Search results for: "Fabrication"
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- Ask the Right Questions… How do you comprehend fabrications? How do you look at them? If you’ve been doing breath meditation, you’ve already got some experience in dealing with fabrications. The Buddha talks about becoming sensitive to the bodily fabrication, i.e., the in-and-out breath, allowing it to grow calm. And then there’s mental fabrication: feelings and perceptions. How do these to grow …
- Guarding the Truth… The Buddha calls that verbal fabrication. You’re working with the breath. That’s bodily fabrication. You have a perception of how the breath comes in and out of the body, and you’re creating feelings of pleasure as best you can. Those are mental fabrications. You’re doing this by maintaining that intention to stay with the breath. You’re paying attention to …
- Feeding Instructions… All this comes down to the five clinging-aggregates—form as a clinging-aggregate; feelings as a clinging-aggregate; perceptions, fabrications, consciousness as clinging-aggregates. And the real problem is the clinging. The word for clinging, upādāna, can also mean “to take sustenance,” in other words, to feed. We’re feeding off of our sense of our body as we feel it from within …
- Reflect on What You’re Doing… When there’s no fabrication in the present moment, there’s no present moment. There’s no fabrication of here or there. There’s no space of going or staying. There is no time. Now, you can’t clone this ahead of time. What you can do is remember those instructions to Rahula and think of carrying them all the way through. Think of …
- Bewildered… There’s feeling in fabrication, there’s feeling in name and form, and there’s feeling that arises immediately after contact. Then there’s the pain that comes with aging, illness, and death and all the different forms of craving. So, you have to ask yourself, which is it this time? Have that range in mind, because it helps give you some idea of …
- Breathing to Awakening… And it’s because you were fabricating these things to begin with, when you’re dispassionate toward them, you see no point in fabricating them any more. They cease, and you just let go of the whole problem. That’s when you’re using this five-step method to deal with distractions. Ultimately, you turn that same five-step analysis onto your own concentration …
- You Can’t Relax Your Way to Awakening… There’s an idea that made its way into Buddhist circles that, after all, because fabrications just create more fabrications, then you can’t do anything that would lead to the goal, so you have to just go around doing nothing, not fabricating, and that’s how the unfabricated will appear. That’s based on a very simplistic notion of causality. The Buddha’s …
- When You Hit a Plateau… After all, what’s happening right now to shape your experience? There’s bodily fabrication, the way you breathe; verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself; and mental fabrication, the images you hold in mind—the perceptions—and then the feelings you focus on. You’re engaging in these activities all the time, but how conscious are you of what you’re doing …
- Safety in an Uncertain World… As the Buddha says, insight gets developed when you ask the right questions about fabrications: what fabrications are, how they should be regarded, how they should be seen with insight. Learn how to look at your emotions as you go through the day. From that perspective, how are they fabricated? The Buddha gives you a list of three types: bodily, verbal, mental. Bodily is …
- Make the Most of What You’ve Got… But if you do it with knowledge, you can actually turn those fabrications into the path. After all, the path itself is a kind of fabrication—the ultimate fabricated dhamma, the Buddha said. It can take you to something unfabricated, which means it doesn’t create the goal, but it takes you there. Just like the road to the ocean doesn’t create the …
- The Energy in the Body… The different forms of fabrication are all right here. There’s bodily fabrication, which is the in-and-out breathing. Verbal fabrication: directed thought and evaluation, in which you’re directing your thoughts to the breath, and evaluating the breath as it comes in and out. And mental fabrication: feelings and perceptions—feelings of comfort or discomfort, and your perception of how those relate …
- Bases for Success… There’s the base of success which is concentration founded on desire and the fabrications of exertion. There’s the base of success which is concentration founded on persistence and the fabrications of exertion. The fabrication of exertion is there in each case; it basically means right effort. The other two bases are concentration founded on intent and concentration founded on circumspection. That makes …
- Analyzing Suffering… So fabrication is involved in all of the aggregates. This is important because fabrication is essentially intention. This means that there’s an intentional element in all of our suffering. We might not like the idea that we are responsible for our suffering, but the fact that we have a hand in our suffering means that we can change it. The fact that there …
- Learning How to Talk to Yourself… Even just the way you breathe—it’s called bodily fabrication. Then there’s the way you talk to yourself, verbal fabrication, which the Buddha divides into two activities: One is directed thought, where you direct your thoughts to a particular topic. You’re going to think about the breath right now. Then there’s evaluation: Whatever you’re thinking about, you make comments …
- Safety… There’s bodily fabrication, verbal fabrication, mental fabrication, all the activities of what’s called name—in other words, perceptions, intentions, acts of attention, feelings, contact: This is contact inside the mind, inside the body. All of that comes prior to what you’re experiencing at the senses. That’s what’s shaping things, and that’s what primes you to suffer. We do …
- A Recipe for Jhana… Then, when you start looking at how the breath has an effect on the body, you’re learning to think in terms of fabrication, which is the topic of insight. As you calm the fabrications down, that brings about more tranquility. The insight and tranquility go together, without your having to think about the words “tranquility” or “insight.” Without getting involved in all the …
- Getting the Most Out of Now… The next type of fabrication is what the Buddha calls verbal fabrication, which is the way you talk to yourself. This, too, has a huge impact on the mind, so you want to learn how to talk to yourself in a skillful way. Like right now when you’re staying with the breath: Part of the mind may be making comments on how skillful …
- Two Roads to the Grand Canyon… You do have to be fired by a certain desire and a certain passion because, after all, the path is fabricated. As the Buddha said, it’s the highest of all fabricated phenomena, but it is a fabrication. All fabrications require desire, and they all involve effort. The discernment comes in figuring out how much effort is just right. This is one of the …
- Passion for Dispassion… Given that the mind likes fabricating things, fabricate the path. Put it together—like right now, meditating on the breath. The breath itself is a fabrication. There’s an intentional element in it. That’s what fabrication means. If you want to run a running commentary, comment on the breath. How does it feel? Where would it feel really good to focus on the …
- Correcting, Fostering, Cutting Away… Then there’s the image of the person standing saying, “I could be more relaxed sitting down,” or the person sitting saying, “I could be more relaxed lying down.” That’s what the Buddha calls the relaxation of thought fabrication. In other words, every thought that would distract you has to be fabricated. It requires some effort. Where is that effort being expended right …
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