Search results for: "consciousness"
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- The Limits of Interconnectedness… But it always has to be with the consciousness that these relationships are going to end. And as you die, as you go towards death, for focus is going to be forced more and more into this area right here, right now, i.e., your direct experience of your mind, your direct experience of your body, how body and mind feel from within. You …
- The Cost of Happiness… Or the totality of non-dual consciousness. They all sound like very good places. But if you get there, you have to look: To what extent is it still fabricated? How are you going to see the process of fabrication? You look to see: Is there still any change? Is there any stress? If there is, then it’s something not worthy of your …
- Self-starting… There’s the element of consciousness. Space and consciousness, in particular, require a lot of good, solid concentration for you to be able to stay with them consistently. This is why we work with the breath and the other physical elements first. But as your concentration gets more subtle, you can begin to pick things up that you didn’t see before, and they …
- The Beginnings of Wisdom… It begins with, “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” As for the inconstancy of form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness: That’s a teaching you use within the context of that search for long-term happiness. As you get in the more advanced stages of the practice, you look at the states of concentration that you …
- 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 …
- Honesty… There are states of awareness and consciousness we feed on. There are also mental intentions, and these are the important ones. What’s your intention? What do you want out of a situation, and why does that particular desire appeal to you? Learn to look at it with a jaundiced eye. We don’t like to think that we have unskillful emotions and ideas …
- Faith in Awakening… Craving and consciousness can feed each other, even without the body. They can go on and on and on indefinitely. What the Buddha learned in his second knowledge is that how things go on and on depends on the quality of our actions. The quality of our actions depends on our intentions, and our intentions depend on our views. The third knowledge is that …
- The Best of a Bad Situation… You can’t imagine relating to your thoughts, your feelings, your perceptions, even your acts of consciousness in any other way aside from clinging to them. But the Buddha is saying there are other ways, to expand your imagination. One way of expanding your imagination is to start with something really simple: generosity. I used to read stories of explorers going to the Arctic …
- Being Somebody, Going Somewhere… They may consciously be on a particular path or not. There are paths going to hell, there are paths going to an animal rebirth, or to rebirth as a hungry ghost. Most of the people on those paths don’t realize that those are the paths they’re on. But their actions are taking them someplace. There are also paths to the human realm …
- The Karma of Meditation… Consciousness depends on craving, craving depends on consciousness, and they can feed each other along the way. But if you feed the mind really well until it’s strong, it doesn’t need that companion of craving anymore. It doesn’t need to feed. You can bring it to a point of equilibrium through the development of both insight and tranquility, and another dimension …
- A Pure Happiness… What are they? There’s form, which is how you’re experiencing the body right now; feeling; perception; thought-constructs; and consciousness. The point of this is if you look at what you’ve got in these five terms, you realize there’s not that much there to cling to, not that much there to hold onto. Form is just a sense of the …
- Success with Breathing… You may not have been thinking consciously of them, but reflect back on your work, reflect back on your manual and artistic skills to see how you actually have used these qualities. For example, with desire, you know from experience that if you simply want the results, they’re not going to happen. You have to focus your desire on the causes, trying to …
- Making an Effort… The kind of happiness that comes through ordinary effort in terms of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, ideas, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness: There’s effort in all of these things. The basic building blocks of our experience, the five aggregates, require fabrication. Even before we sense things, there’s an element of fabrication going on in the mind. If the mind weren …
- A Multilingual Mind… In particular, he focuses on the connections between what he calls name and form on one hand and consciousness on the other. Starting with this connection, he points out how suffering is built on top of it. The important elements of name and form are contact and intention. The way you regard the contact is another element of name and form, called attention. But …
- 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 …
- Learn from the Ants… form, feeling, perception, mental fabrications, and consciousness. Once you read the definitions, you realize that these are things you do, and you’re doing them all the time. How the mind functions, how the mind works: That’s a constant. If it works certain ways, it’s going to cause suffering. If it works in other ways, it’s going to lead to the …
- Truth in Action… Even the highest form of non-duality, the Buddha said—the non-duality of consciousness—is still fabricated. It’s still something that’s put together. And you want to see that as an activity. That’s how you get to go beyond it. So it’s not the case that we work at being very careful about what we’re doing up to …
- 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 …
- Discernment in Concentration… And then there’s your consciousness, your awareness of all this. These are the things you’re going to need to know, and this is the best way to get to know them: by turning them into concentration, a state of body and mind where things come together. So it’s important that you realize that as you’re doing concentration you’re also …
- In Terms of the Four Noble Truths… attachment to the body, to feelings, perceptions, ideas, even attachment to sensory consciousness. You want to notice that when you leave concentration, these things get heavier, more burdensome. The stories you build around them, the sense of who you are that you build around them, the sense of the world that you build around them, all of which is called becoming: It becomes a …
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