Search results for: "consciousness"

  1. Page 15
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. The Fourth Frame of Reference
     … In particular, you want to learn how to identify each of the clinging-aggregates—form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness—as events, activities, to see what spurs them into action and how they stop. Then you try to notice how you’re clinging to them: how you keep compulsively repeating them. Then you take your clinging apart. If something’s disturbing your concentration, take … 
  10. A Touchstone at the Breath
     … Or better, you can just focus on consciousness, your awareness of the space. But to do that, you need to have practice in maintaining that perception of space, space, space, all the time. So right here in your experience of the body is when you learn about the other aggregates as well: the feeling aggregate, the perception aggregate, fabrication, and consciousness. It’s when … 
  11. The Tools of the Path
     … Of course, there are perceptions and thought constructs, consciousness of these things—it’s all there. You have to learn how to use these aggregates to get rid of unskillful thoughts. This is going to be a lesson for concentration, because once the mind gets into concentration, you don’t just stay there. The whole point of getting into concentration is that, in the … 
  12. A Good Foundation
     … What we’re doing as we meditate is learning how to focus on the way in which we put the present moment together, and to do it consciously. One of the big areas of exploration is going to be the movement of the energy in the body. Think about it: When we first got these physical bodies, we didn’t have any language. We … 
  13. Negotiating with Death
     … And then consciousness. Prior to the Buddha’s time, these various concepts were floating around in India. But he was the one who put them together as a set and said that it’s out of this set that we create a sense of who we are. As long as we identify with these things, we’re going to suffer. And not only that … 
  14. The Field Hospital
     … Or formless pleasures, when everything in the body gets so still that you can have a perception of infinite space, infinite consciousness, and the body doesn’t interfere. It’s so quiet that you can ignore it. It’s only then, when you have this kind of pleasure, that you can really step back from sensual craving. Otherwise, even though you may know the … 
  15. Open Are the Doors to the Deathless
     … The same with thought constructs and consciousness: You look at these things as they’re happening, as he talks about them. And ask yourself, “How do I cling to these things? What’s the passion? What’s the desire I have around these things? Why is that?” Part of the mind will say, “The only way you’re going to find happiness in life … 
  16. Death Is All Around
     … feeling, perception, thought constructs, and consciousness. You turn these things into a path. Focus on the breath, develop feelings of ease, spread them throughout the body. You use your perception of the breath to focus your concentration. You use your directed thought and evaluation, which are thought constructs, to keep your mind on the breath and to evaluate the breath. Then you’re aware … 
  17. Strength of Persistence
     … That’s probably the biggest obstacle in the path—the attitude of “well, just enough to get by.” We may not come to the meditation consciously with that attitude, but if that’s the way we live our lives, it’s going to creep into the meditation as well. So the various skills you need around the house, the various skills you need at … 
  18. Fabrication
     … Other times you can consciously ignore the distraction. A little world appears in your mind and you say, “I don’t want to enter into that,” but for some reason it just doesn’t go away. You realize the reason it’s not going away is because you’re paying attention to it. Even if you don’t like it, paying attention to it … 
  19. The Uses of Right Concentration
     … form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness. On the surface this may sound like the same sort of thing as developing mindfulness and alertness, but the word “origination” here signals something different. It points not to the fact that things come and go, but to the fact that they come because of a reason. That’s the meaning of “origination,” and the origination of the … 
  20. Two Eyes, Not Just One
     … I’ve discovered that when I think very consciously of letting the breath flow there, it also changes the flow of breath in the head. So there are all kinds of connections all around. And this is just in the body. It’s even more so in the mind. So you really do want to develop this all-around eye that comes with concentration … 
  21. Feeding on Right Resolve
     … The Buddha identifies three different kinds of food for consciousness. One of them is sensory contact: sights, sounds, smells, taste, tactile sensations making contact at your eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind. Then there’s the act of consciousness itself as those things make contact: We’re constantly looking, listening, hoping to get some nourishment out of things outside. But it’s like popcorn … 
  22. Load next page...