Search results for: "consciousness"
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- 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 …
- At Play… So, as you’re sitting here meditating, think of yourself being at play—at play with the four elements of the body; at play with feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness, your awareness—on those basic, building-block terms. You begin to see even how not only are your perceptions somewhat arbitrary, but even the Buddha’s perceptions are conventions. You see this in some …
- True & Beneficial… What do you make the raft of? You make the raft out of the twigs and branches on this side of the river, which the Buddha identifies as form, feelings, perceptions, thought-constructs, consciousness of the senses—in other words, the things that you ordinarily cling to that cause suffering, but now you’re going to cling to them strategically as you make this …
- Pain & Patience… form—the way you create the sense of your body, inhabit the sense of your body; feeling—feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain; perceptions, the labels you put on things, either words or images; fabrications—the thoughts you create around things; and then finally, consciousness, which is aware of all these things. These are all activities you’re engaged in. And …
- What You’re Choosing to Do Right Now… feelings, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness. The fact that you are fabricating these things… The way the Buddha explains it is that there’s a potential for all of these things coming in from the past, and you decide that you want a feeling, or you want a perception, so you fabricate those potentials into something you actually experience right now. What this means is that …
- When Aging Closes In… It’s a matter developing the mind to the point where you no longer have to identify with the body, with feelings, perceptions, thought-constructs, or consciousness. That way, when these things change, as they inevitably will, the mind won’t be affected by the change. That’s a really healthy mind. This is what we’re working on as we meditate. We develop …
- Intelligent Effort… The Buddha had to go and show him that he was wrong, by disappearing to a realm that Baka himself couldn’t see, and by pointing out that there was a different kind of consciousness that had nothing to do with any of the six senses at all. The funny thing is that the sutta doesn’t say whether Baka changed his mind. But …
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