Search results for: "consciousness"
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- 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 …
- The Carrot & the Stick… Or sometimes you can consciously tense up a muscle and then relax it, tense it up and relax it, to see what the difference is between the two. Then try to breathe in and out without allowing that particular muscle to tense up again. There are lots of ways you can play with the sensations of the breath in the body. This is something …
- Study & Practice… If you move from one set to another consciously, it’s perfectly okay. So you want to be able to keep these things in mind and not slip off to another frame of reference without knowing what you’re doing. Like that science-fiction story I read years ago, which featured a spacecraft that didn’t have to use fuel because it moved simply …
- Mindful of Karma… Basic awareness or consciousness just receives whatever comes in: important, unimportant, relevant, irrelevant. But once you’ve made up your mind that you want to stay with the breath, you have to be alert to the things you can do to keep yourself with the breath and alert to the things that are going to come in and pull you away. You have to …
- Occupy Your Space… Remember Ajaan Lee’s image of all the different consciousnesses in your body or around your body, coming in, permeating your blood vessels and getting into your brain. Just because a thought comes through the mind doesn’t mean that it’s your thought. He says that any thought that’s not in your best interest, you can say, “That’s not me, that …
- The Uses of Pleasure & Pain… You’ve got aggregates of form, feeling, perception, thought-fabrications, and consciousness. Learn how to treat them as tools, showing them the proper care and attention that tools need, but also realizing that they’re not the be-all and end-all of life. They’re processes, not things. They’ve got their uses, but they’re not ends in and of themselves. Once …
- Discernment… form, feeling, perception, fabrication, consciousness. If you look at the suffering in those terms, takes a lot of the sting out. Because as you see the perception that it’s “my” suffering or that “I’m” suffering is just that: it’s a momentary event in the mind. But it brings a big sting with it. So you have the choice not to say …
- Injustice… So you consciously try to breathe in a smooth and even way—in a way that releases the tension, clears up all the blockages. Maintain that type of breathing as long as you can. That then puts you into a better position to actually look at the situation: what needs to be done, what can be done right now, what would be the most …
- Breath Energies… If you can’t even imagine the energy, how can you change it? At least, you can’t consciously change it, but subconsciously it’s going on all the time. This is why certain parts of the body are related to certain memories. There’s a subconscious connection between the breath at that time and the impact it had on that part of the …
- Practice All Day… From there, he’d recommend that you go to space, and then, from space, to consciousness—awareness—knowing. He would have you try to stay with that sense of knowing as you went through the day, and you would try to notice what things would stir you up. If you found that just being with the knowing was not solid enough, you’d go …
- Limitations… Or if there are any parts of the breath cycle where you tend to squeeze things in the body—say, in your neck or in your chest or in your head—then very consciously hold back from squeezing those things. In other words, make the breath interesting, and it becomes a lot easier to stay here. You may wonder: Why are we working with …
- Investigative Work… He talks about the different consciousnesses in your body. When you learning how to stop laying claim to them, you have your freedom; they have their freedom. They’re no longer being commandeered in ways that go against their nature. As in the image of the fire: The fire is burning because it’s clinging. It’s trapped in its fuel because it’s …
- Battling Darkness… To break out of the limitations and shake out the dishonesty, you have to sit down and very consciously try to think of other ways of reacting. One compulsion is the part of you says, “You’ve got to get upset whenever this memory comes back. If you don’t get upset, you’re just being a milquetoast. People are going to walk all …
- Doing Meditation… a sense of space, boundless space, or a sense of boundless consciousness. When you see the act of putting it there and keeping it there, you realize that even these very refined, very still, very spacious states are things that are put together. That’s when you lose your interest in them because you see that they’re inconstant, stressful, not-self. This is …
- The Purpose of Empathetic Joy… As someone once said, “The things we know best are the things we do.” You do concentration by taking form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness, and turning them into a state of concentration—that’s how you really get to know them. If you don’t use them like this, you don’t know them. And if you don’t know them, how can …
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