Search results for: "Form"
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- The Kamma of Self & Not-Self… In both cases, you suppress the urges to do unskillful things and you replace those urges with another form of happiness. This is another healthy ego function, called sublimation in psychologists’ terms. The Buddha doesn’t have a term for it, but he does recommend that you develop concentration as a source of well-being in the mind that’s totally harmless. It doesn …
- The Heart of the Teachings… But that’s not the best form of homage. The Buddha said the best form is to practice. That’s how you show genuine homage to the Buddha: Pay honor to his original intention to find awakening through all those many, many years in which he followed that intention. He didn’t gain awakening in order to have people present him with candles, incense …
- Directed Thoughts, Random Thoughts… As you get more sensitive to the breath, you’ll begin to notice that there’s a stirring in the breath before a thought forms. If you can catch that in time, you can just breathe right through the stirring—it’s like combing out knots in your hair—and the thought won’t have a chance to form. Other times, you find yourself …
- Possessed by Emotions… When the Buddha expressed his awakening, he would sometimes go into a lot of detail, sometimes he’d express it in very short form. The shortest form is essentially the principle of causality, which comes down to the fact that your present moment is shaped by two things: your past actions and your present actions. It’s because of the present actions that the …
- Trust Your Desire for Happiness… If you feel compassionate of others only if you believe that we really are all one, that’s a very selfish form of compassion. You talk about feeling other people’s pain, but it’s more that we can create pain within ourselves when we see other people in pain. We don’t really feel their pain. Ajaan Suwat once made a comment when …
- Skills of the Dhamma Wheel… And it should form the basic frame for the way we look at our practice. It’s how we should frame our attention to things. The Buddha never taught bare attention. He talked about only two kinds of attention: appropriate and inappropriate. When you attend to things, it’s not really bare. The fact that you’re noticing something, paying attention to something, means …
- Goodness & Goodwill… The word metta, goodwill, is described by the Buddha as a form of restraint, which is an interesting idea because it’s also an unlimited attitude. So what’s the restraint on something unlimited? Well, the unlimited part is that you have goodwill for all beings without exception. The limitation of the restraint is on your actions. In other words, simply thinking thoughts of …
- Terror & Revulsion… Two is name and form. Three is the three kinds of feelings. Four is the four noble truths, and so on. “One” is interesting. The question is, “What is One?” And the answer is, “All beings subsist on food.” This is how the Buddha introduces causality. In other words, causality, interconnectedness, is not always a pretty thing. It’s essentially feeding. And if you …
- The Not-Self Discourse… Unlike his later talks, where he usually starts with a question, here he starts with a statement: “Form is not-self.” He makes the same statement about the rest of the five aggregates: feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. They’re not-self. You might wonder why he brought up the topic of not-self. After all, all five of the brethren had attained the …
- Simplify… Some forms of happiness last longer than others do. So we have to look at ourselves with the realization that we have only so much energy. If our energy gets scattered around or spread too thin, we end up not succeeding at anything at all. Given the fact that we have limitations in our time and energy, we want to make the best use …
- Barriers in the Heart… These practices formed the background of his meditation. So try to develop this more unlimited attitude – which comes through being generous, through being virtuous – as a background for your meditation, as a foundation for your meditation, because it teaches you that true happiness comes through overcoming these barriers by giving of yourself. When you come to the meditation with that attitude of giving, you …
- No Extra Arrows… It’s focused on form — the form of the body — feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, acts of consciousness. And it comes from craving. Craving, too, is desire and passion. The relationship between the two is like this: The word for craving in Pali is “thirst.” The word for clinging — upādāna — is “to feed.” So the desire and passion that’s looking for something: That’s …
- You Can’t Clone Awakening… That’s just one more form of fabrication based on ignorance. And if you’ve ever read anything about dependent co-arising, you know that ignorance leading to fabrications leads on to more stress and suffering. Freedom isn’t found that way. It’s found in this very unlikely spot, the point in the present moment where you’re making choices and are trying …
- 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 …
- The Kamma of Self & Not-self… The Buddha once said that if you try to take a stance on either side of that question—“Is there a self? Is there a no self?”—you end up siding with extreme forms of wrong view, because you’re assuming that the whole idea of a self is a thing. You either have it or you don’t have it, willy-nilly. When …
- 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 …
- Body & Mind from Within… The aggregates are the form of the body as you feel it from within, your feelings, your perceptions, your thought fabrications, and your consciousness. We engage in these things usually without knowing what we’re doing, because we focus on clinging in four other ways: We cling to sensuality: our fascination with sensual fantasies about what we’d like to smell, what we’d …
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