Search results for: "Form"
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- 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 …
- A Noble Choice… All these forms of craving cause you to cling, and it’s in the clinging that there’s the suffering. You cling to the form of your body, you cling to your feelings, you cling to your perceptions—i.e., the labels you use to identify things as to what they are, what they mean. You cling to thought-constructs: the thoughts you put …
- Calm… Some people have it in a very mild form; other people, in a very strong form. As long as you feel refreshed, alert, active, and energized, you’re off to a good start. Then you come to the factor of calm. Once the body’s been energized, you want it to calm down. When the mind has been energized, you want it to calm …
- Restraint… What kind of generosity are you still weak in? Probably the most important form of generosity is forgiveness. It’s often the hardest, so you have to look into why. What pride is keeping you from being forgiving? What offended sense of honor is keeping you from being forgiving? Is it worth holding on to? If it’s getting in the way of your …
- Not-self in Context… Just as you engage in other forms of clinging on the path, you’re going to cling to a sense of self for a while. But you’ve got to change your sense of self to make it a healthy one, just as you change your views to be healthy views and your habits and practices to be healthy habits and practices. Those are …
- In the Context of the Deathless… Aggregates like the form of your body as you feel it from within, as you’re sitting here right now, working with the breath. Feelings: You hope to create feelings of pleasure. There are perceptions, the labels you apply to things that identify them, give them meaning. Here you’re identifying the breath as the topic you want to stick with. There’s fabrication …
- Overcoming Complacency… From the potential for form, we create forms. From the potential for feeling, we create feelings. And so on with perception and consciousness as well. An act of creating that’s going on all the time. And then, on top of that, once we have those aggregates, once they’re present to our awareness, we can create our sense of self out of them …
- Informing the Whole Committee… Any of the forms of religion that require you to focus on an outside power to come in to save you have as their premise the idea that your self is a single solid thing that’s corrupt and can’t possibly save itself. That’s where the question of self power and other power gets born. But the fact is that your self …
- Prepare to Die… The mind is free from every form of restriction, every form of limitation placed on it by space and time. Free from fear. Free from attachment. This is why the Buddha said that when you contemplate death, it doesn’t just lead to more depression, it doesn’t make you morose. You contemplate death in the correct way and it leads to the deathless …
- Meaning & Becoming… Each of the factors of the noble path will involve some form of fabrication. So you take these processes: When you hold on to them and try to keep them, it causes suffering. But when you learn how to use them to get out, they form the path. It’s in following that path that you end this crazy paradox where in our search …
- Learning by Doing… This is necessary to develop your insight, because the factors that go into creating the good sense of concentration—the form of the body, which is the breath; the feeling of ease that you get from the breath; the perceptions you hold in mind about the breath; your thoughts that think about the breath, that evaluate it, and your awareness of all these things …
- A Clean Break at Death… Worry here comes in many forms. One is that you’re worried about the people you’re leaving behind. Or you’re worried about yourself, thinking about things you’ve done in the past that could lead to an unfortunate rebirth. If you’re worried about other people, you have to realize there are times when you just can’t help people anymore and …
- Cleaning up Your Personal Environment… The problem with social-grease speech, if you’re really not paying attention to what you’re saying, is that you end up falling into other forms of wrong speech. With idle chatter, by definition, you’re not really paying much attention to your intention as to why you’re speaking. But if the intention is to put the other person at ease, to …
- Solidly Here… You can understand the intentions that form around sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, feelings, perceptions, fabrications—the whole gamut. They’re going to form right here and they’re going to play out right here. If you don’t stick with them, you don’t see how things play out. You don’t see how a cause leads to an effect—or even …
- The Purpose of Empathetic Joy… We’re working on the pleasure of form—the body as it’s experienced from within. We’re making it as pleasant as possible, to give the mind the food it needs in order to practice, to settle down, be still, and see things as they really are, to see the movements of the mind as they’re actually happening, to see the extent …
- Transparent Becoming… A film begins to form on the water, called savory earth. According to the description, it has the color of really good ghee or really good butter, and the taste of pure wild honey. One of the beings, simply out of curiosity or just plain wantonness, decides to check it out. He takes his finger and tastes it, and it’s so good that …
- Consistently on the Path… If we bring some knowledge to them, they can form the path. But we have to do it consistently. Otherwise the path begins to develop but then we cut it off. It’s like planting a seed. Say you plant a seed for a large tree, and when a tiny shoot comes out, you say, “This is not the tree I want,” and so …
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