Search results for: "consciousness"

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  2. Assumptions
     … You use your body, you use your feelings, you use your perceptions, your fabrications, your consciousness. You convert them into the path. As Ajaan Lee once said, “A wise person can get good use out of anything.” We’re told that the aggregates, if you cling to them, are the essence of what’s stressful, the essence of suffering. So what the Buddha has … 
  3. Death World
     … The infinitude of consciousness is 40,000, and the dimension of nothingness is 60,000. That’s a long time. But if you haven’t gained any of the noble attainments, then when you fall from those places, you fall hard. You can go fall all the way down to hell, you can fall to be an animal, you can be a hungry ghost … 
  4. Equanimity & Power
     … ways that may not be skillful? We’re trying to bring some light into areas of the mind that tend to be subconscious, to bring them up into the light of consciousness so that we can see, “Oh, this is what I’m doing.” When we talk about breath energy, a lot of people get confused. They say, “What kind of breath energy could … 
  5. The Right Place to Look
     … And as you can work through your own ignorance, you’re going to be able to see where you’re doing things semi-consciously that are actually harmful to yourself or other people. You can stop that harm, both for yourself and for everyone else. So when you’re working with the breath, you’re working right close to the source. This is where … 
  6. How & Why We Meditate
     … The breath is one of the few bodily functions that you can actually change consciously, so try to take advantage of that fact, both for the settling down and for the being observant. If the breath feels good and you find it interesting to notice how the way you breathe has an impact on how the body feels, that helps you to stay in … 
  7. Goodwill Is Respect
     … This is why we consciously develop thoughts of goodwill. It’s not that goodwill is our innate nature. Goodwill comes easily to us in some cases, and ill will comes just as easily in others. That’s the typical human attitude. What we’re trying to develop are Brahma attitudes, and those are higher, more refined, more inclusive: goodwill for all, everybody without exception … 
  8. A Simple Path Through a Complex Map
     … All you have to do is to bring knowledge to one connection, say, between name and form and consciousness, or to feeling and craving, or contact and feeling, or any of the combinations. You bring knowledge to these things, and—because the cycle has so many feedback loops—you can get whole the cycle to stop. What kind of knowledge? Knowledge in terms of … 
  9. Body as Path
     … And of course there’s consciousness. They’re all here together. You’re taking all the aggregates and you’re using to make them a path. Once you’ve done it, then you try to maintain it. Keep the path going inside. Think of your body as a path. How the mind relates to the body is a path. So ask yourself: The state … 
  10. Your Main Foundation
     … When the Buddha talks about form, feeling, perception, fabrications, or consciousness, what is he talking about? You can see these things in action. Or feelings, mind states, and mental qualities: You can see them in action because you’ve worked through all the interference that the breath was creating. By staying here with the breath and making it really still, you’ve learned how … 
  11. Count Yourself Lucky
     … If you’re not consciously changing the breathing, then all the adjustments of the breathing become subconscious where you can’t see them. So take your desire for immediate happiness and focus it right here. We talk about the path having a goal, but it doesn’t save all of its good things for the end. As the Buddha said, the path is good … 
  12. The Alternative of Concentration
     … It’s useful when you start out meditating to make a very quick scan through the body—through your various joints, especially around the wrists, around the hands, any part of the body that tends to be tense most of the time—and just consciously relax it, to create the right feeling tone for what you’re about to do. Then the mind can … 
  13. Construction Techniques
     … In other words, these are feelings that you consciously give rise to. Then when you have something pleasant and rapturous or refreshing, let it spread throughout the body so that the whole body is saturated. So this is a technique that doesn’t just tell you what to do. It focuses you on areas where you can explore. It encourages you to become more … 
  14. Goodwill as Wealth
     … It’s one of the few bodily processes that can go on either unintentionally and subconsciously, or intentionally and more consciously. The problem is that when we start getting conscious of it, we start screwing it up. We have certain cartoon ideas about where the breath comes in or which part of the body has to do the work, and if we don’t … 
  15. Inconstancy
     … So the Buddha’s having you do fabricate consciously: to get more and more subtle in your acts of fabrication until you see that even the subtlest, calmest, most secure and stable fabrication—even that has its little ups and downs. As the Buddha said, that’s when you incline the mind to the deathless. This insight turns you around. Up to that point … 
  16. Lessons from the Breath
     … It’s something you consciously do with as much knowledge as possible, so that your mental and verbal fabrication don’t cause suffering. You understand that when you think, when you have feelings and perceptions, if you do that with ignorance, it’s going to cause suffering. But if you do it with knowledge, it goes in the other direction and helps form a … 
  17. Merit: Goodness of the Heart
     … the form of your body as you feel it from within; your feelings; your perceptions; your fabrications, the way you put thoughts together; and your consciousness. All of these things are activities. Even the way you keep reaffirming to yourself where your body is right now: That’s an activity, your sense of form, i.e., how you feel the body from within. The … 
  18. Weathering Karma Storms
     … You can very consciously breathe in a calm way, even though the thoughts will still be there. They may have taken over your visual field inside like an IMAX screen, but you still have the sensation of the body as you feel it from within. So, stick with body, body, body sensations. That’s one of the good things about taking the breath as … 
  19. Meaning & Importance
     … As the Buddha says, we take the potentials for form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness, and we fabricate them into actual forms, feelings, etc., for the sake of something. Usually for the sake of happiness, which means that every present moment has a for-the-sake-of in it. It’s moving in a direction. It’s a means to an end. That’s … 
  20. Pull Yourself Up by Your Fetters
     … The dimensions of the infinitude of space, the infinitude of consciousness, the dimension of nothingness, the dimension of neither perception or non-perception are levels of concentration you can get into because you enjoy them. There’s delight there—passion, desire, delight. Granted, these are fetters. Think of them as chains. Some chains you can actually use to pull yourself up. Say you’re … 
  21. Realizing Cessation
     … It’s unchanging, blissful, a type of consciousness that has no object, no restrictions: what the Buddha calls unrestricted awareness. And it’s the best thing there is. As Ajaan Maha Boowa once said, if you could take nibbana out and show it to other people, they wouldn’t want anything else. We don’t talk much about the duty with regard to this … 
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