Search results for: "consciousness"
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- Empathetic Joy… So it’s good very consciously to develop an attitude of appreciation and empathetic joy when people are doing good things and when they’re reaping the results of good actions. That makes the mind very expansive. It’s a form of generosity, a generosity of spirit: that you’re happy to see other people doing something that might be better than what you …
- Concentration: A Balancing Act… Then very consciously spread your awareness to fill the whole body, and then keep watch over it to make sure that the range of your awareness doesn’t shrink. As it fills the body, try to make sure that it fills every little part of the body. Each toe. Each finger. The spaces between the fingers. The spaces between the toes. The different vertebrae …
- You Should Heed These Shoulds… In other words, you use the aggregates of form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness to create a path. Your practice of the precepts will involve these five aggregates. Your practice of concentration will involve them. Even discernment—the perceptions and thought constructs you use for discernment—will involve the aggregates, especially perceptions. And you have to hold on. And if it involves a sense …
- To Know the Buddha… As they say in Pali, rūpa ruppati, which means form deforms; feelings feel; perceptions perceive; fabrications fabricate; consciousness cognizes. They’re not things. When we talk about them as aggregates, it sounds as if they’re piles of gravel, but they’re actually activities. And the activity itself is suffering, stress. We do these things for the sake of happiness—we cling to them …
- Freedom, Conditioned & Not… There’s a state where there’s the Oneness of consciousness, a sense of your awareness being one with the object. But that’s fabricated and it’s going to let you down. Even more so when you just slap the label of Oneness on everything without really knowing what you’re doing. After all, there is a choice—you can choose to use …
- Some Assembly Required… Things come up from the past, and as the Buddha said, we take these potentials and shape them into forms, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness—for a purpose. Our primary purpose is simply to have these kinds of experiences so that we can then use them, to get some pleasure out of them. That means that our experience is purposeful. We’re not just …
- Taking Stock… We had that chant just now about how form—one of the forms in our life, of course, is the form of the body—feelings, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness: All these things are not-self. They don’t really lie totally under your control. But it’s not as if you don’t have any control over them at all. You do have some. So …
- Fear of Death… So why are we so attached? It’s because we fear that without the body there’d be no consciousness. Here again, meditation could help. If you can get the mind really still, to the point where the breath stops, you begin to notice that the sense of the boundary of the body begins to dissolve away. You think of the space filling the …
- First Principles… But if you learn to be more consciously proactive in how you approach your body, you begin to realize that the mind has already been playing a huge role in shaping your experience all along. How you perceive the breath has a huge impact on how the breath actually feels. In other words, the images you hold in mind determine how the breath flows …
- The Good We Already Have… That takes you as far as it can go and you stay tuned to the sense of infinite consciousness: a sense of “knowing” that has no discernable limits. It’s all there. What makes the difference is simply your ability to stay tuned in the right way that will nourish these useful qualities. In other words, they’re always there, but the question of …
- Categorical Truths… You cling to the body, you cling to your feelings, your perceptions, your thought constructs; you cling to consciousness of the senses. Wherever you cling, that’s the suffering. This is called a noble truth because when you understand your suffering in this way, you see that there’s something you can do about it in such a way that takes you beyond all …
- Training Heart & Mind… So you want to bring some awareness to that process as well, and you can do that by consciously directing your inner conversation to the breath. You’re going to talk about something to yourself? Talk about the breath. How is the breath doing? Does it feel right? Where could it feel better? Once it feels good, how can you maximize that pleasure? For …
- Steering the Raft… There are similar contemplations for feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. There’s a lot about these things that you simply can’t control. They come and they go. You can see them coming, and you can see them going. If they were really you, you wouldn’t be in a position to observe their coming and going. Things like this, if they’re based …
- Issues of Control… Even though the Buddha says that, in ultimate terms, the five aggregates of form, feeling, perceptions, thought constructs, and consciousness do not lie under your total control, still you do control them to some extent. If it weren’t for that “some extent,” you wouldn’t fall for them. The question always is, with your sense of self: Is it worth identifying with them …
- Anybody Home?… form, feelings, perceptions, mental fabrications, acts of consciousness coming and going, coming and going. They’ve been coming and going in all kinds of zigzags. You want to learn how to see that they’re really not worth getting involved with. He represents this by the little children suddenly getting sick and tired of their mud houses, realizing they’re nothing but mud, and …
- Helping Yourself by Helping Others… But when you consciously try to bring these attitudes of endurance, harmlessness, goodwill, and sympathy or kindness into your dealings with other people, you find that you start dealing with your own mind in that way as well. And that makes the meditation go a lot better. You can put up with dry periods in your meditation and not feel defeated. You can develop …
- We’re All Learning the Ropes… It may have been because she just didn’t have the opportunity or because she consciously made this choice not to go to a better world, but again you have to realize you’re not just the target of everybody else’s misbehavior. You’ve been putting some misbehavior out there into the world yourself. This applies to all of us. The Buddha himself …
- A Confident Ego… But when you suppress something, you know it’s there, but you consciously say no to it. And if you’re skilled, you can be effective. But you need the assistance of the fourth function, which is called sublimation. In other words, when you deny yourself an unhealthy pleasure, you should find a healthy pleasure to put in its place. Now, in the Buddha …
- To Purify the Heart… It would be possible for the mind to think without the breath, but it’d be a disembodied consciousness. It wouldn’t have an impact on the world outside. It’s through the breath that you relate to the world around you. First you use it to relate to the other properties of the body and then, through them, you also relate to other …
- Observe Your Concentration… Perceptions, thought fabrications, consciousness: If they were your self, he said, you could have them be just the way you wanted them to be. Now, we can have some control over these things, but the problem is that the control is not total. Then the Buddha goes on to give the questionnaire that he gave many, many times after that with each of the …
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