Search results for: "Form"

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  2. The Noble Eightfold Path to the Deathless
    In every case when the Buddha explains the different sets that form the wings to awakening, he says that each set is developed by developing the noble eightfold path. This means that the path is central. It’s the most important of the sets. You can see this in the Buddha’s teaching career. It was his very first teaching. He started his first … 
  3. The Dhamma Eye
     … fabrication, name-and-form, consciousness, your experience of the six sense media. The fact that you’re aware of the six senses comes from the fact that there’s something in the mind that flows out to the senses. That’s what allows you to have that experience of the senses to begin with. But when you can see the mind at a point … 
  4. Investment Strategies
     … That’s a huge hunk of wealth right there, because it helps you to stock up all these other treasures that the Buddha says form inner wealth. There’s virtue, the realization that if you learn how to abstain from harmful behavior you’re not going to be weighed down by regret and unfortunate memories, because the regret tends to cause you to want … 
  5. The Uses of Concentration
     … They’re already here in a gentle, potential form. But we do have to be careful. We do have to watch, to be sensitive, and to show a great deal of restraint in respecting the little pockets in the mind, the pockets in the body, where there’s already a sense of wellbeing that we tend to overlook. To sense the potential for wellbeing … 
  6. Hindrances to the Heightened Mind
     … It’s halfway between two forms of devotion: devotion to sensual pleasure and devotion to self-torture. And the middle way is not devotion to a middling pleasure, a middling pain. It’s devotion to the heightened mind—in other words, to the practice of concentration. As the Buddha said, noble right concentration is the heart of the path, and all the other factors … 
  7. Honest & Observant
     … You begin to recognize that there are some forms of desire that should be encouraged, some forms of desire that should be abandoned. There are Dhamma teachings that sound deep and profound, but they’re lying to you. You have to watch out for that. But again, you put them to the test of your honesty. If you adopt a particular teaching, does it … 
  8. Mind Reading
     … Then you realize the only thing keeping you with that sense of form in the body is your image of the boundary of the body. Can you locate the act of the mind that’s creating that image? Can you erase it? Drop it? Replace it with a perception of space permeating the body and going out in all directions? It’s in this … 
  9. Long-Term Welfare
     … This is the kind of pleasure, this is the kind of well-being or happiness, that forms the path, something we work on. Once the mind gets settled in with that sense of well-being, then you can turn to look at the other things you ordinarily chase after for the sake of your happiness. You begin to see that they’re awfully fleeting … 
  10. Respect for Heedfulness
     … You begin to realize that even the most subtle form of pleasure on the everyday level has some clinging mixed into it, and that that particular clinging opens the bridge for all kinds of suffering to come into the mind. Once you build that kind of bridge to things, anybody can come over the bridge. Pleasure can come over the bridge; pain can come … 
  11. The Path of Mistakes
     … That’s one form of fabrication. Try to make the breath comfortable. When there’s a sense of tension anywhere in the body, learn how to breathe around it, or breathe through it, to relieve as much of the tension as you can without totally losing focus. You direct your thoughts to the breath. You evaluate the breath: “What kind of breathing feels good … 
  12. The Uses of Concentration
     … Now, there are slight forms of harm that develop, in terms of laziness on the one side or pride on the other—if you start thinking about how you have concentration and other people don’t—but those defilements can be dealt with, and they’re much more refined. How do you deal with them? By getting more skillful at your concentration: getting more … 
  13. Cutting the Fetters
     … People say that you can think about what the Buddha had to say about the first fetter, identity view, the idea that you identify yourself with any of the five khandhas — form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness — in any of four ways: either identifying directly with the khandha or aggregate itself, or seeing that you’re the owner of the aggregate, or that you’re … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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