Search results for: "consciousness"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. Being Reliable
     … You’re not going to consciously break any of the five precepts at all. If you haven’t reached that point yet, you’re not reliable. This is why your tasting the deathless is a gift to others as well. As the Buddha points out, the mind is capable of all kinds of things. Look at the animal kingdom: all those different kinds of … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. Just One Person
     … You’re doing your perceptions, your thought fabrications, your consciousness. You’ve even been doing your sense of the body. This is why the Buddha said that all of the aggregates depend on the fourth one—fabrications. That’s what takes the potentials coming from your past actions and turns them into your present experiences. So you’re playing a huge role right here … 
  17. The Making Of
     … It goes back further and further, through name and form, consciousness, fabrications. When you learn how to see these things in these terms, it allows you to step out. We get practice in these terms as we try to get the mind into concentration—as with fabrication. There’s bodily fabrication—which is your breath. Verbal fabrication—directed thought and evaluation. And mental fabrication … 
  18. Watch Your Mind Whenever You Can
     … The people who were in the space vehicle would lose consciousness for a bit as the vehicle changed its frame of reference, then they’d come to. This is a picture of the mind. Your mind moves around depending on its frame of reference. When it changes its frame of reference, it tends to blank out for a bit. What’s happening is that … 
  19. Skill
     … You start with the breath, and in order to learn about intention, you very consciously set up an intention in the mind as to what you’re going to try to stick with. That way, you begin to see other intentions that were less obvious, things that slip in from underground. It’s like putting a dam across a river. Only when you actually … 
  20. Calm & Insight into Pain
     … One of the terms the Buddha has for craving is the seamstress, what stitches things together in a way that creates suffering without our consciously wanting to. We don’t want to add extra pain, but it’s what we do. We’re doing this in ignorance because we’re paying attention to other things and so we let a subordinate part of the … 
  21. The Desire to Be Free from Desire
     … A consciousness without any limitations at all. Something that’s true and unchanging. Something totally free from hunger, free from lack. So, the Buddha’s not trying to have you deny desire. He’s basically saying that it is possible to put your desires in order, straighten them out, tie them together, and make them into a raft that takes you over the flood … 
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