Search results for: "Form"
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- Into the Light of Consciousness… We encounter these forms of these fabrications very directly as we meditate. But the three fabrications are also interpreted in another way in some passages in the Canon, where bodily fabrication is any intentional bodily action. Verbal fabrication is any intentional verbal action. Mental is any intentional mental action. In other words, three different levels of kamma: bodily, verbal, mental. These are then discussed …
- Perception… You’re not trying to do away with form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, and consciousness — at least not right away. The first thing you’ve got to do is learn how to convert them into the path. They use the word “aggregates,” “heaps,” for the word “khandha.” You might think of them as big heaps of gravel. And you have the choice: You can …
- Oneness… When you start leaving the meditation object, the first thing you’ll run into is the fence formed by the sound of the talk. That’s to remind you to go back. The word desana, the word we usually translate as “Dhamma talk,” actually means pointing. And the talk is here to point you back to the breath, back to your present awareness, to …
- Constructing & Deconstructing… That, too, has its form and feelings and perceptions and thought constructs and consciousness. The fact is that the mind in concentration is the ideal laboratory for understanding these things and dismantling them. With the voices in the mind, you find there are many layers. There’s the voice that tries to take charge, and then the other voices make comments on it. Then …
- Useful Thinking… Your experience of form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness itself has an intentional element that’s operating right here, right now. That’s what you want to see. Now, because you’re shaping the present moment in this way, you can’t simply sit here and be totally passive. If you’re making the decision to be passive, okay, that’s a decision, there …
- Establishing Priorities… If you’re really alert, you can catch it before a distracting thought is fully formed. The more quickly you can see that process, the better. You can feel that stirring of a form or a thought beginning to occur, like a little tingling or a little stirring around, a little knot in the breath energy. At that point, it’s hard to say …
- Exploring the Basics… You can bring that sense of ease to bear the other forms of fabrication. The way you talk to yourself about the breath is called verbal fabrication. You don’t have to talk out loud, just in your mind. What are you telling yourself about the breath? Ideally, it should be two things: one, how you keep reminding yourself to stay with the breath …
- Happiness is a Skill… When he analyzes all those forms of suffering down to their common denominator, he defines suffering as the five clinging-aggregates, a point that’s not immediately obvious. When he assigns a duty to this suffering, he says it’s something you want to comprehend. It’s because we don’t really comprehend suffering that we keep on suffering. When he defines right view …
- Right Inner Speech… There’s some form in there, and there’s some feeling and some perception and thought-constructs and consciousness. Learn how to perceive it in those terms. Once you start taking things apart this way, then you can put them back together in more useful ways. Your sense of the form here can become a basis for concentration. The feeling that comes when you …
- Into the Cave with the Tiger… So, you’ve got all the forms of fabrication right there. Breath is bodily fabrication. Thinking and evaluating: That’s verbal fabrication. And feelings—feelings of pleasure or pain or neither pleasure nor pain—and perceptions, the images you hold in mind: Those are mental fabrication. We’re trying to do these activities with knowledge so that we can understand that the present moment …
- Heedfulness is the Path… the serious search for true happiness—realizing that there are so many forms of happiness out there that seem desirable but are not really reliable, and then looking at the actions that we do in quest of those forms of happiness, to see which ones we can trust and engage in with a sense of confidence, and which ones we have to abandon, to …
- Train Hopping… How does a thought form? At what point do you get interested? And when you get interested, what happens? What are the steps that lead you to suddenly finding yourself inside the train, going off in a whole different frame of reference? The first step in seeing these things is learning how to pull yourself out of trains of thought as soon as you …
- Taking Your Own Medicine… It’s not helpful to go around holding on to views all the time, because sometimes they really get in the way of seeing what’s really needed in any given situation, and they form a burden on the mind. The fourth effluent is ignorance—in other words, not knowing the mind, having blind spots in the mind. Not knowing when greed, anger, or …
- Stepping Out of the Waves… It, too, is a form of breath energy. Learn to see it as energy rather than just as something solid. It does have its solid aspects, but you don’t have to focus on them. Focus more on the sense of its being energy that can flow in any direction, that has no barriers, no boundaries. When you can think in this way, it …
- Can All Beings Be Happy?… He tells you to avoid killing, stealing, illicit sex, lying, taking intoxicants, and other forms of wrong speech in addition to lying: such as divisive tale-bearing, where you’re trying to break people up, break up a friendship because you feel threatened by the friendship; hurtful speech; idle chatter, the kind of talk that accomplishes nothing, that’s a lot of froth. In …
- A Refuge Inside… We take refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, but that doesn’t mean we’re finding our ultimate refuge in Prince Siddhartha of 2600 years ago, or in the words of the Dhamma, or in the monks who form the monastic Sangha, or even in the noble ones who form the noble Sangha. Those are external refuges, and they play a …
- The Skills of Truth & Calm… If you work your way down, you get to name and form. And here you are again: Form is the body as you experience it in terms of its properties. One of those properties is the wind property, and an aspect of the wind property is the in-and-out breath. But as you settle down, you may notice you’re also sensitive to …
- Dhamma Medicine… This is a very basic form of wisdom—and it’s important not to forget the basics, because they form the structure for everything else. That way, when you apply the various teachings that are more subtle and more specific, you can apply them in the right spot, keeping the general framework in mind: Where does this teaching fit? What situation is it meant …
- Exploring What You’ve Got… The important point that’s going to make a big difference, though, is when you get to the factor called “name and form.” “Name” stands for mental activities; “form” stands for the body or your sense of the body sitting right here. And in those mental activities there’s one that’s especially important: It’s called “attention.” Attention means basically what you choose …
- The Power of Truth… He described the basic formula for mindfulness practice and then he talked about developing it as a form of jhana: Focus in the body in and of itself—ardent, alert, and mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. That’s the formula for mindfulness. Then he would say first you develop this concentration with directed thought and evaluation—that’s …
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