Search results for: "Form"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. Inconstant, Stressful, Not-self
     … Once the path has been brought to its culmination, that’s when you apply the same analysis even to the aggregates that form the path: the form of the body sitting here meditating, the feelings of pleasure you’ve created through concentration, the perception that holds you in concentration, the mental fabrications that maintain the intention to stay in concentration, and the awareness of … 
  13. The Power of Intention
     … Why do we want to see the mind? We want to see what it’s doing as it forms an intention. All the qualities that are to be brought to bear on getting the mind into concentration—mindfulness, alertness, ardency—are focused on your actions, your intentional actions. Mindfulness keeps things in mind so that you can recognize when something comes up: Is this … 
  14. Cooking with Kamma
     … There’s delight and there’s passion, which can take all kinds of forms. So what form are they taking in your mind right now, telling you that a certain unpleasant event has made you suffer, or a certain physical pain is making you suffer? Learn how to separate these things out and see to what extent the pain is coming from past kamma … 
  15. One Thing Only
     … So wherever there’s any stress or dukkha in any of its forms, you’ve got to look into what you’re doing. Then you can change what you’re doing and shape a different present: That’s the positive point. Now, because what you’re experiencing right now is a combination of different factors, that means you have to look and look again … 
  16. In Memory of King Rama IX
     … The fourth quality is generosity, which, as the Buddha points out many, many times, is a form of wealth. You find that you have more than enough of something and you’re happy to share. And this doesn’t have to be just material things. You can share your energy. You can share your knowledge. You can share your forgiveness. Be fair to other … 
  17. The Value of Refuge
     … The happiness of form; the pleasure of form. There was pleasure; there was rapture. So he asked himself, could this be the way? And the answer that came to him was Yes. So he asked himself another question: “Why am I afraid of that pleasure? Why am I afraid of that happiness?” For six years, he had been running away from happiness. But what … 
  18. Don’t Stop with Acceptance
     … Feeling also occurs in name and form. There it’s associated with the different elements in the body. That’s the “form” part of name and form. In name, there are perceptions again. There are also acts of attention and acts of intention. What is your intention with regard to the pain? Maybe that’s aggravating the pain. Do you want it to go … 
  19. Right Resolve
     … the ideal happiness to form part of the path. So focus on the breath in a way that feels comfortable. Focusing on the breath is called directed thought. Learning how to make it comfortable is called evaluation. These are the two factors that help build concentration. The third factor is singleness: that you really focus on the breath and try to stay with the … 
  20. A Safe Place
     … Sometimes your greed, your aversion, your delusion can take very strange forms; forms you wouldn’t like anyone to see. You get to the point where you don’t want to see them yourself. So little messages get sent around in the mind, and you turn a blind eye to them. You’re like a teacher in a classroom where the kids are sending … 
  21. Ups & Downs
     … Do you want to slide back there? That’s one form of encouragement. Another form of encouragement, of course, is to read stories of people who actually made it to awakening. The Theragatha and Therigatha are really good in this area: the stories of the nuns and the monks who went through an awful lot, and had an awful lot of obstacles in their … 
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