Search results for: "Form"

  1. Page 18
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. For the Sake of the Deathless
     … Even form deforms. We know form through its activities. And fabrication fabricates all the aggregates for a purpose, for the sake of something. And as the Buddha saw rightly, it’s for the sake of happiness. The thing is, we have to keep on fabricating because the happiness we’ve gained from our activities in the past lasts for a little while and then … 
  18. Relating to Kamma
     … Part of the reaction came in the form of a teaching that said that people didn’t have any free will, so when someone gave something to someone else, it didn’t really mean anything. The other part of the reaction took the form of a teaching on annihilation, that when you die, pffft, you just go out and that’s it. This would … 
  19. A Slave to Craving
     … It confirms what you’ve already seen, that the pleasure of jhana, the pleasure of concentration, is really a much better form of pleasure. And you are better off not running after those other things. This is one way in which you begin to cut the leash that craving has on the heart. When mind is solid enough, then you can start looking at … 
  20. Circumspection
     … As the Buddha once said, it’s not that he praises all practices or condemns all practices, he doesn’t praise every form of renunciation, he doesn’t condemn every form of renunciation. He would praise the practices that would lead to fewer defilements, and condemn the ones that don’t. The test, of course, is when you apply a particular strategy or apply … 
  21. Discernment in Concentration
     … Even form he says deforms; feelings feel; perceptions perceive; fabrications fabricate; consciousness cognizes. These are activities, and you use them as you get the mind to settle down. In this way, you get on familiar terms with them. As a famous philosopher once said, “The things we know best are the things we do.” And for the most part, most people do things, say … 
  22. Load next page...