Search results for: "consciousness"
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- Like an Athlete in Training… It feeds off of contact, consciousness, and intentions. Like right now, we’re meditating. We’ve set the intention that we’re going to stay with the breath. That’s our food right now, and it’s good food. It’s healthy food, but you want to make sure it’s not just the kind of health food that tastes awful and the only …
- Common Ground… The form of the body, feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, consciousness, these we have in common. And the ways we cling: We cling through sensuality, through our habits and practices, through views about the world, and through ideas of who we are. And although the views and the ideas of who we are, and our habits and practices, and the particularity of our ideas of …
- A Position of Strength… The Buddha talks about the different properties of the body—earth, water, wind, and fire—and then the properties of space and consciousness. The way he uses the word property, or dhatu in Pali, is that it has potential. You have the potential for breath feelings all over the body, solid feelings, liquid feelings, warm feelings, all over the body. And you can make …
- In Accordance with the Dhamma… We cling to form, we cling to feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, consciousness, which means we feed on them, hoping to get some satisfaction out of them. As the Buddha points out, that’s why we’re suffering. So he wants us to gain a sense of having had enough of this kind of feeding. It’s through having had enough that we gain release …
- Concentration… your consciousness. You learn about the five aggregates in a hands-on way by maintaining your concentration. So as you learn how to maintain it in lots of different situations, you learn lots of useful things about the mind. You learn about the aggregates, you learn about which ones are skillful and which ones are not. You learn how to develop skillful fabrications and …
- Refuge in the Dhamma… There’s a feeling going into it, a way of breathing that goes into it, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness. Seeing things in those terms helps pull you out. So there’s the alertness to see what you’re doing, and the mindfulness to remind yourself, “Okay, this is a mind state.” That puts it in a framework. Then, recognizing what mind state it is, you …
- Recollection of the Buddha… If you believe that all you are is a body and that your consciousness is just an epiphenomenon, as they call it—a side effect of there being a body—then you can’t really believe that by training the mind you’re going to have any impact on anything at all—because in the materialist view, the only reality is physical reality. Yet …
- Distinctions That Make a Difference… Then there’s consciousness, which is aware of all these things. In order to do concentration properly, you have to have a hands-on mastery of these aggregates. That’s how you get to know them. When you get to know them in a hands-on way like this, then you can be more precise in noticing: “Where are you focused?” Are you focused …
- Beyond Duality… You can do the same thing with consciousness, contact, feeling, craving, or clinging. In other words, you learn to see these mental events as just that—as events, as actions—and then you apply that question of skillful and unskillful to those events. What kind of fabrication leads to more stress? What kind of fabrication leads to less stress? What happens if you can …
- The Brightness of Life… He didn’t consciously think about the fact that the world was lacking a Buddha before he met the Buddha. But as soon as he found one, he realized, “Oh. This is what it’s been missing.” So don’t just lie around and wait until the path is closed, when it gets forgotten. It gets buried by what the Buddha called “improved Dhamma …
- What Are You Bringing?… You consciously go through the people you love, the people you like, the people you’re neutral about, and even the people you dislike, trying to feel an attitude of genuine goodwill for them all. Of course, the people you dislike are the hardest ones. Don’t pretend that you feel goodwill when you don’t, but you’ve got to dig out: Why …
- Getting into the Body… The Buddha says that if you really want to see your attachment to form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness, this is the place to see it: in a concentrated mind. As you fully inhabit the body, you can see what it’s like to identify with the body. Ordinarily, our sense of identification is very erratic. It’s like the reflections of sunlight off …
- Keeping Your Head… your spirit. They can’t crush the goodness of the heart. They can’t crush the strength of your heart. Even as the body gets crushed, the heart will move on. Consciousness will move on. That’s the time where you really need to keep your head. So if the news is making you lose your head right now, how will you keep your …
- In Touch with Your Fabrications… When the Buddha defines fabrication, he defines it as taking the potentials for a sense of form, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, or consciousness, and then putting them together into actual experiences of those aggregates for the sake of something. Many of our problems come from the fact that we, in the past, did these things for the sake of what we thought was going …
- Worldly Dhammas… the water element, which is the coolness that permeates body; the earth element, the sense of solidity; space, both around the body and permeating between the atoms; and the element of consciousness: When you look at things simply as elements or as elementary properties or potentials, the affairs of world seem far away. The trick is to be able to maintain this level of …
- Unattractiveness… Go to consciousness. Don’t be so attached to the body. So if you feel attached to the body, it’s good to look at its negative side in a healthy way so that you can then look at its positive side in a healthy way as well. Get some good use out of it. Then, when the time comes to go, you can …
- Control… Then there’s consciousness, which is aware of all these things. This is how you take the aggregates and make a path out of them. The path may be makeshift: Remember the Buddha’s image of the raft. You don’t wait for a professional carpenter to come and make the raft for you. You put it together out of the twigs and branches …
- Doing, Maintaining, Using… As you gain that feel for it, then the various elements of form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, and consciousness begin to separate out. You can watch them for what they are. Then when you let them go, it’s not that you throw them away. You’ve simply learned that you don’t have to identify with them. You can pick them up when …
- Calm & Insight… Then, consciousness which is aware of all these things. These are said to be fabricated because the way you experience them is that there’s a potential for each of these that comes from the past. Sometimes you have many potentials coming up in the present moment, and your mind focuses on some and not on others, fabricating them into your actual experience of …
- Stick to Your Duties… Why is there the desire? Why is there the passion? What is the allure? Then you take the desire and passion and you separate them from the form, or the feeling, or the perception, the thought construct, the act of consciousness that you’re holding on to, so that you see just the desire and the passion in and of themselves: That’s what …
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