Search results for: "Fabrication"

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  2. How to Listen to the Dhamma
     … You work with the fabrications in your mind, get them really subtle, maintaining whatever quality of concentration you’ve got. Then, when discernment arises, you begin to see that even the concentration is fabricated, so the next question is: Where do you go to reduce the stress even in the fabricated concentration? You realize that wherever else you could go would also be a … 
  3. Timeless Practice
     … The suffering of the three characteristics is simply the fact that things are fabricated, and there’s stress when you try to find happiness in things that are fabricated. The real suffering is the stress that comes from craving, the stress mentioned in the first noble truth, and that’s not necessary. As long as there’s going to be samsara, there are going … 
  4. Restlessness & Anxiety
     … Take any unskillful thought apart in terms of these fabrications and fabricate new thoughts in a much more skillful way to take its place. That way, you can induce more concentration and more discernment in the mind. These hindrances are obstacles not only to concentration but also to discernment. To deal with them, you’ve got to first borrow the Buddha’s discernment. Then … 
  5. Doubt vs. Questioning
     … For example, a common complaint about concentration, as you begin to fabricate it, is that you notice, “Hey, this is fabricated. This is willed. There’s got to be something wrong here.” You’d think that concentration should be something that happens naturally. Sometimes it does, but other times you really have to will it. You really have to work at it. After all … 
  6. Using Right View Rightly
     … You see how fabricated your sense of the world is and how fabricated your sense of you is. He says when it’s just sensory experience, there’s no “you” there and there’s no “here” or “there” or “between the two.” In other words, the spatial dimensions of the world don’t occur then. That’s useful for deconstructing any sense of “I … 
  7. Guardian Meditations
     … For instance, building right off of ignorance there are what they call fabrications. The way you breathe, if it’s done in ignorance, can contribute to suffering. That’s physical fabrication. Verbal fabrication consists of the way you direct your thoughts to things and then comment on them. If this is done in ignorance, it’s going to lead to suffering. Mental fabrication consists … 
  8. Mindfulness Gets Intimate
     … He calls the breath “bodily fabrication.” When you talk in terms of fabrication, you’re talking in terms of insight. You get sensitive to the breath. You energize the breath. And then you calm bodily fabrication. The calming: That’s the tranquility side. So, you gain practice in stilling and insight into the process of fabrication at the same time. In this way, you … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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