Search results for: "consciousness"
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- The Bureaucracy of the Defilements… All of the kamma that you’ve been creating in a semiconscious way becomes a lot more conscious—and your ability to bring consciousness and discernment to these things is what’s going to make all the difference.
- Samvega for Samsara… form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. Once we latch on to these things, we become a being. Then the problem is that beings need to feed on physical food and mental food, and it’s in the feeding that we suffer. Now, we think that feeding is our main pleasure in life, so when we hear people say that the Buddha said that life …
- Fear of Missing Out… Then, from there, the sequence goes on to consciousness and from there, name and form. And again, you have intention under name. You also have perceptions. You also have acts of attention. What are you paying attention to? How are you framing the issue? These are things you should know. All these steps prior to sensory contact are things on which you should cast …
- Seclusion Through Mindfulness… After all, what is “the knowing” in the present moment? It’s the aggregate of consciousness. It’s one of the khandhas. It’s a useful tool in the path, but ideally you don’t want to be the knowing—you want to keep track of the knowing. This is how you get secluded: putting aside thoughts of the past, not laying claim to …
- A Concentration Checklist… What’s form, what’s feeling doing right now? What’s perception doing? What’s fabrication doing? What’s consciousness doing? How do these things work together to create a state of concentration? Can you see that? Look. Take an interest—and you’ll realize there’s nothing to get bored about. All the processes by which the mind is creating suffering for itself …
- Serial Clinging Is Still Clinging… Sometimes you identify with your body, sometimes with your feelings, sometimes with your perceptions, your thoughts, your consciousness, or any combination of these. If you were to draw a picture of your sense of self, it would be like an amoeba, changing shape all the time. It all still counts as clinging, because the Buddha’s not telling you, “Wander around with your ideas …
- Love Me, Love My Defilements… Feelings feel, perceptions perceive, fabrications fabricate the other aggregates into actual aggregates, and consciousness cognizes. These things are defined by their activity. And these activities are the raw materials from which we create our sense of self. In our delusion we tend to think of “self” as a thing we’re stuck with, either for metaphysical reasons or for social reasons. But that’s …
- Your Committee of Addicts… These are basically ways in which we put the aggregates together—our sense of our body, our feelings, our perceptions, our thought constructs, our acts of consciousness. We put them together into something that we actively hold on to. The Buddha’s great insight was that if you’re really serious about going beyond suffering, you can take the different things that you hold …
- Refuge… There’s fabrication, your internal conversation about the breath, your directed thoughts and your evaluations of what’s going on; and then consciousness, which is aware of all these things. There you’ve got them all here, the five aggregates, and you turn them into the path. They become your home right now, a much more solid home than any other one you could …
- Dispassion… You realize that you’ve been feeding off of form and feelings and perceptions and fabrications and consciousness: all these things that make up your sense of who you are. Now, though, you’ve found something better, which doesn’t require that you need to feed anymore. And you realize that all of this clinging and holding on is suffering. So you feel dispassion …
- A Good Path to Be On… contains an element of intention. So the way you breathe already has a subconscious element of intention. The best way to realize that is to try to breathe in different ways. Consciously change the way you breathe. Find a way of breathing that’s comfortable, interesting, soothing when you need to be soothed, energizing when you need to be energized. This involves thinking about …
- Not-self Is a Value Judgment… Even when he was talking to people on the verge of becoming arahants giving them that questionnaire, notice how he phrased the questions: “Form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness: Are they constant or inconstant?” — “They’re inconstant.” “If they’re inconstant, are they easeful or stressful?” — “They’re stressful.” And then the final question is not, “Then is there a self?” No, the question is …
- Doing… The same with feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, consciousness. He doesn’t tell you just to give to up and say, “Well, that’s not my self, so I’ll just learn how to accept things as they are.” That short-circuits the whole path. You never get anywhere. He says to try training these things into a state of stillness, a state of well …
- The Mind When Trained Brings Happiness… re not holding on to any tension as you breathe out. Allow your ankles to relax, allow your wrists to relax. Any part of the body that tends to hold tension: Consciously relax it. If you’re not sure if something is tense or not, you can compare the left side to the right side. Your left shoulder and your right shoulder. Your wrists …
- 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 …
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