Search results for: "consciousness"
- Page 22
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Load next page...
