Search results for: "Form"
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- Do, Maintain, Use… You begin to see how the mind slips off, how you can get it back again, how a little thought begins to form, and then the mind denies that it formed. Then it waits until your mindfulness slips, your alertness slips, and it’ll take over. So you have to watch out for that. This is how concentration begins to develop discernment, and how …
- Our Sense of Self… After all, these are the things we’re going to control so we can get other forms of happiness. But in ultimate terms, there has to come a point where you realize you don’t have total control, even over such little, immediate things like the growth of your hair. So the question is, are you just going to continue to hold on to …
- Step Outside the World… It’s like little bubbles forming in your mind or in the general area of your body: There’s a whole world in each bubble. You go into it, and suddenly you find that that’s not a bubble in your body: You’re in the bubble now. And it can take you. It can float off in different directions, like a kite with …
- The Reality Principle… These are forms of generosity. These are forms of compassion and goodwill because they open up the mind and make it more expansive. When the mind is in a more expansive state, the amount of suffering grows less. So it’s good to develop these qualities in the mind. One way of developing them is to learn how to develop the same attitudes toward …
- Concentration Work… They’re different forms of becoming. Eventually you’re going to have to let them go, but you have to train them first. It takes work. I’ve heard some people say, “Well, it’s so much work. Why don’t we just let go? Why do we have to bother with all this work?” Well, if you let go like that, you’re …
- The Basic Medicine… There’s the healing, comforting, soothing aspect, but remember medicine comes in all sorts of forms. Some of it can be pretty strong. In other words, once the mind settles down you have to watch after it, make sure it doesn’t go wandering off, doesn’t get lazy and complacent. If the mind goes wandering off ask yourself, “What trouble are you looking …
- Use Your Defilements… Your aversion to stooping to something below the standards of the precepts is a good form of aversion to take on, to develop. The same with your concentration: It’s okay to desire for the mind to be still, as long as you focus on the causes, which again are mindfulness, alertness, and ardency, as you bring them more and more to bear right …
- Right View: Feeding Instructions… You’ve got the form of the body sitting here. The breath is also counted as form. There are the feelings of ease or dis-ease that come with the breath. Your perceptions of how you think of the breath to yourself: What image do you hold in mind? When you breathe in, where do you feel the breath? What do you think is …
- Fear of Death… You’re able to see a thought form and realize that you’re in charge. You can go with it or not as you choose. The mind has a long-term habit of going into these things without even thinking. So the first order of business when you meditate is how not to get involved in these things at all. In other words, your …
- Infinite Good Humor… He asked himself, “Why am I afraid of that pleasure?” He’d been denying himself every form of pleasure. Like many people who’ve been indulging very heavily in sensual pleasures and then regret it, the Buddha, after all his years in the palace, took the immediate opposite tack and denied himself, starved himself, out of a fear of pleasure. But now he asked …
- The Self-correcting Mind… But the Buddha talks openly and freely about aging, illness, death, separation, all the various forms of stress and suffering because he has a cure for them all. But it’s a self-administered cure. We learn from him, we learn from his example, we learn from the example of all the noble disciples in the Buddha’s time on up into the present …
- The Origination of Suffering… Instead, you create a state of becoming here around a different kind of pleasure, the pleasure of form: the body as you feel it from within. And you try to adjust it so that this is a good place to be. This is going to be your food on the path, but you learn how to use it to see into other becomings. In …
- Turning Points… Central to this story is his discovery of right concentration, a form of happiness that could be a path to a higher form of happiness. He didn’t have to put himself through ultimate pain in order to get the happiness that’s supposed to lie on the other side. There would be pain, there would be struggle in the path, but he kept …
- Choose Your Cravings Wisely… Some forms of craving are the cause of suffering, but the Buddha also recognized that there’s a kind of craving that’s involved in the path: You’ve heard that other people have gained true happiness and you want that happiness. That’s a good craving to nourish. There’s a sutta where he calls craving your companion. Everywhere you go, you’re …
- Becomings… This is the good becoming you want right now, so that you can see the other becomings as they form, and recognize them for what they’re doing. This way, in the course of getting a place for the mind to settle down and get a sense of well-being from settling down, you’re also learning about the mind, about all of its …
- Interconnectedness… We intentionally shape this process, because the most important type of interconnectedness is the interconnectedness in the mind—how our perceptions and our intentions, the questions we ask ourselves, the answers we give ourselves, how we go about forming those answers: how these processes are all interconnected. They can be interconnected in a way that leads to suffering or in a way that leads …
- Beneficial Thinking… Not that there aren’t pleasant things or good things outside, but they’re not solid enough to form a foundation for a happiness that you can really trust. Sometimes it’s good to think about these things in a general sort of way. That’s why we have the chants about aging, illness, and death, and the chant on the unattractiveness of the …
- Tranquility & Insight… That’s form. The breath coming in, breath going out: That’s form. There’s a feeling of ease that you’re trying to develop. There’s a perception of how the breath goes through the body. When it comes in, where does it come in? When it goes out, where does it go out? How does it go through the body as it …
- Buddhist Engineering… You take the potentials, say, for form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness, and you turn them into the actual experience of these things, using your present intentions. This, too, is a type of fabrication, and we’re doing it all the time. We want to get more sensitive to exactly how we’re doing that. That’s where the emphasis gets more and …
- A Slave to Craving… We tend to think of goodwill as an expansive mind-state, but the Buddha calls it a form of restraint. In your search for happiness, there will be certain things you simply can’t do if you have goodwill for others. There are certain things you can’t do if you have goodwill for yourself. The whole point of developing goodwill is that it …
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