Search results for: "consciousness"
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- Discernment Fosters Concentration… When we bring the mind back to the present moment, we have to consciously allow those parts of the body to be un-squeezed. Let them fill up with breath energy. You can think of their being starved of blood, so you allow the blood to flow there. It’s this way you get the beginnings of the factor for awakening that in Pali …
- Negative Emotions… Exactly what are you consciously ignoring? We tend to think of ignorance as a blank that just happens to be there in the mind, but actually there’s an active process of ignoring, an active process of denying, of shutting things off within the mind. What are we covering up? For most of us, that’s how our minds function—there’s a lot …
- A Noble Choice… And you cling to consciousness. Now, those things on their own have nothing really wrong with them. It’s just that they can’t provide a happiness that would be really satisfying. The Buddha says it is possible to put an end to that suffering, put an end to that clinging. You do it through the practice of the path, which boils down to …
- Producing Discernment… outside, how do you undo that reaction? You can start with the breath. Remind yourself that even though the body may be in a bad breath cycle, you can change it. Consciously breathe in a way that’s calmer. Hold in mind perceptions that are calmer. Talk to yourself in ways that calm you down. You can borrow the wisdom of the ajaans, the …
- The Primacy of the Mind (2)… Those are feelings that are consciously, deliberately created. So again, we’re working from the mind into the breath. Then you’re sensitive to how that sense of pleasure has an impact on the mind: You breathe in and out sensitive to mental fabrication—in other words, feelings and perceptions. So, what perceptions do you apply to the breath? How do you visualize the …
- Why Mindfulness… form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and sensory consciousness. There’s another follow-up question: “What danger does your teacher see in having desire and passion for those things?” The answer: When you have desire and passion for those things, you do things that cause suffering. But if you abandon that passion and desire, you put an end to suffering. So notice that Sariputta’s answers …
- The Heart to Keep Going… At the same time, you’re also developing the observer inside, what in some circles they call meta-consciousness—the ability to watch your own mind, to observe your own mind from the outside, and not get sucked into all of its stories and moods. The moods and the stories are one thing, but your awareness is something else. Each time you pull out …
- The Wisdom of Incongruity… Stream-of-consciousness novels have nothing on the strange shifts and incongruous fragments that the mind can toss up. If you try to trace where your mind has been or the course of its inner conversations even over the course of five minutes, you find that it’s zigged and zagged all over the place. Of course, when we’re getting the mind to …
- Unfabricated Happiness… For instance, simply the way you intend to breathe—consciously or unconsciously—has an impact on how you experience the body. The feelings you focus on, the perceptions you use, have an impact on the mind. Then there’s a third kind of fabrication, called verbal fabrication, where you talk to yourself. That plays a role in the instructions to the meditation themselves: things …
- Renunciation… The Buddha talks about learning how to see form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness as something separate; sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations as something separate. There’s an awareness that’s not touched by any of these things. You have to dig deep down into this awareness right here right nowto get to that level of awareness. But this is how you find …
- Get Outside Yourself… form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. But those things—now that you’ve gotten good at them—you want to see them in terms of the fact that they’re inconstant, stressful, not-self, a void, a disease—whatever perception you can think of to induce dispassion, until it really hits home that these things do have their drawbacks. You want something better. You …
- Ingenuity… It’s one of the qualities the Buddha said you should look for in yourself as you practice and consciously try to develop. The Pali word for ingenuity, patibhana, shows up in a lot of places as a good quality to develop together with your learning. There’s nowhere, though, where the Buddha defines the term. So you have to be ingenious in figuring …
- Mindfulness & Perception… What feels good right now? How is it going along? Is the mind settling down? If not, what can you do? And then there’s the consciousness of all this. There you are: You’ve got all five aggregates working together—because you want to see them together. You want to get everything in one place, in a place where things are still, calm …
- Admirable Friendship… how you deal with sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations; how you deal with thoughts, feelings, and perceptions; even how you deal with the act of consciousness. All these things are a matter of skill. This is why the Buddha didn’t present himself as a savior. He was a teacher. He pointed out the way. Part of his pointing out the way …
- Patience… As the Buddha says, we engage in different activities that he classes under the aggregates, and each of those aggregates — whether it’s form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, or consciousness — is something we fabricate for the sake of something else. In other words, we have means and we have goals. The goals are either directly or indirectly aimed at happiness. This is how we …
- Fangs in the Static… the form of the body, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness—all very ephemeral things. How could you build anything lasting out of things that are ephemeral like this? Now, not all those perceptions are negative. The Buddha also has you think of the positive perceptions of how the cessation of these things would be a good thing, dispassion for these things would be a good …
- The Path Is and Isn’t the Goal… And there’s consciousness. In other words, you’ve got the five aggregates right here in your state of right concentration. So there’s still the possibility of clinging right here as well. In fact, in the beginning, this is what you’re doing: learning how to cling to the aggregates in a new way as you turn them into the path. But then …
- Calming the Breath… Even our basic experience of the five aggregates—our experience of the form (the body), feelings of pleasure and pain, our perceptions, our thought constructs, even our sensory consciousness: As the Buddha says, we *fabricate *these things for certain purposes. The best way to test this is by watching the breath. This is why this process of (1) being sensitive to the whole body …
- A Magic Set of Tools… There will come a point where you don’t have to consciously remember them. All you’ll have to do is be very watchful, very alert, making sure you’re not complacent, and you can drop the concepts. Dropping them doesn’t mean you’ll forget them. They’ll be there to pick up again when you need them, but you don’t have …
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