Search results for: "Fabrication"

  1. Page 26
  2. Sensitive to the Mind
     … which is bodily fabrication. All the different instructions—“I’ll breathe this way, I’ll breathe that way”: Those are verbal fabrications. Then there are mental fabrications: the perceptions that hold you with the breath, and then the feeling-tones that you give rise to by the way you breathe. These are all very explicit in the instructions. And of course, when you’re … 
  3. Strategies for Happiness
     … It’s a fabrication. We fabricate the decision to identify with certain things. The thought that “I am,” the thought of identification, is an act of putting things together. It’s a fabrication, an activity, aimed at happiness. And to some extent it works. People who have a very poorly formed sense of self have trouble managing their lives. A certain level of identification … 
  4. The Buddha’s Rules of Order
     … Then there’s verbal fabrication. Ajaan Lee points to this as being probably the most detrimental of the three fabrications if you haven’t trained it. The way you talk to yourself can ruin your state of mind. You may be in a perfectly good situation, but you can talk yourself into being miserable. You have to be very careful about how you talk … 
  5. Dispassion & Delight
    In the sutta we chanted just now, the Buddha says that all fabrications are inconstant, all fabrications are stressful, all dhammas are not-self. This, he said, is always true. Whether there’s the arising of a Buddha or not, these things are true. The question is, are these ideas always beneficial? The Buddha does have that passage where he talks about how things … 
  6. Even Shame Can Be Skillful
     … Being with the breath throughout the body gets you in touch with the physical side of your emotions and then with the other elements of what are called fabrication. There’s verbal fabrication, which is the mind talking to itself—what it focuses on, how it evaluates what it’s focusing on. It’s called directed thought and evaluation. You’ve got that in … 
  7. Right View: Feeding Instructions
     … Then there’s fabrication: the questions you ask about the breath. Is the breath comfortable? Could it be more comfortable? How about this; how about that? You try things – experiment. You get good results? Then start spreading that sense of ease around the body. All of this comes under fabrication. And then there’s your awareness of all this, which sometimes is focused with … 
  8. Breath Energy
     … This is called calming fabrication. And in calming fabrication, you’ve got insight and tranquility working together. The tranquility is in the calming, and the insight is in understanding things in terms of fabrication. At the same time, when developing concentration, you’re seeing to what extent you can go against what the Buddha calls the three perceptions: the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and … 
  9. Standards for Thinking
     … Your feelings, your thoughts, are all fabricated. They’re all habits. And although old habits may be hard to change, it’s worth changing them if they’re making you miserable. That’s the message of the Buddha’s teachings: Skillful habits can be developed, unskillful habits can be abandoned. If this weren’t true, the Buddha said he wouldn’t have bothered to … 
  10. Respect for Tranquility & Insight
     … The insight comes easily—they can understand what the Buddha said about inconstancy, stress, not-self, the fabricated nature of our thoughts—but the tranquility comes hard. There’s a tendency in both those cases to want to stick with the side you’re already good at. But as Ajaan Fuang would point out, we need to bring things into balance, so we have … 
  11. The Buddha’s Program
     … Calming bodily fabrication, calming mental fabrication: These are steps in the breath meditation. They apply to the way you shape things coming in from the past as much as to things you’re doing right now. Ideally, you take the lessons you’ve learned in the meditation and apply them in the rest of your life. Try to be sensitive to the assumptions you … 
  12. Three Weapons
     … But still, there’s a lot to see here in terms of all the fabrication that goes on in the present moment. And learning how to get fascinated here is your protection. It’s your weapon against the defilments who would like to go out and have a little more sensual thinking and say, “It’s just a little bit, it’s not too … 
  13. A Game of Chess
     … See how those are fabricated as well. Then you let them go. It all sounds nice and linear. But as you know if you’ve been practicing any length of time, there are ups and downs, ins and outs. You make progress, then you backtrack and try another tack. Yet it’s important that you don’t see the backtracking as a total waste … 
  14. Let Pleasure & Pain Fall Off the Plow
     … the form of your body as you feel it within; feelings; perceptions; mental fabrications, where you put thoughts together; and consciousness, your awareness at the senses, including the sense of the mind: If you hold on to these places, you’ll find that they can give pleasure and they can give pain. Seeing that they give pleasure, we hold on to them. They’re … 
  15. The Wall of Discernment
     … There’s still something fabricated. You get to the point where you’re tired of having to fabricate. You wonder: Is there anything that is not fabricated? And as you contemplate that question, there can come an opening to something that’s totally unintended, and involves no intention to keep it going. That’s where you can find the happiness the Buddha was talking … 
  16. The Desire for Things to Be Different
     … There’s the factor of fabrication, saṅkhāra, in which case you have three types: bodily fabrication, the breath; verbal fabrication, how you talk to yourself with directed thoughts and acts of evaluation; and mental fabrication, perceptions and feelings. These can lead to bodily actions, verbal actions, mental actions that can have affect for a long, long time. But you want to look at them … 
  17. Don’t Clap Hands with Pain
     … As the Buddha said, just the fact that you’re experiencing the present moment already involves some fabrication. The fact that you’re breathing involves some fabrication, and there are perceptions, and there are thoughts, and there are intentions: All of these things are types of fabrication. So hold the perception in mind that there is space permeating the body. That will help fabricate … 
  18. Seeds of Becoming
     … In doing that, you engage all the forms of fabrication: physical, verbal, mental. There’s the breath, which is the physical fabrication; then there’s directed thought and evaluation, which are verbal fabrications; and then there are feelings and perceptions, which are mental fabrications. These are the basic building blocks from which you create this world, the world of a concentrated mind. You use … 
  19. The Not-Self Discourse
     … feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness. That dealt with the aggregates in the present moment. Then he continued by saying you can extrapolate from the present moment and think back to the past. Those who are able to remember past lives, what are they remembering? They’re remembering form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness. And wherever you could go in the future in the universe … 
  20. Feelings of Pain
     … The third step is to breathe in and out sensitive to mental fabrication—in other words, feelings and perceptions. Feelings are feeling- tones of pleasure, pain, or neither pleasure nor pain. Perceptions are the labels you use to identify things. Then the fourth step is to calm mental fabrication. In other words, find a way to breathe that calms the feelings and calms the … 
  21. Fabrication Theory
     … In the same way, this is thought theory, fabrication theory, where you learn how the mind fabricates things. When you’ve mastered that, you’ve mastered the ways of the mind. That’s when you’re really in charge. After all, the biggest danger in life is a mind out of control. And who does it harm? Well, the first person it harms is … 
  22. Load next page...