Search results for: "Form"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Adolescent Practice… For instance, the aggregates of form and feeling: the actual movement of the energy is form, the sense of pleasure or pain that goes along with it is the feeling, and it can be extremely fleeting. When you see how fleeting feelings are — much more fleeting than even subtle sensations of breath — that rearranges your notion about how you’ve been living your life …
- In the Elephant’s Footprint… The first forms the framework. As Ven. Sāriputta later said, it’s the four noble truths that form the framework for all skillful dhammas. In the same way that the footprint of an elephant can contain the footprints of all the other animals that walk on earth, the four noble truths contain all skillful dhammas. So if you want to understand skillful dhammas and …
- 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 …
- Don’t Be a Traitor to Yourself… There’s a sense of well-being that’s called the pleasure of form, i.e., the form of the body as you sense it from within. This is your property; this is your land. Cultivate it. What can you do with these four properties of earth, wind, fire, and water? When is it good to have a good solid heavy sense of concentration …
- The Need for Evaluation… The different elements here are the aggregate of form. And when you get that feeling of pleasure, are they the same thing or they are something separate? Then there’s the perception, the different labels you apply to the breath, to your sense of the body, your mental image of the body. Learn how to use these things deliberately. The fabrication here is the …
- The Joy of Renunciation… that what we experience in terms of form, feeling, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness is based on what we’ve fashioned out of the potential for these things. We have certain intentions that make us fashion these aggregates. That applies to feelings of pleasure and pain. The pleasure you’re going to find in the precepts is something you have to fabricate. You do that …
- Investing in Noble Wealth… That’s a form of wealth right there: having that conviction. It gives you a lot of energy to stick with the practice. The next three forms of noble wealth go together as a set: virtue, a sense of shame, and a sense of compunction. Virtue is the decision that you’re not going to harm anybody. You’re not going to harm yourself …
- Right Effort… Keep the proper form. It’s like when you’re practicing to be a swimmer. There are days when your energy level is down, so you do less practice, but you try to maintain proper form throughout the practice. And it’s the same with the meditation. In days when your energy level is down, try at least as skillful as you can. When …
- The Pleasure of the Middle Way… But the pleasure that comes from the breath is called a pleasure of form. It’s on a higher level. When the Buddha had been practicing austerities for six years and realized finally that that was not the way, he asked himself, “Is there another way to awakening? Could there be another way?” He cast around, and he remembered a time when he’d …
- The Desire for Things to Be Different… The same with the factors of name and form: Under form, you’ve got the elements of the body: earth, wind, water, and fire; or solidity, energy, coolness, and warmth. Just notice how these four types of things actually make up your sense of the body as you feel it from within. So instead of thinking of it as your body, it’s just …
- Skillful Selfing… The path that did work was to focus his desires on taking these aggregates, these raw materials from which we create our sense of self—the form of your body, feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness: taking these things that we normally grab onto to create a sense of self in a particular becoming, and turning them into a path. Even though there may …
- Seeds of Becoming… It’s one of the forms of craving that leads to suffering. Then there’s vibhava-tanha, which is a more controversial term, because it it’s not defined anywhere in the Canon. Some passages indicate that it’s desire for annihilation, in other words that you not have anything that has to go anywhere, you’re tired of going to these different places …
- The Five Aggregates… There’s a potential for form, a potential for feeling, for perceptions, for fabrication, for consciousness, coming from our past actions. But for the actual experience of these things to happen in the present moment, you have to fabricate them a little bit more. Which means that there’s an intentional aspect to all your experience. Whatever you experience has to have a certain …
- The Not-Self Discourse… This was a questionnaire that he was to give many, many times throughout his teaching career, starting with form: Is form constant or inconstant? We look at it, and can see it’s inconstant. If something is inconstant, is it easeful or stressful? The fact that it’s inconstant and undependable means that it’s stressful. It’s like building a house in a …
- Signs Along the Road… All of these forms of breath energy are already there. As the mind settles down, you want to detect them and use them. The bathman working the water with the bath powder is like the first kind of breathing—getting the whole torso involved. The spring filling the lake is like the second kind of breathing. It ripples out and fills the entire lake …
- Conviction & Truth… Here’s the possibility of putting an end to suffering, and even before you put a total end to suffering you can begin to see—as you put the path into practice—that many forms of suffering are falling away. There’s the stress, of course, of having to put the path into practice, but a lot of the really heavy forms of suffering …
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