Search results for: "Form"
- Page 16
- Mature Strategies… The water will evaporate and form clouds and maybe someday fall down in the catchment basin of another river that will flow to the ocean, but that can take a lot of time. So you have to be careful about who you hang around with and what kind of strategies you employ for a lasting happiness. The Buddha said that this is the beginning …
- The Questions of Suffering… You’ve got a potential coming in from past karma—a potential for a feeling, a potential for a perception, and so forth—and you take that and form it into an actual experience, an actual aggregate. There’s an element of intention in each one, which means you can do things with these aggregates by changing your intentions. You don’t just accept …
- Exercising Discernment… As a state of becoming is about to form, there’s a moment of unconsciousness. You blank out. If you want to see the forming of these states, you have to fight that moment of unconsciousness, which means that you have to make your alertness and mindfulness as continuous as possible. That’s where ardency comes in, in keeping them continuous. The next quality …
- A Full Life… You look at the universe—galaxies forming and dissolving, stars coming and then exploding, sending their matter spewing out into space. Then the matter coalesces again, it forms stars again, and it repeats the process over and over and over again. It’s going nowhere—but we are going someplace. And that someplace gives us genuine meaning. So these are the requisites for a …
- The Path Is in the Details… There’s a potential for form, for feeling, perception, fabrication, consciousness, but with your present intention you choose how to put those things together and turn them into actual forms, feelings, perceptions, and so on. This is something very quick. We’re very adept at it. Because it’s so quick, it’s hard for us to catch sight of it. And because we …
- Sensitivity & Skill… Instead of looking for our pleasures in sensuality, our fascination with fantasizing about sensual pleasures, we’re going to go for the pleasure of form. We’re trying to get back to that point prior to the flavor-earth where those brahmas were feeding on rapture, as they were self-luminous. We’re trying to breathe in a way that gives rise to a …
- To Discern Suffering… Your sense of the body sitting here right now, that’s form. Working with the breath energy, learning to perceive the body as composed of breath energy, that’s all form. There’s also the perception that holds you there. So those are two of the aggregates. Then as you stay with the breath you analyze it, adjust it, so that it’s a …
- Lust… You need another form of pleasure to replace the pleasure that comes with sensuality. This is why we have to develop the factors of the path, primarily right mindfulness and right concentration. So learn to look at the pleasures of mindfulness and concentration as your friends. They don’t cause you to do anything unskillful. You sometimes hear about the dangers of concentration, but …
- Rooted in Heedful Desire… When you take care of greed, aversion, and delusion in their blatant forms, they can come back in their subtle forms. And so you just want to watch, watch, watch what’s going on. That patience in watching is one of the most important weapons the soldier has. It’s a part of discernment. As long as you have the desire not to come …
- Desires Rightly Directed… You’ve got the form of the body as you focus on the breath, the feelings of pleasure you create as you play with the breath, the perceptions you hold in mind as to where the breath flows in the body, where it can flow in the body, and where you want it to flow in the body. As for fabrications, they include the …
- Right View & Right Resolve… You begin to see the different forms of craving, and can let them go. Now, it may seem strange that right resolve doesn’t have resolve on going beyond becoming and non-becoming. After all, those are the two other forms of craving that cause suffering besides craving for sensuality. But in the beginning, you’re not ready for that because you’re going …
- Compassion for People on Fire… Instead of focusing on desires for sensuality, we focus on desires related to form, inhabiting the form of the body. It lifts the mind. You’re looking for a happiness in a place where you don’t have to fight anybody else off. No one’s going to come in and try to push you out of the way to watch your breath. It …
- Asalha Puja… Then he summarizes all forms of stress, saying that the five aggregates, when you cling to them, are stress. The *clinging *to the aggregates is the stress. That’s knowing the truth. The second level of knowledge is knowing that there is a duty with regard to the truth—you don’t just *know *these things, you actually act on them. In this case …
- Clinging, Addictions, Obsessions… You find that these alternative forms of pleasure are better to pursue—and that you can tap into them. Addictive views, of course, have to be replaced with right views. One of the lessons of right view is that the important issue in life is not the pleasure that you’re sucking out of life, but the things you’re doing and the consequences …
- Occupy Your Body… If you need to have the body, you can form it. It’s like that old science fiction story about teleporting people to the moon. They were working on the technology of teleportation and, according to the story, they still had to iron out some bugs. The main bug was that the bones were slower then everything else. So, say, if you sent a …
- Fabricating the Present… These little seed crystals of fabrication form in the mind, then thoughts and other things form around them, and all of a sudden you’ve got a thought storm. You don’t see this until you learn how to hang around this place where you’re just with the field of energy: awareness energy, breath energy. It has the potential to turn into any …
- Distinctions That Make a Difference… The breath is body, or form. It’s part of the wind element in the body. Together with the breath there will either be pleasant feelings or unpleasant feelings. You’re trying to focus on the pleasant feelings and nurture them—give rise to them and keep them there. Then the perceptions—the images you hold in mind of the breath: When the breath …
- Dwelling in Emptiness… As long as the concrete hasn’t set yet, you don’t take away the forms. But once it has set, you can take away the forms, and the concrete stays right where it is. Learn how to appreciate that: Your mind is now empty of directed thought and evaluation. But there’s still some disturbance: The sense of rapture can sometimes get too …
- Spread Goodness Around… All three ways of developing inner worth are forms of happiness, forms of goodness, without blame. Years back I was going to be giving a Dhamma talk on Buddhist ideas on the pursuit of happiness. The afternoon before I gave the talk, I happened to visit one of my old college professors, whose field was Christian ethics. He asked me what the talk that …
- Learning by Doing… It starts with ignorance, and then there’s fabrication, consciousness, name and form, then you get to the sense organs, and then you get to the contact. This fact illustrates a principle the Buddha laid out in the first verse in the Dhammapada: All phenomena are preceded by the mind. It’s what’s going on in the mind prior to sensory contact that …
- Load next page...
