Search results for: "Fabrication"
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- The Noble Truths of the Breath… The important point in all the steps is that as you breathe in and breathe out, you give yourself a task to do, either in making the breath comfortable, giving rise to a sense of refreshment, or in dealing with what the Buddha calls fabrication. This is where breath meditation connects to the four noble truths. Because the way you fabricate the body is …
- Anapanasati Day… These are mental fabrications, the Buddha calls them. Then you learn how to calm the mental fabrications. In other words, where there’s pain, you try to turn it into rapture; where there’s rapture, you might want to turn it into pleasure. Then there’s the very subtle pleasure of equanimity. These are all things you can play with. Again, if you couldn …
- Dissolving Distress… He says you try to breathe in and out aware of what he calls bodily fabrication. Breathe in and out aware of mental fabrication. Bodily fabrication is the breath and its effect on the body. Mental fabrication deals with your perceptions and your feelings, which shape the state of your mind. As you’re trying to stay with the breath, keeping it in mind …
- The Forerunner of All Things… Physical fabrication is the breath itself. Verbal is the way you talk to yourself, what the Buddha calls directed thought and evaluation: You focus on a topic and then you comment on it. And finally there’s mental fabrication, which is composed of feelings and perceptions. Feelings are feelings of pleasure, pain, or neither-pleasure-nor-pain. Perceptions are the images or labels that …
- Wise Endurance… clinging to form, feeling, perception, thought fabrications, or consciousness. In particular, what are your perceptions, what are your thought fabrications about a particular issue? Remember that even with the aggregates, there’s an element that comes in from the past and an element of fabrication in the present. The way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself, the perceptions and feelings you focus …
- Defabricating AngerThe Buddha says that we suffer from our ignorance, and the first thing we’re ignorant of is the extent to which we fabricate the present moment. We take the raw material coming in from our past karma, and then we turn it into an actual experience of the present moment. We that with three activities called fabrication: bodily fabrication, the in-and-out …
- Physical Pains & Painful Words… The next two steps—being sensitive to mental fabrication and calming mental fabrication—correspond to Ajaan Maha Boowa’s recommendations for how to deal with pain. “Mental fabrication” basically means feeling and perception. And here the perception is the important element: how you perceive the pain. You might want to ask yourself, “What color is the pain? What shape is the pain?” Strange questions …
- What’s Relative, What’s Constant… The connection between ignorance and fabrication is a useful one to start with, because as you’re sitting here meditating, you’re getting direct hands-on experience with bodily fabrication—i.e., the in-and-out breath and all the variations of the ways that you can breathe. Verbal fabrication—directed thought and evaluation—all the different ways you can talk to yourself about …
- Right Effort… Other defilements, though, require what the Buddha calls exerting a fabrication. “Fabrication” here has many aspects: verbal, mental, and physical. Physical fabrication is the breath. In other words, when you see greed or anger or delusion arising in the mind, ask yourself, “How is the breath going right now?” See if you can change the mind state by changing the way you breathe. That …
- Breath Meditation: The First Tetrad… I was reading a piece recently questioning the standard translation of bodily fabrication, asking, “Why would the Buddha introduce a technical term here?” Well, part of the reason we’re doing breath meditation is because we’re trying to develop both calm and insight. Insight requires seeing things in terms of fabrication. So the breath is something that fabricates your sense of the body …
- Get Outside Yourself… You incline the mind to something that’s not fabricated at all. And at this point, the inclination is sincere. If you do this before the mind is in good concentration, you can tell yourself that you’re inclining in that direction, but the mind will sneak off and find something else that’s fabricated. You want to get to the best possible fabrication …
- Analysis of Qualities… They require first, though, that you understand the process of fabrication in the present moment. Fabrication, sankhara, comes in three types: bodily, verbal, and mental. “Bodily” is the in-and-out breath. “Verbal” is the way you talk to yourself before you break into speech. Technically, this is called directed thought and evaluation: directing your thoughts to an object and evaluating it—asking questions …
- Meaning & Becoming… Think about the different kinds of fabrications that go into this process of becoming. They’re the same fabrications that can be used to create a path. There’s bodily fabrication, the way you breathe; verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself with directed thought and evaluation; mental fabrication, perceptions and feelings. We turn these into states of becoming all the time. We …
- Anger… We get used to looking at things in the mind in terms of the different kinds of fabrication: bodily fabrication, verbal, mental. Bodily fabrication being the in-and-out breath; verbal being directed thought and evaluation being the way you talk to yourself; and mental fabrication being perceptions—mental labels, acts of recognition, acts of imaging things to yourself—along with feelings. You use …
- The Body In & Of Itself… After all, at the moment, all those worlds are just fabrications, total fabrications. You think about your friends: Your friends aren’t here right now. You think about issues at work: They’re not here right now. They’re just baggage you’re fabricating and carrying around. What is here right now: You’ve got the body sitting here breathing. And even though there …
- Happy to Be Here… In doing this, you’re employing all the different kinds of fabrication the Buddha talked about. There’s the breath itself, with is bodily fabrication, and then there’s the way you talk to yourself, which is verbal fabrication. Here you talk to yourself in a calm and soothing way. Then you take an interest in the breath, realizing that the breath and the …
- Learning by Doing… You focus on the breath—that’s bodily fabrication, and it’s also part of form. It’s part of the wind element. You think about the breath—that’s verbal fabrication. And you hold perceptions in mind—that comes under both name and mental fabrication. You’re trying to create a feeling of well-being—that comes under both name and mental fabrication …
- No One Size Fits All… As for the topics you use, in general, the Buddha said it’s an issue of learning how to look at fabrication: this process by which the mind creates thoughts, intentions, urges. You can look at fabrication from any number of angles: from the five aggregates, the six sense media, the six properties, dependent co-arising. A monk once went to see a several …
- The Purpose of Empathetic Joy… We’re making it as pleasant as possible, to give the mind the food it needs in order to practice, to settle down, be still, and see things as they really are, to see the movements of the mind as they’re actually happening, to see the extent to which you’re fabricating your experience, and then the value of those fabrications: which ones …
- Deconstructing Suffering… It’s made out of directed thought and evaluation, which count as sankharas, or fabrications of the mind. Focused on the breath—which is a bodily fabrication—you’re dealing with perceptions and feelings, which are mental fabrications. What you’re doing is taking this process of fabrication and turning it from a cause of suffering into a path to the end of suffering …
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