Search results for: "consciousness"
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- Question Your Actions… This is the Buddha’s reason for talking about the aggregates—form, feeling, perception, fabrication, consciousness—because they help you take your suffering apart. You’re just not trying to define who you are, although we do tend to define ourselves around the aggregates. But we have to remember they, too, are activities; they, too, are actions. They’re things you’re doing. So …
- Noble Priorities… form, feeling, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness. The clinging is the big problem. That’s the suffering. What causes it? The three kinds of craving, which are things that you do. You could attack those three kinds of craving by doing other things—in other words, following the path, starting with right view all the way through right concentration under the headings of virtue, concentration …
- Oneness is a Water Snake… That can take you all the way to the state of infinite consciousness. There’s a oneness that holds you there. The perception of the body feels like a burden. The perception even of space begins to feel like a burden. You just want to be with knowing, knowing, knowing. And, as the Buddha said, that’s the ultimate non-dual state. But it …
- A Sense of Well-being… When the texts describe dependent co-arising, one of the basic patterns starts with name and form and consciousness acting together to create all the processes leading up to suffering. Well, intention is an important part of “name.” It’s one of the major causal factors in how we experience things. And you can see it operating here as you practice concentration. You also …
- Comprehending Clinging… And you have to look into to see, well, what exactly is this you? Look at the identities that would pull you away from the path and notice that they’re simply constructs made out of form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness: things that come and go. It’s like building a house out of frozen meat. As long as it’s frozen, you’re …
- De-thinking… breathe in line with that. And many times it’s a caricature of what’s actually going on. So we have to learn to look at the process in other ways. Consciously change the way you conceive of your breathing; see what happens. At the very least it’ll give you a good insight into the relationship between mental events and physical events. It …
- Action & Result… When you cling to form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrication, or consciousness, there is some pleasure. The Buddha doesn’t deny that. But the clinging itself can turn things into pain and can lead to more suffering. We go around defining ourselves this way all the time. This is why we get reborn. We find that the things by which we define ourselves are falling …
- Oozing Bodies, Oozing Minds… You’re consciously, deliberately, blocking out certain things. We don’t like to see what’s inside the body, what’s under the skin, the fact that the skin has blood right under it. The hair that you’re looking at has blood right under its roots. There’s all this crud that comes out of the body that you have to keep washing …
- To Discern Suffering… You’ve been making the choices, but not very consciously, and often not very well. But now as you get more conscious of what’s going on, you can make wiser choices. So you’re not just seeing the suffering. You’re actually discerning the suffering. And you also begin to discern, as the chant says, “Where it totally stops without trace.” That’s …
- Savor Your Breath… Remind yourself that consciousness is there in all the parts of the body. Ajaan Suwat made the comment one time that you could take an iron stake and stick it into any part of the body, and you’d know that there’s pain. Suppose the spike is in the leg: It’s not as if the awareness up in the middle of the …
- Beyond Inter-eating… You see the precise points where you’re making a decision to move in and continue creating more and more form and feeling and perceptions and thought constructs and consciousness in that thought world, all of which involve taking on an identity—which in turn takes a lot of food. So only when you see the harm of that process do you realize this …
- Strong Through Mindfulness… Well, where are you, really? You’re in the aggregate of consciousness. The Buddha said that the duty with regard to that is not just to be with it. The duty is to try to comprehend it, to figure out how you’re clinging to it and learning how you can let it go. To get that kind of discernment into what’s going …
- Practical Wisdom… Or as Ajaan Lee says in his talk on consciousnesses, when a particular idea comes in your mind and you know it’s going to be for your own good, you can side with that kind of thought. But if you know it’s going to be harmful down the line, just assume that maybe it’s somebody else’s thought. Maybe it’s …
- Recognizing Fools… The question should be, ‘Where does the physical universe have no footing?’ And the answer is, ‘In the consciousness of the awakened one.’” So you have to be very careful about insights and visions. I was recently reading a book saying that when you see that there is no self, that’s a sign that you’ve gained stream entry. Well, usually it’s …
- Taking Apart Suffering… So try consciously to cobble together a good observer, a patient observer. In other words, you don’t have to be impatient with your impatience. You don’t have to be angry at your anger. See which voices in the mind you can cobble together to just observe and watch patiently, to remind yourself of all the good lessons you’ve learned in the …
- The Buddha Didn’t Play Gotcha… Repeatedly, the Buddha talks about analyzing the concentration in and of itself, seeing what in the concentration is form, feeling, perception, thought fabrication, or consciousness. You realize that even when you let go of outside aggregates, or the grosser aggregates, there are still these subtler aggregates inside. It’s right here that the work can be done. So the Buddha’s teachings are very …
- Reading & Meditating… The Buddha provides a very clear vocabulary for what’s going on inside the mind, in terms of feelings and perceptions, thought-fabrications, acts of consciousness, and all the other many elaborations on those basic terms. It’s good to have those terms in the back of the mind as you meditate. For example, what he has to say about the three kinds of …
- Fixing the Present… One of the ways you do that is by consciously trying to change the perception, bringing a new perception into the mind, one that’s less likely to stir up those emotions. Then you can ask yourself: What in the mind resists this? What in the mind feels that this new image is artificial? Often we have the feeling that whatever comes up in …
- Lean into the Present… The same with perceptions, thought fabrications, consciousness: We do this for the sake of something, but all too often we’re not really clear about what the “for the sake” is. All we know is that we’re leaning in that direction. What the Buddha’s telling us is to be here with the breath in order to fabricate feelings around the breath, fabricate …
- Attahi Attano Natho… If you can consciously calm those manifestations, it has a calming effect on the mind. So try to breathe in a way that’s comfortable: easy coming in, easy going out, not strained or tightened or stressed. Think of the whole body being nourished by the breath, with everybody getting a part, because the breath is not just the air coming in and of …
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