Search results for: "Fabrication"
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- Push Yourself… That requires exerting bodily fabrication—in other words, looking at the way you’re breathing—as well as verbal fabrication, the way you think about a particular issue. Say that anger comes up. How are you thinking about it? How are you directing your thoughts to the anger? How are you evaluating the anger, evaluating the situation? Are you doing it a way that …
- Values… Now, fabrication here can mean your bodily fabrication, in other words, the way you breathe. Say, anxiety arises, and you find yourself breathing in a certain uncomfortable way. Well, learn how to breathe in another way that’s not so aggravating to the anxiety. Then there’s verbal fabrication: How are you talking to yourself about the issue? What are you saying? Suppose you …
- Why We Train the Mind… You have to work with what are called different kinds of fabrications. There’s bodily fabrication, which is the breath; verbal fabrication, directed thought and evaluation, in other words, how you narrate and analyze the problem to yourself. Then there’s mental fabrication: feelings and perceptions. “Feeling” here doesn’t mean emotion. It means the feeling tone that you focus on with regard to …
- It’s up to You… Then you stop your fabrication of the present moment. And as you stop that fabrication, something opens up inside: total freedom, totally unrestricted by space or time. That’s the direction we’re heading to, the direction of less and less disturbance, based on the realization that the disturbances that are bothering your mind are actually coming from your mind itself. And if you …
- Dimensions of Right Effort… This is called exerting a fabrication. And this requires that you understand the different elements that go into this process of how the mind fabricates something. On the one hand, there’s the breath, which is bodily fabrication. This is one of the reasons why we focus on the breath. The breath is an intentional process, and we look at the breath so that …
- Fighting off Ignorance… Then, conditioned by ignorance, we fabricate our experience. Some of that fabrication comes in from the past, but a lot of it comes in the choices we’re making right now. For instance, you can choose to ignore the breath or you can choose to pay attention to the breath. You can choose to breathe in different ways. You can actually breathe in ways …
- 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 …
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