Search results for: "Form"
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- 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 …
- A Heart Set on Goodwill… Universal goodwill is also a form of mindfulness. You have to keep it in mind, that regardless of what other people do you’ve got to have goodwill for them. That means you’ve got to understand what goodwill means. It’s a wish for happiness. And you’ve got to understand that wish for happiness in line with right view. One of the …
- Use Your Imagination… Greed, aversion, and delusion can come in 108 different forms, and maybe 108 is too small a number. If you want to just memorize a few principles and hope that those few things will take care of everything, the defilements will eat you up. You’ve got to be willing to come up with new ideas on your own. When you stop and think …
- High Level Metta… You’ll notice that these three forms of fabrication work together. The image you hold in your mind is going to have an effect on how you breathe. The way you breathe is going to have an impact on the feelings: You sense a pleasure here or tightness there. And then directed thought and evaluation go through and try to straighten things out—evaluating …
- In Harmlessness Is Strength… This is why developing the pleasure of concentration is not a bad form of clinging. You may be clinging to it, but you’re clinging to something good. It’s a good attachment. If you don’t have this form of pleasure, you’re going to go sneaking out and finding your pleasure in other places, not all of which may be skillful, and …
- Safe at Home… One of the purposes of meditation is to be able to sit here in the present moment and see a thought form and to decide very clearly whether it’s worth going with or not. After all, some thoughts really are useful. They can help give rise to discernment, give rise to concentration, give rise to understanding. They can be very useful. Others are …
- The Buddha Didn’t Play Gotcha… Repeatedly, the Buddha talks about analyzing the concentration in and of itself, seeing what in the concentration is form, feeling, perception, thought fabrication, or consciousness. You realize that even when you let go of outside aggregates, or the grosser aggregates, there are still these subtler aggregates inside. It’s right here that the work can be done. So the Buddha’s teachings are very …
- Audacious & Undaunted… You begin to see that this is how an intention forms, this is how a craving forms, and this is how the mind is in collusion with its unskillful states. This is how you can get it so that it doesn’t want to fall into unskillful states again. That’s how concentration leads to discernment, as your actions come more and more in …
- Noble Right Concentration… The breath is part of form. The feeling of pleasure that arises as you stay focused: That’s feeling. The mental image you have of the breath: That’s perception. Directed thought and evaluation as you try to adjust the breath, play with the breath, make the most of the sense of pleasure that comes from being with the breath: That’s fabrication. Then …
- A Friend When You’re on Your Own… They form the foundation on which you continue to stand. So look carefully for who you take as your friend. We miss a lot of this nowadays in Dhamma circles because the pattern has changed from apprenticeship to mass production. We have a mass-produced Dhamma for mass retreats. There are techniques that were developed in the nineteenth century. The Asians were very impressed …
- The Pursuit of Pleasure… That’s the kind of pleasure that actually forms the path to the end of suffering. And this is what we’re working on as we meditate. It’s a pursuit of pleasure. It’s instructive to know that in Pali, they don’t have different words for pleasure, happiness, bliss, ease, and well-being. These are all one word, sukha. They do distinguish …
- Safety All Around… Then, of course, the Buddha’s teaching on the Triple Training teaches you other forms of protection as well. With the training in heightened virtue, where you observe the five precepts, you observe them strictly. If you’re consistent in holding to the precepts, you’re providing safety to everybody. They don’t have to fear anything from you. They don’t have to …
- Concentration Food… These three forms of craving are part of the cause of suffering. Those are to be abandoned. But the desire to do this well is part of the path. Which means it’s to be developed. So, we work on mindfulness. We work on ardency. We work on alertness. We work on using our directed thought and evaluation, our inner conversation, in a way …
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