Search results for: "consciousness"
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- Chanting on Your Own… I remember one night in particular as I was chanting and I got to consciousness, something inside me clicked and said, “This is referring to my awareness right here, right now,” and I saw that it spoke to my direct experience. That’s one way in which chanting can be useful in the meditation: You repeat something long enough, you get to know it …
- Seriously Happy… He says that the aggregates of form, feeling, perception, fabrication, consciousness—the things out of which we create our sense of self—have their pleasures and their pains. He says that it’s because of their pleasures that we get stuck on them. It’s because of their pains that we look for a way out. So when you find yourself missing a particular …
- The End of Uncertainty… When there are feelings, be alert to what you’re doing in the feeling, in the perception, in the thought fabrication, in the consciousness. Each of these things contains an element of fabrication, an element of present intention. Do you ever notice that? Do you see it happening? If you can’t yet see it happening, look at what you can see that you …
- Balance & Release… You might consciously try to fight aging by doing longer in-breaths and shorter out-breaths to see if the breath can have a rejuvenating influence on the body. Whatever technique you find that gives more energy to your practice is helpful. Ajaan Fuang once said, “You have to be really crazy about this to do it well.” Otherwise, you might not be paying …
- Training the Whole Mind… After all, the big issue is how you relate to yourself, how you relate to the body, how you relate to feelings, perceptions, thought-fabrications, and consciousness. That’s the area where you’re causing yourself suffering, so that’s the area where you’ve got to gain sensitivity and insight. Nobody else can get into your head and straighten these things out for …
- Self-starting… past?” Look at what kind of person you’re becoming, given the habits you’ve been picking up, the habits that you’ve been training yourself in—regardless of whether you consciously regard yourself as being in training in that particular habit. A habit of laziness, a habit of carelessness: We don’t think of ourselves as training ourselves in those directions, but if …
- Tranquility & Insight… There’s form, feeling, perception, fabrication itself, and consciousness. Or there’s another list called the three fabrications: bodily fabrication—which is the breath; verbal fabrication—directed thought and evaluation; and mental fabrication—perceptions and feelings. These things are all involved in doing the concentration. In terms of the five aggregates: You’ve got the body here that you’re focused on: That’s …
- The Size of Your Eyes… We may not consciously think of it when we’re developing it in the direction of greed, aversion, and delusion, but that’s what we’re going. But we have the choice to develop it in a good direction. Remember that this is what wisdom is all about. Sometimes, when you hear about Buddhist wisdom, you think about emptiness or not-self or statements …
- Respect for Concentration… And then your consciousness, which could be aware of all kinds of things: You devote it to being conscious of this process of getting the mind to settle down. Don’t pay attention to anything else, even the voice of the talk here. Let that be in the background. These activities are called aggregates, and ordinarily we suffer a lot because of the aggregates …
- Pleasure on the Middle Way… Sometimes there will be a resistance to opening up, for fear that in the past you’ve breathed in ways—not consciously of course—but you’ve breathed in ways that were harsh and uncomfortable, and there are parts of the body that will close up as a result. But as you start breathing in a way that feels good in some parts of …
- Free to Choose… As long as there’s consciousness that feeds on craving, which gives rise to more craving, the process can just keep on going indefinitely. It’s not going anywhere in particular and it doesn’t serve any purpose. Now, that insight can be depressing if you think about it in one way, but it’s liberating if you think about it in another way …
- The Problem Is Birth… Notice that when he was asked, “What happens when a being goes from one body to another?” he didn’t say, “There’s no such thing as a being.” He said that wherever there’s attachment to the aggregates—form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness—there is a being. It’s in taking on that identity as a being: That’s why we keep on …
- 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 …
- Hitting a Wall… Your mindfulness, your effort, all the qualities that need to go into the path, are things that you experience from within, your consciousness. So in that sense, your path is a very particular one. But in a more general sense, the path has the same structure for everybody. We all need to have all eight factors of the path. And they all need to …
- Think Like a Thief… If you feel desire or passion for form, feeling, perception, thought formations, consciousness, all of which are activities, you feed off of these things the way the fire feeds off fuel. And you get stuck on these things the way fire stuck in its fuel. The basic image the Buddha uses here, as you know, is in the word nibbāna. It refers to a …
- Quiet in the Midst of Turmoil… the food of sensory contact, the food of consciousness at the senses, the food of our intentions with regard to what’s going on outside. So you’ve got to give the mind something better to feed on. This is why we practice mindfulness immersed in the body, totally immersed in the whole body. Be aware of the whole-body breath coming in and …
- Measuring Progress… It was because she wasn’t developing any discernment, and she wasn’t using the discernment she did have, consciously applying it for the rest of the day. Part of the problem was that when she was in concentration it was very intense, and she couldn’t even think. She didn’t have the ability that Ajaan Fuang was trying to teach her, which …
- Truths of the Will… That’s a truth of the will that you may or may not have been consciously acting on. As the Buddha said, you have to ask yourself every day: “Days and nights fly past, fly past. What am I becoming right now?” What kind of person are you becoming? We’re all becoming older, but what kind of older person are you becoming? Are …
- An Auspicious Birth… It wants this kind of feeling, these kinds of perceptions, thought constructs, this kind of consciousness. We talk of the first kind of birth being auspicious when you’re born into a family that’s got material comforts and you have an opportunity to meet with the Dhamma. But it’s really made auspicious by this other kind of birth, the momentary attachment, because …
- Me, Me, Me… form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness. That gives you five. In each of those cases, you can either identify directly with the aggregate or you can think of yourself as someone who has that aggregate, or somehow you’re in the aggregate, or the aggregate is in you. That’s four times five: twenty. Twenty possible ways of thinking about your self. On top …
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