Search results for: "Fabrication"
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- The Easy Way Out… Then you ask, “To what extent are you fabricating this element of your experience?” Then you try to notice, when you’re fabricating that aspect—such as with the breath or with feelings or with your mind-states—which ways of fabricating are more stressful and which ones are less? Which ones add a burden to the mind and which ones take a burden …
- Fabricated Path, Unfabricated Goal… The breath is what the Buddha calls bodily fabrication. When you direct your thoughts to something and you evaluate it, that’s called verbal fabrication; you’re basically talking to yourself about it. So you can talk to yourself about the breath, the proviso being that you want to talk about it skillfully. Ask questions that actually help you to settle down: What kind …
- A Better Place to Feed… The fabrications he points to are: One, the breath—bodily fabrication. Two, verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself, which he calls directed thought and evaluation: when you choose a topic and then you make comments on it, ask questions about it, decide what you think about it. And then three, mental fabrication, your perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the words and images …
- A Cure for the Sluggish Mind… Where are you feeding right now? Analyze the mind’s feeding habits in terms of fabrication. Remember there’s verbal fabrication and mental fabrication. Verbal fabrication is directed thought and evaluation: how you talk to yourself. The Buddha’s analysis of how you talk to yourself, dividing it into directed thought and evaluation, is really useful. What topics are you choosing? Where do you …
- A Passion for the Path… Why is that? Because they’re fabricated and you’re holding on to something fabricated. But there’s also suffering in the fact that it’s not worth holding on. In fact, if you cling to anything, the clinging is, in and of itself, suffering. That’s what you have to see. It’s a value judgment that you’re going to have to …
- Inquisitive… The work is right here in this process of fabrication that goes into the breathing, bodily fabrication. How does bodily fabrication relate to verbal fabrication? And how does that relate to mental fabrication? It’s all happening right here, and you learn the answers to those questions not in the abstract but being right here, too: noticing connections right here, asking questions right here …
- Attachment to the Body… The next step is to try to calm what the Buddha calls “bodily fabrication,” in other words, the in-and-out breath. He uses a technical term here. He could have said simply, “calm the in-and-out breathing,” but he wants you to think in terms of fabrication, what the mind is doing to shape the breath, because that’s going to be …
- Cooking the Present Moment… That’s why the breath is called a bodily fabrication. Then there’s verbal fabrication—your inner chatter right now: asking questions, making statements, commenting on this, commenting on that. If you leave that mental chatter to its old ways, it just wanders all over the place. But here we’re bringing it to bear on the breath. So you talk to yourself about …
- Delight in Striving… Those, the Buddha said, require that you exert a fabrication. In this case, it would be the three kinds of fabrication: bodily, verbal, and mental. Bodily being the way you breathe in and out. Verbal being the way you talk to yourself—what the Buddha defines as direct thought and evaluation—you pick a topic, you focus on the topic, and then you ask …
- Feeding Frenzy: Dependent Co-arising… Dig down a few more steps into dependent co-arising, and you come to fabrication. Fabrication comes in three kinds: bodily, verbal, and mental. Bodily fabrication is the breath; verbal fabrication is directed thought and evaluation; and mental fabrication is feeling and perception. When you’re focused on the breath, thinking about and evaluating the breath, you’ve got all these things right there …
- Full Attention… We forget the Buddha’s analysis of feelings, which would place feelings and emotions, in our sense of those terms, under the aggregate of fabrications, rather than under the aggregate of vedana, which is a matter of the feeling tone: pleasant, painful, or neither pleasant nor painful. We forget how fabricated our feelings are, how conditioned they are, and the fact that just because …
- On Not Being a Victim… After all, all the elements of the path are fabricated. Your experience is fabricated through your intentions to begin with. And the path, everything from right view on down to right concentration: These are all fabrications. Right view means learning to look at things in a certain way, learning to look for certain things. So learn to look for some concentration, look for some …
- Calming the Breath… The next step is calming bodily fabrication as you breathe in, calming bodily fabrication as you breathe out. This is an important step. The term “bodily fabrication” here means specifically the in-and-out breath, and it seems to mean even more specifically the intentional element that you bring to each breath—because, as we all know, the breath is one of the few …
- Right Next to Ignorance… The primary explanation of the causal chain, of course, is in dependent co-arising, where he talks about how ignorance conditions fabrication. So what have we got? Right next to ignorance, you’ve got the breath—that’s bodily fabrication. You’ve got directed thought and evaluation—that’s verbal fabrication. And then you’ve got feelings and perceptions—mental fabrication. This is one …
- Cooking Skills… the three kinds of fabrication. There’s bodily fabrication: the in-and-out breath. Verbal fabrication: directed thought and evaluation—in other words, the way you talk to yourself. You choose a topic and then you comment on it. And then mental fabrication: perceptions—the labels you apply to things, the images you apply—and then feelings, feelings of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor …
- Samvega vs. Dispassion… You don’t feel a need anymore to feed off these things, and that allows you to stop creating all the fabrications you’ve been creating around the things of the world in an effort to dress them up as food. What follows is dispassion, and that’s not a negative thing. You’re dispassionate toward all that fabrication you’ve been doing, and …
- Develop Your Inner Observer… This luminosity is a quality to be developed, which means it’s part of the path, which further means it’s conditioned and fabricated. But it’s a really useful thing to fabricate. The more sensitive you get to how the mind fabricates, even on the bare level of bare awareness, the more likely you are to get the mind inclined to want to …
- The Questions of Suffering… Fabrications fabricate thoughts, and consciousness cognizes. These are activities, and we cling to them, which means we try to get our sustenance out of them. We try to feed off of these things. That’s why we suffer. How do you feed off feelings? You want pleasant feelings. Whatever sensation comes in, you grab onto it and try to squeeze whatever pleasure you can …
- True & Beneficial… So, given that your projections and fabrications in the present moment are an important part of your experience, how do you fabricate well? The Buddha’s instructions are all about that: that it is possible to make a fabricated path, a constructed path that goes to something that is unfabricated and unconstructed. The raft doesn’t cause the other side of the river to …
- An Inner Revolution… But in the process, you get ever more subtle insights into what it means to fabricate your present experience. A question that ultimately comes up is: “Is there an alternative where you don’t have to fabricate it at all?” That’s the question you pursue. And when you find the answer, that’s when things open up to something else entirely. There’s …
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