Search results for: "Form"
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- The Escape of Discipline… That’s a treasure right there, a very strong form of happiness. Then there’s the happiness that comes from understanding, from discernment: seeing where you have habits that cause unnecessary stress, unnecessary suffering, understanding why you do them, and understanding how you can drop them. A great sense of relief and release comes with that. So the training that the Buddha offers is …
- Take an Interest… So you want to be able to look into the mind and see, when a thought forms, how does it form? Can you trust it? What kind of impulse is it coming from: something that’s going to be good for you, or something that’s going to be bad? Is it going to be good for somebody else, or bad for somebody else …
- Cutting Through the Hype… We come up with an idea: “I’d like to do this,” and then the mind can elaborate on it and create all the hype you need in order to get going, to search for that form of happiness. When it comes, it’s usually not much, but again you can embroider it more. The hype while you are doing it, the hype after …
- Tending the Flame… As I mentioned last night with Ajaan Fuang’s image, when you’re trying to set something in cement, as long as the cement isn’t yet hard, you have to keep the form in place. But once the cement has hardened, then you can take the forms away So you find, as you settle down, that sometimes the mind hasn’t set yet …
- Metta Can Hurt… After all, the brahma-vihāras are a form of mindfulness. But then, to move into the other factors of awakening requires that you analyze things. When is it skillful and when is it not skillful to hold to mettā? When is it more skillful to hold to upekkhā, equanimity? And how do you make sure that your actions are based on mettā* *for others …
- Pride… passion for form, passion for formlessness, restlessness, and ignorance. There’s a good side to some of these qualities. You need a passion for form and for the formless, for instance, to really master the jhanas. Even restlessness can have its uses on the path, to keep you active and pushing ahead. Only when these fetters have served their purpose do you let them …
- Eeeels… And you open up also to the areas where thoughts begin to form. The formation of a thought usually starts as a little disturbance—or a little wavering, wiggling, whatever—and at the very beginning, it’s hard to tell whether it’s a physical or mental sensation. It’s on the borderline between the two. Then the mind scouts around, coming across this …
- Cleaning Out the Stables… As you remember, clinging comes in four forms. There’s sensuality—clinging to the pleasure of planning and fantasizing about sensual pleasures—which forms a nucleus for your desire. There are views about the world in which that object is going to be found. There are habits and practices—the things you have to do, the things you *should *do, within the context of …
- Beyond Inter-eating… just masses of form, masses of feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and sensory consciousness. You’ve taken these aggregates and you’ve turned them into your path. Even so there’s still a little bit of clinging there. And the clinging also relates to feeding. It’s the act of taking sustenance on these things. You’ve brought the mind to the most refined form of …
- The Long-Distance Meditator… One of its instructions is that even on days when you don’t have a lot of time to put into swimming practice, for the few minutes that you do put in, make sure your form is correct. So when you’re feeling sick, make sure the form of your meditation is correct, that you’re with the breath. It doesn’t require that …
- At Home in Jhana… You might think there are forms of happiness you get from very aroused states of mind, very active and running-around states of mind, but that’s not really happiness. The mind’s true happiness is when it’s at peace. Yet it’s so rarely at peace. It’s traveling around all the time, jumping from one thought to the next. If you …
- The Gift of Discernment… What are you holding onto in terms of the form, whatever forms there may be in your experience right now? What are you holding onto in terms of feelings, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness? How are you holding on? Why do you hold on? What’s the allure? When you see the allure, then you want to see the drawbacks of holding on like that. That …
- To Depend on Yourself… After all, the Buddha was speaking about ways of putting an end to suffering, and two of the forms of right resolve are goodwill and compassion. That goodwill and compassion will focus you on the problem of how to put an end to suffering, which points you to right view. So those two discernment factors help each other along. As you exercise them together …
- Mindfulness the Gatekeeper… You’re trying to understand all your mind’s attraction to other forms of becoming, so you need this form of becoming to hold on to, both to understand the process of becoming, and to compare this state of becoming with others, seeing that this one is a lot better. This is why we work at developing this state of becoming as part of …
- Looking after Yourself with Ease… As the Buddha said, the problem is that we’re usually doing these forms of fabrication in ignorance, which is why we suffer. But if we can bring knowledge to the process, they become part of the path away from suffering. That’s what we’re doing now: We’re bringing knowledge to all three processes as we focus on the breath. Try to …
- Cornered… You take it with a purpose and you make it into an actual experience of form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. You do that through the three fabrications we’ve talked about so much: bodily fabrication, the way you breathe; verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself; and mental fabrication, perceptions and feelings. These are our cooking techniques. Then we’ve got these …
- A Blameless Happiness… So as long as the happiness you’re looking for doesn’t involve any of those forms of harm, it’s fine. But that’s just the first test. The second test is: What impact does this particular pleasure or form of happiness have on your mind? Think about restraint of the senses: It doesn’t mean you deny yourself pleasures. As the Buddha …
- Strength of Conviction: 2… As Venerable Ananda once said, that way of thinking is a form of conceit, but it’s a conceit to be developed. It leads ultimately to the end of conceit, in other words to the stage where you don’t need to compare yourself with anyone else anymore because you’ve found the ultimate happiness, so why compare? That’s why this conviction is …
- Fabrication… Now it so happens that when we bring the mind to the breath, we have all these basic forces right here in their most elemental forms. The breath is the factor that fashions the body. It’s what they call kaya-sankhara or the “physical putting-together.” The breath is what puts life together in the body. If it weren’t for the breath …
- Beyond Inter-eating… You see how they form; you can see how they disband. You see the precise points where you’re making a decision to move in and continue creating more and more form and feeling and perceptions and thought constructs and consciousness in that thought world, all of which involve taking on an identity—which in turn takes a lot of food. So only when …
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