Search results for: "Form"
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- Standards for Thinking… But if you notice that there are also movements through the body, and take those as a form of breath, an energy that goes through the body, you realize they can be felt anywhere. The little muscles in your blood vessels tense up, relax, tense up, relax, and this goes in waves through the body. Can you feel that as you breathe in, as …
- Using Your Many Minds… Ultimately, you reach the point where you can let go of any form of concentration, because concentration contains the most subtle levels of the aggregates that we chanted about just now: form feeling, perception, mental fabrications, consciousness. They’re all there in the concentration. When you learn how to let go of the most subtle levels, then you’re totally free. But you can …
- Disenchantment… You look for the origination of whatever desire you have—for forms, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, and consciousness—and you see that it originates in the mind. What is it in the mind that wants these things? What wants to take the raw materials, the potentials in the present moment for these things, and turn them into actual aggregates? And then from the aggregates …
- Understanding Through Developing… Those are preliminary forms of understanding. You want to have a sketch in your mind about how things should work, how the path works, which topics are worth thinking about, which ones are not worth thinking about. Then you think about the things that are worth thinking about. These will be in line with the duties of the four noble truths: You want to …
- Dealing with Limitations… As the Buddha said, when you become a being, you identify with form, feeling, perception, fabrications, or consciousness of particular kinds. And whatever way you identify yourself, that’s how you limit yourself. You gain certain powers by bringing those things under your control, but you also take on certain limitations. Those limitations may not be getting in the way of the particular task …
- Victory in Battle… I was talking with someone the other day who was saying that she wanted to figure out how to take care of all forms of greed all at once. I said, no, they’re going to be individual cases. She gave me a despairing look, “That means I have to deal with all my defilements?” Yep, you have to deal with all your defilements …
- Potentials… You probably know the passage where the Buddha says that you look at form, feeling, perception, fabrication and consciousness, and you ask yourself: “Are they under your control? Can you have them be the way you want them to be?” The answer is “partially.” Most people tend to think that there’s nothing you can do about them at all. You’ve just got …
- The Sublime Attitudes… The three roots of unskillfulness — greed, aversion, and delusion — can branch out into five hindrances, seven obsessions, ten fetters, 108 forms of craving. They grow exponentially. No one skillful quality can take them all on. Each skillful quality has to be strengthened by others to be effective, to play its part in the training of the whole mind. At the same time, each has …
- Helping Yourself by Helping Others… If they think you’re weak, then they know nothing of the Dhamma”—because you have to remember that qualities like goodwill, patience, equanimity, and kindness are forms of strength. There’s that story where Lady Vedehika is famous for being kind, generous, and mild-mannered. And she has a slave woman, Kali. And Kali starts wondering, “Why does she have this good reputation …
- The Safety of Jhana… You’ve got your old karma and then you’ve got consciousness, focused in on whatever old karma presents in terms of form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrications, or consciousness itself. Instead of delighting in the idea of making something new out of these things, you can simply see them as they arise and pass away. That’s how you go beyond the dichotomy between …
- Working with Fabrication… All the different voices in the mind, all the different committee members, all our different identities are made up of these various forms of fabrication. This is where the teaching gets useful. A thought comes into your mind, an emotion comes into your mind, telling you that you want to do this or that: If you realize that it’s not skillful, you can …
- The Chess Game… One of the basic principles in the Buddha’s teachings is that if you see that there’s a higher or greater form of happiness that you can gain by giving up a lower form of happiness, you have to be willing to give up the lower form—happy to give it up. That’s what’s hard about the practice. The Buddha was …
- Surveying the World… You’re doing this to clear the decks, because eventually you’ll want to see how those thoughts form—the ones that pull you away, that want to go back to more papañca. And from a still mind, you can see what motivates them: the arrow that the Buddha talked about. So as you’re here right now, if there are any thoughts of …
- Focus on What’s Important… There are forms of pleasure that have nothing to do with sensuality. Even though the pleasure of the first jhāna is intensely physical, it’s not sensual. It’s a pleasure of form, the body as you feel it from within. He could engage in it without causing any harm to himself or to others. And it could take him to awakening. But to …
- In Times of Danger and Fear… Then when danger comes in a blatant form, we tend to lose our wits. We don’t think straight. We think that because things are dangerous we have to take special measures that are really not reasonable. Reason lies in realizing that dangers are around us all the time, and that we have to behave well in spite of the dangers. Or we might …
- To Suffer Is an Active Verb… We’ve got potentials coming in from the past for form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. And then, for the sake of having aggregates to use, we fashion them—we put them together—into actual aggregates. The Pali in this particular sutta is rather strange: It says that we do this for the sake of feelingness, for the sake of formness, for the sake …
- What You Sense Directly… what the Buddha calls name and form. I’ve been reading a book recently saying that all of our language is metaphorical. The metaphors get really deep into our experiences, so deep that it’s hard to say that we don’t have any experience that hasn’t been colored by the metaphors of our language and culture. But there is one experience that …
- The Path of Happiness… It’s in seeing those subtle forms of stress that you begin to see the movements of the mind in a very direct way. That was how he began to see which forms of desire are actually part of the path and are conducive to concentration, and which forms of desire pull you away. This is taking a very special attitude toward happiness. As …
- A Pervasive Well-being… That’s the kind of concentration that can form a basis for insight because nothing is blocked out at that stage in the practice. The mind is allowed to be as large as it wants to be, but it’s centered. It’s got a basis. It’s not wandering around here. It’s more radiant. You may not actually sense light—some people …
- Wealth & Strength… They started out poor in worldly wealth, but they had wealth in the form of conviction—and, through being willing to change and grow, they were able to parlay that wealth to great attainments. This, too, is a lesson we should take to heart. We tend to be really stubborn about our habits. “This is the way I am, this is the way I …
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