Search results for: "Form"
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- You Should Heed These Shoulds… Recently, someone explained the Buddha’s recommendations for being content with your lodgings by saying, “If you tell yourself, ‘I have to be content,’ you’re imposing the ego on things, and it’s a form of grasping. Because no matter what you become, it’s all subject to being inconstant, stressful, not-self. Instead, you should simply reflect: If you have some discontent …
- The Meaning of Happiness… The act itself is a form of happiness, a form of sukha. The same with virtue: This has more to do with refraining from things where you could harm other people or yourself, or you could do something that was for your advantage that would take something away from someone else. You may find yourself in a situation where you could do something of …
- Five Strengths… That’s a form of strength. The second form is persistence, as when you’re sticking with the breath here. Each time you slip off, you just come right back. Don’t let yourself get discouraged, don’t get frustrated. Just keep coming back again and again and again. That quality of coming back again and again is going to strengthen all the good …
- Learning by Doing… All the different forms of fabrication, all the different aggregates: They’re right here. You’ve got the form of the body, you’ve got the feelings of pleasure or pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain. Hopefully you can work with the breath so that you can give rise to a greater sense of pleasure. Then there are the perceptions that hold you here …
- Right Questions in the Right Order… But the aggregates are the aggregates of form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness. Clinging is clinging to these things in any of four ways: through either through the desire for sensual fantasies, the desire for views, clinging in terms of habits and practices concerning the way things should be done, or clinging in terms of your sense of your self. Any of those four …
- The Importance of Being Truthful… And to recognize that they’re bad is not a form of aversion. It’s a form of heedfulness, which is the beginning of all that’s skillful, realizing that if you keep on acting in unskillful ways, you’re going to suffer, the people around you are going to suffer. But keep it on that level: just the action. When you see these …
- The River Gauge… Your concentration is going to require form—the form of your body, the breath. It’s going to require feeling. You have to develop feelings that they call feelings not-of-the-flesh, pleasure not-of-the-flesh. Part of the motivation though, might also be a pain not-of-the-flesh, which is the reflection that, okay, this is a path you’re …
- Appropriate Attention… You know that in those two things—the craving or the passion and desire on the one hand, and these aggregates of form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness on the other—the craving is to be abandoned, while you have to comprehend those aggregates that you’re clinging to. When you think in these ways, that’s called appropriate attention. So, as you go …
- The First Noble Truth… Those are all forms of suffering we’re familiar with. But in Ajaan Lee’s words, they’re just the shadows of suffering. They’re not the real thing. The real thing is the clinging. That’s the heart of the suffering. We latch onto things like form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness as being us or ours. Or we latch onto the idea …
- It’s All in What You’re Doing… When the Buddha set out his major teachings toward the end of his life— when he called the monks together and said, “These are the teaching that I want to make sure you’re all in agreement about”—he set out the seven sets that form the wings to awakening. They’re qualities. No mention of the five aggregates, no mention of the six …
- On Human Nature… One is the realization that there are short-term forms of happiness and long-term forms of happiness. And the long-term ones, even if they take more effort, are the ones that are really worth going for. The second realization is that these things are going to require effort. You have to do things in order to attain happiness. That’s the beginning …
- A Thread into Awareness… But the form of the body is the first object of your attention, because when you’re with the breath, you’re with the form of the body right now; you *know *you’re in the present moment. Otherwise, if you focus on a perception, you suddenly find it drifting away and turning into something else. So you stay with the perception of the …
- Heightened Skillfulness… In fact, there are ways in which you can see that all three of these forms of making merit—doing what’s skillful, virtue, and the development of goodwill—are forms of generosity. With virtue, you’re giving safety to everybody. With the development of goodwill, you’re freely giving your good intentions regardless of whether people wish you well in return. Now, people …
- Duties… The four duties form the overarching framework you want to keep in mind at all times. To do this is what the Buddha called fostering appropriate attention: using the questions he asked, the teachings he gave, in a way that fits into this frame. Anything that didn’t fit into this frame, he’d just put it aside. The truths are not just lists …
- Evaluation… You still have to watch over what you’ve got, because when distracting thoughts come, they come in little forms at first. As we were saying this afternoon, sometimes there’s just a stirring in the body someplace, or sometimes there will be a little whispering voice that comes in and goes away. “Wouldn’t it be nice to think about x,” and then …
- Head & Heart… This is the kind of breathing that leads to suffering, it’s one of the forms of fabrication—bodily fabrication—and it’s one of the basic building blocks of all your emotions. There’s bodily fabrication; verbal fabrication, which is directed thought and evaluation, the conversations you have inside; and then there are mental fabrications, your feelings and perceptions. Those are the building …
- Take Nothing for Granted… As the Buddha said, we fabricate our experience for the sake of having form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness, and then we use those things for the sake of happiness. So we have to remember why we’re here. Keep that in the background, and then set your mind on doing what needs to be done to reach to that goal of happiness, of real …
- Breath Meditation – The Four Tetrads… The pattern he’s establishing here—and it’s one that carries through each of the tetrads—is that you first try to get sensitive to this particular aspect of your awareness and then learn how to manipulate it as a form of fabrication. Energize it for a while, and then realize the best way to manipulate it is to calm it down. That …
- Staying on Track… In other words, when something really unskillful comes up, use breath meditation as a way of dealing with these three forms of fabrication and finding the antidote. The Buddha lists five different ways of dealing with unskillful thoughts, and they’re basically different ways of engaging in fabrication. With each of them, he gives you an image, which is a perception to hold in …
- The Five Precepts for the Mind… The Buddha calls this the pleasure of form. It’s a pleasure of a higher level. Just being able to be inside your body and inhabit it from the inside with a sense of ease and well-being is a pleasure with no drawbacks. In fact, when the Buddha-to-be realized that, that was what got him on the path to the end …
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