Search results for: "Form"
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- Stake Out… At the same time, in the course of working through these energies, you get more sensitive to how thoughts form. The formation of a thought has both a physical side and a mental side, and the breath is the ideal place to see this. After all, it is a physical property, but of the physical properties, it’s closest to the mind and the …
- Mental Stirrings… As your mind gets more and more quiet, more and more solid with the breath here, you begin to sense earlier and earlier stages of thought processes as these things begin to form in the mind. You chase them back to the point where it’s hard to say that it’s strictly a mental phenomenon. It seems to be right at the border …
- Expanding Your Awareness… Even in day-to-day life, these two forms of expanded awareness are really good, really helpful. When you’re working on restraint of the senses, it can lead to a sense of being really confined at times. You can’t look at this, you can’t look at that, without having to think of the other side. Looking and seeing become a real …
- Stay with the Breath… We spend most of our day getting into our thoughts, but we very rarely look at the process of how a thought forms. Yet the only way you can get around unskillful thinking, any kind of thinking that creates suffering, is to look at the process, to see how jerry-rigged the whole thing is, how arbitrary it is: all the make-believe that …
- The Challenge of Faith… It’s a basic principle that some forms of happiness, some forms of pleasure, require that you give up other ones. So that’s a given right there. The question is, what kind of happiness, what kind of pleasure are you going to take as your primary focus? What is something you’re not going to sacrifice? How high do you want to set …
- Why We Train the Mind… This is where discernment forms an essential part of right effort. As the Buddha noted, there are some problems in the mind that go away when you simply watch them with equanimity. Other times, you have to fabricate, as he says, an effort, or fabricate an intention to do away with them, or to develop whatever is needed. So that’s the second part …
- Even Animals Can Be Trained… It was only one factor out of the eight that form the path, but it was the beginning for getting on the right path. So the grass and other food that you offer to the elephant correspond to the sense of well-being that you get as you stay with the breath—which means that you should focus on what kind of breathing feels …
- Questioning & Conviction… This is an important form of conviction because it gives you the impetus to get on the path. You say, “He could do it; so can I.” You need to maintain that belief. So the knowledge of the Dhamma that you start out with is not really knowledge. It’s a conviction, a belief—an untested hypothesis that you’re going to test. But …
- Breath, Tranquility, & Insight… Here, he’s introducing you to one of the three forms of fabrication. Bodily fabrication is the in-and-out breath. Verbal fabrication is your directed thought and evaluation, as when you bring up a topic in the mind and then evaluate it. This is how we create sentences in the mind, ask questions in the mind. The third type of fabrication is mental …
- The Uses of Fear… But as you get more sensitive to the full process of fabrication, you begin to realize what you’re doing is creating a thought world here that includes all forms of fabrication: breath, which is bodily fabrication; directed thought and evaluation—verbal fabrication; and your feelings and perceptions—mental fabrication. They’re all right here. When they’re all right here, you’re in …
- The Four Jhanas… The bathman would start with some scented bath powder and then mix it with water, kneading the water into the powder until it formed a paste with which they’d bathe. It’s similar to mixing water with flour to make bread dough: You want to mix it just right and knead it through thoroughly so that all the flour gets moistened in the …
- Practicing for Dispassion… The solution that the Buddha discovered was to see things, as he said, as they’ve come to be—in other words, simply as the raw material from which we create these becomings—and to develop dispassion for the raw material before it had a chance to form a becoming. That was going to be the way out. He discovered that it was possible …
- Remembering Ajaan Lee… Becoming is part of the problem, and yet you have to create a path, which is a form of becoming, to get beyond it. We’re trying to get beyond fabrication, but you have to fabricate the path. We’re going to be using the insights of what’s inconstant, stressful, and not-self, and yet when you’re developing concentration you’re trying …
- Fear of Death… The Buddha calls these strategies the process of “I-making” and “my-making.” Whatever way you form a sense of self around form, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, or consciousness, it’s all just fabrication. In the process of fabrication there’s stress. If that’s all there were in life, you’d be willing to put up with the stress, for without your self …
- Questioning & Acceptance… You focus, say, on the sense of form here in the concentration: the form of the body, the breath, the earth property, the wind property, the water property. You ask: Is this constant? The states of concentration can seem very constant, but you’ve got to look very carefully, and you’ll see that there is a slight bit of inconstancy. The level of …
- In Context… The implication there is that those are the basic truths that should form the context. Then the question with regard to those three perceptions is: Where do they fit in with the four noble truths? The answer is they fit in with the duties of trying to comprehend suffering and abandon craving. You have to understand that the things you crave are not going …
- The Buddha’s Questions… the life of sensual indulgence or the life of self-torment? At first he had answered, “The life of self-torment,” but later he realized that that was a poorly formed question. Or the question of what is the origin of the world: If that had been the question that had originally motivated him, then he would have stopped with the first or the …
- Guardian Meditations… Then, of course, the instructions for breath meditation are a form of verbal fabrication. You talk to yourself about sticking with the breath and how this is what you do with the breath, what you do around the breath. Sometimes when the mind is willing to settle down, those instructions for the three types of fabrication are perfectly sufficient. Other times, though, as the …
- Turtle Mind… Virtue, too, is a form of giving. As the Buddha says, you give safety to others. When you develop the brahmaviharas in your search for merit, again, you’re radiating. You’re not taking in. Ultimately, of course, when you get into meditation and your mind gets still enough so that you can gain some insight, insight is largely a matter of letting go …
- The Same but Different, but the Same… So regardless of your nationality, regardless of the type of mental illness you suffer from—greed, anger, delusion are all different forms of mental illness—the basic structure of the problem and the basic structure of the path to its solution are the same across the board. The difficulty lies in taking that large structure and applying it to your own particular sufferings, your …
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