Search results for: "consciousness"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- The Perception of Inconstancy… Some of them are neutral, like the *dhātu *of consciousness. Some things in the mind are actually unskillful: There’s the dhātu of sensuality—in other words, this potential in the mind is lying there, waiting for something to provoke it—although, as Ajaan Lee noted, often it doesn’t wait. It goes out looking for things to provoke it. But then there are …
- The Form of the Body… Sometimes you don’t have to consciously adjust it, just think of this part of the body as feeling sound and whole, and the in-and-out breath will adjust itself. See how long you can keep it that way. In other words, give yourself challenges within the context of the form of the body. That’s one way of making it more compelling …
- Food for Endurance… As for the other types of food, consciousness or awareness of the senses goes together with contact. Then there are the intentions. These are things that come totally from inside. They may be influenced by past actions, but you can train them here in the present moment to be something new. This is a freedom that’s available to all of us, and that …
- All-around Knowing… But as long as you can maintain this full-body awareness, when it’s really solid, there’s no space for the thought worlds to appear, or if they do appear, there’s no space for you to move into them, because you’re consciously too big. In Pali this is called mahaggatan cittam, the enlarged mind. When your mind is enlarged and all …
- Eeeels… What you’re doing as you open up your body to your awareness is that you expand the range of consciousness so that your subconscious gives way. You can actually see these incipient thoughts, these nascent thoughts as they begin to wiggle, to begin to form, and you can catch the process before it takes over. These are some of the advantages of having …
- Stop Weaving… Simply the fact of having a body, having feelings, perceptions, thought-constructs, consciousness, clinging to these things, we suffer. Carrying these things around as a burden, we suffer. It’s because we weigh ourselves down that we feel overburdened. When you’re overburdened, the least little thing can set you off, and you end up spreading that suffering around. One of the things we …
- Obsessive Thinking… The mind settles down on its own, without your having to think consciously about the body or feelings or any of the frames of reference. Then there’s the directed approach, in which you actually are thinking specifically about the breath, thinking specifically about whatever your meditation topic is. But that undirected approach: That’s where you use your discernment to peel away your …
- The Gift of Discernment… What are you holding onto in terms of the form, whatever forms there may be in your experience right now? What are you holding onto in terms of feelings, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness? How are you holding on? Why do you hold on? What’s the allure? When you see the allure, then you want to see the drawbacks of holding on like that. That …
- Straightening the Arrow… If you’re still influenced by the perceptions advocated by your friends, you have to ask yourself, “What kind of perceptions do they have? Are they the kind of people whose perceptions I should pick up?” You hang around people and you may not be consciously picking up their perceptions, but it’s a subliminal kind of thing. Dogen had the comment that being …
- Explore & Experiment… When the Buddha talks about the causes of suffering, there’s one way in which he expresses dependent co-arising that goes down to consciousness on one side, and name-&-form on the other side. Nāma-rūpa is the Pali. Form, of course, is the four elements or properties. Name covers, among other things, acts of intention, attention, and perception. If you’re ignorant …
- A Mind Without Inertia… Your greed, your aversion, and your delusion, identifying with your body, identifying with your feelings, your perceptions, your thought fabrications, even with acts of consciousness: These things weigh the mind down if you hold on to them. This is the Buddha’s ultimate mode of attack when you see the mind holding onto something. The phrase, “holding on,” here, is metaphorical. The mind doesn …
- Elemental Energy… Notice where the tension is, how the rhythm of breathing has changed with the anger, and consciously change it back to something more normal and soothing. This won’t get rid of the cause of the anger, but at least it’ll give you a handle on how to deal with it, how to create a beachhead for yourself. As the physical side of …
- Protect Your Energy… Whether oe nor they consciously know that you’re contributing something good, they’ll pick it up and it’ll be good for them. This practice is something that radiates its benefits all around.
- Sticking with an Intention… That’s the “why.” As for the “how,” you’ll notice as things come up in the meditation that the vagrant intentions have very little to do with anything you were consciously thinking about as you sat down to meditate, when you made your intention to stay with the breath. And yet suddenly they appear. This relates to the Buddha’s teachings on how …
- Inconstancy… infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness. It can take you far, and it’s good to see how far you can go with it. When you hear about things being inconstant, stressful, not-self, and that being reason enough to let them go, if you haven’t tested the limits of how far constancy can take you, then you wouldn’t know for sure. If …
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