop right concentration, because if you’re going to sit here and watch the pain until you …
- The Second Noble Truth… form, feeling, perceptions, mental fabrications, and consciousness at the senses. We try to grab onto these things, to pull ourselves to safety, to find some place to rest, because as the Buddha said, it’s only when there’s peace, when there’s a sense of resting, that the mind has any real happiness. And yet, this is all that the river can grow …
- The Four Noble Truths from Within… Then there’s your consciousness of all this. When he uses these terms, he’s talking about right here. And he wants you to look at how you’re creating suffering out of these things right here. The word he uses for the essential part of suffering is *upadana, *which can mean clinging. It can also mean taking nourishment. You’re feeding off these …
- The Noble Eightfold Path to the Deathless… There’s a passage where the Buddha compares consciousness to a magic trick. And the nature of a magic trick is that the magician tries to divert your attention from what he’s actually doing. He gets you to focus on something far away. You think you’re paying careful attention to where he’s paying careful attention, but actually he’s doing something …
- See Yourself as Active Verbs… The aggregates are form, feeling, perception, mental fabrications, and consciousness—all of which the Buddha defines with verbs. Form, he says, deforms. In other words, in the form of your body there’s nothing static. Feelings feel: pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. Perceptions perceive. Thought fabrications fabricate, and consciousness cognizes. These are all verbs, and we cling to them. The act of clinging …
- The Dhamma Eye… fabrication, name-and-form, consciousness, your experience of the six sense media. The fact that you’re aware of the six senses comes from the fact that there’s something in the mind that flows out to the senses. That’s what allows you to have that experience of the senses to begin with. But when you can see the mind at a point …
- The Power of Intention… As the Buddha said, our past karma gives us the potential for different experiences of form, feeling, perception, thought fabrications, and consciousness. Then with our present fabrications—our present intentions—we turn these potentials into something actual for the sake of having an actual experience, and then, of course, for the sake of whatever activities we want to do with those forms and feelings …
- Understanding Through Developing… Wherever there’s attachment, there’s a being.” What are people attached to? They’re attached to form, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness. Your sense of what you are is something you define. You define yourself through your clingings, through your attachments. You should find that thought liberating, because if how you’re defining yourself is unsatisfactory, you can define yourself in new ways …
- The Karma of Ideas… In this case, what picture do you have of the breathing process? When the breath comes in, what’s coming in? How does it come in? What’s making it come in? Have you stop to examine it? One way to examine it is to give yourself a new perception, consciously, intentionally. Think of the body as a big sponge. It’s got holes …
- What You’re Bringing… There are the things we consciously bring to it and there are the other things that we bring to it unconsciously, that we’re not aware of. So it’s important that you make your conscious intention as clear as possible. This is why Ajaan Lee would often start his meditations with a vow, “I’m going to sit here and I’m going …
- Permission to Play… And you can get there only by consciously trying to fabricate things: fabricating your sense of the body through the breathing, and fabricating your mind through the perceptions you hold. The sensitivity that develops over time is what allows you to see the subtleties of these processes. If you try to lay down the rule in the beginning that “I’m not going to …
- The Taste Is Release… Then consciousness has three kinds of nutriment: contact at the senses, consciousness at the senses, and then your intentions. When you’re getting the mind concentrated, you’re learning to feed off of good, intentional food. You see how the mind has been fixing its own food for a long time through its other intentions. You get a sense that this is a lot …
- Even Animals Can Be Trained… form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness. But these are things eventually you’re going to have to go beyond. You’ll have to learn how to stop clinging to them, but first you have to cling to them in a way that gets you across. In this way, you’re taking the ordinary, everyday functions in the mind, where it has feelings and …
- Emotion… You fabricate them, often not consciously. So one of the important lessons you need to learn in meditation is how you fabricate an emotion so that you can start fabricating more skillful ones. Again, the idea of a skillful emotion may sound strange. But when you learn that you can consciously direct your emotions and that your emotions do have consequences, you want to …
- The Raft… And then there’s consciousness, which knows all these things. So you’re taking these five aggregates and are turning them into your raft to cross the river, making it from things that are on this side of the river and using it to cross over the flood to the other side. One of the big floods in the river, the Buddha said, is …
- Enlightenment is Not a Hot Dog… But you have to consciously apply these things. You can’t expect that you’re going to do some meditation and it’s automatically going to take care of your problems for the rest of the day. Ajaan Fuang, my teacher, had a student whose powers of concentration were very strong. She was a schoolteacher. And she complained to him that she didn’t …
- The Buddha’s Questions… Then he remembered when he was a child meditating under a tree, and had spontaneously entered the first jhana. “Could that be the way to awakening?” And the consciousness arose to him, yes, it could be. But even then, he tested it. As he says in one of his accounts, he first decided, “How about if I divide my thinking into two sorts: skillful …
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