Search results for: "Fabrication"
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- Constructing & Deconstructing… But as the Buddha said when he gave breath meditation instructions, you’re trying to look at the breath as bodily fabrication, and your feelings and perceptions around the breath as mental fabrication. When you see things in terms of fabrication, that’s insight. For the time being, we’re not watching them just arising and passing away. We’re trying to give rise …
- Always Looking Inside… always looking inside, looking at the movements of the mind—the comments, the fabrications of the mind—because they cause trouble, they cause suffering. But as part of the path, we have to use fabrications. After all, the noble eightfold path is a path that’s fabricated. It’s put together out of our intentions. Right views, right resolves, right mindfulness, and right concentration …
- Imagine Your Breath… Ajaan Lee singles this out—verbal fabrication—as the big culprit among the different kinds of fabrication. The sorts of conversations you tend to hold in the mind get carried over into your engagement with the breath. If you tend to talk to yourself in unskillful ways, you’ll be talking to yourself about the breath in unskillful ways. So try to pick up …
- Taking Apart Suffering… As you learn to see the process of fabrication, both in learning how to do it skillfully and in learning how to take apart unskillful things, that gives you a certain amount of insight into fabrication. This is how insight helps with concentration. You get the mind into a more stable mood, and it’s more willing to settle down regardless of what the …
- Reading & Meditating… Well, feeling and perception are together in the factor for fabrication, and they’re together in the factor for name and form. Sometimes the feeling is invading your mind because of the way you talk to yourself: directed thought and evaluation, also in the factor of fabrication. Sometimes the feeling is related to sensory contact. Sometimes it’s related to craving. Sometimes it comes …
- Birth Is Suffering… We get hands-on experience with bodily fabrication in the breath, verbal fabrication in the way we talk to ourselves, and then mental fabrication—feelings and perceptions—seeing how we put these things together to create a state of concentration. Then, as the concentration deepens, some of them will peel off. That’s how you see that they are distinct. The first one that …
- Three Levels of Concentration… And that’s precisely the skill you’re going to need in order to see fabrication just as that — fabrication. It’s like taking the old Zen story of the finger pointing at the moon and turning it around: You don’t want to look at the moon; you want to look at the finger — because the finger is what’s fooling you. It …
- The Limits of Control… You want to be able to fabricate a path to the end of suffering out of your intentions, while you have the ability to do so, because ultimately there comes a point where you have to let go of everything here, and go on to who knows where. So what we are doing as we’re meditating is to find out exactly how much …
- Calm in the Storm… When the Buddha talks about the different kinds of fabrication that we do based on ignorance that lead to suffering, he speaks of body fabrication, which is the breath. and then the two that are more mental: verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself—what he calls directed thought and evaluation; and then mental fabrication, your perceptions and feelings—feeling tones, here, of …
- Fear of Death… Working with this bodily fabrication also involves other types of fabrication. There is verbal fabrication, in which you direct your thoughts to something and then you evaluate it. So you direct your thoughts here to the breath and you learn how to evaluate it with sensitivity. Then there’s feeling and perception: mental fabrication. We fabricate our feelings as well, partly through the way …
- Doing Aggregates… You can see that when the mind slips off, it’s engaging in perceptions and thought fabrication. There’s usually a feeling. When you’re here with the concentration, you’re adding the form of the body as an anchor. But still, there’s also feeling and perception, fabrication, and consciousness. So everything you need to understand is right here. You’re getting practice …
- The Path to Stream Entry… After all, the path is fabricated—you do put it together—but it can take you to something unfabricated. This is one of the big paradoxes in the Buddha’s teachings that has been a stumbling block for a lot of people. You hear it again and again through different periods of Buddhist history in different places: “How can something fabricated lead to something …
- Random Word Generators… And the result is that you’ve not only learned how get the mind to settle down more fully, but you’ve also learned a lot about this process of fabrication in the mind and how useful the Buddha’s teachings on not-self can be. You’ve learned about fabrication—the tendency we have to churn things out—together with perception. Perception is …
- Inconstant, Stressful, Not-self… learn how to develop some dispassion for these processes—these forms, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and moments of consciousness—that we crave, that we keep going after, that we fabricate again and again and again. We want happiness, but we keep looking for it in processes that will disappoint us, that keep us stuck with aging, illness, and death. If you bring some wisdom to …
- Bare Attention… There are times when you have to fabricate and think and analyze in order to get past a particular unskillful mind state, either by fabricating stronger concentration to resist it or by fabricating discernment to try to figure out ways of getting around the problem— taking it apart, seeing what makes it work, getting down to the nuts and bolts. It’s interesting that …
- Pleasure & Pain… If you learn how to use it properly, you can learn a lot about the processes of fabrication in the mind. That’s what insight is all about: how the mind fabricates things—its sense of the body, its sense of the mind, how it fabricates speech as you try to carry the concentration into the day. It may not be full absorption at …
- The Brahmavihāras Aren’t Enough… As you get your mind into concentration with any of these topics, you reflect on the fact that this concentration is fabricated. Whatever is fabricated, you perceive in line with the three perceptions of being inconstant, stressful, and not-self, or in line with variations on those perceptions: a disease, a dart, alien, empty. In other words, look at the state of concentration itself …
- Questioning the Hindrances… He just taught a series of questions. “How do you look at the fabrications of the mind?” That’s a question he posed, and then you have to learn how to look at your fabrications yourself. “How do you regard fabrications? How do you understand them?” You pose questions in the mind, and it’s in the posing of the question that you start …
- Nostalgia for Suffering… Because when you look at the categories, they’re all pretty broad, especially fabrication. All kinds of things come under the category of fabrication: all the different ways you think about things, all the different ways you talk to yourself about your suffering—that’s all fabrication. The Buddha had to give just the basic principles because there’s no way he could have …
- How to Feed Mindfulness… I recently read someone saying that mindfulness is an unfabricated phenomenon—that only your thought processes that pull you away from the present moment count as fabricated, that when you’re in the pure present there’s no fabrication going on at all. But that’s a major misunderstanding. Mindfulness is something you do. It’s a fabricated activity. Alertness is something you do …
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