Search results for: "consciousness"
- Page 3
- To Know the Noble Truths… And finally consciousness, which is aware of all these things. If it weren’t for the activity of consciousness, you wouldn’t be able to do any of these other things. Our sense of the world, our sense of our self, our sense of what should be done, and what kind of pleasures we want: All these things are made up of those aggregates …
- The Not-Self Discourse… feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness. That dealt with the aggregates in the present moment. Then he continued by saying you can extrapolate from the present moment and think back to the past. Those who are able to remember past lives, what are they remembering? They’re remembering form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness. And wherever you could go in the future in the universe …
- Practice in Dying Skillfully… Looking from the outside, people say, “Oh, the fact that you’re conscious means that even though you’re not aware of the body, your consciousness depends on the body.” But when you die, you’re not worried about what people looking at you from the outside would see or say. You’re worried about your consciousness as you’re experiencing it from within …
- The Mind’s Ostinato… What is your consciousness? What is your mind? Who are you? Those are questions the Buddha leaves aside, or else he defines them in terms of verbs—your knowing is a doing. Sometimes you sense consciousness as this field that’s always there, but it, too, is a construct—it’s put together. And we’re the ones putting it together. Who are we …
- Preparing to Die Well… Then you let go of your consciousness of the senses, your consciousness of what’s going on in your mind, your consciousness of consciousness itself: You let go of that, too. And Anathapindika starts to cry. He’s never heard this teaching before. All those years he spent with the Buddha, yet the Buddha never mentioned it to him. There’s a lot of …
- How We Cling… clinging to form, feeling, perception, thought fabrications, ad consciousness. This is where it gets unfamiliar. You may say, “I don’t consciously cling to these things.” But you have to understand that there are four ways of clinging, and they’re all very familiar: clinging to sensuality, your ideas of where you’re going to find sensual pleasures; clinging to views, your ideas about …
- Learning from Determination… But without that intentional element, you wouldn’t have consciousness of the senses at all. You wouldn’t have consciousness of the present moment at all. Consciousness is something you do. It’s not just an ultimate reality. It’s an activity. But to get back to form: You see that your sense of the body really does dissolve away when the breath stops …
- Wilderness Wealth… from the physical properties, you go to infinite space; from space to infinite consciousness, consciousness permeating everything; from there to nothingness; and then on to neither perception nor non-perception. And then to what the Buddha calls the themeless concentration of awareness. At that point you’ve gone even beyond the notion of oneness. Oneness actually takes you only as far as the infinitude …
- Feeding on Feeding… the form clinging-aggregate, feeling clinging-aggregate, perception clinging-aggregate, fabrications clinging-aggregate, consciousness clinging-aggregate. People have often asked: Where did the Buddha get this analysis? Because you don’t see it in any pre-Buddhist teachings. He mentions it in his first discourse, explains a little bit more in his second, and the people that were listening gained awakening. What was he …
- The Path of Giving… What is it made up of? Body, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, and consciousness. We tend to take these raw materials and use them to fashion our sense of who we are. That “who we are” then becomes an end in and of itself. When you’ve got an end, you’ve got a barrier. Things go no further than that. But when live with …
- Mud Houses… form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. He illustrated his point with an analogy. He said it’s like little kids playing with mud houses. You might think of kids playing with sand castles. As long as the little kids are fascinated with the little mud houses, they’re very protective of them. If anyone tries to come along and kick their mud houses or …
- Where the Mind & Body Meet… The question should be, ‘Where do the four great elements find no footing?’ And that’s in consciousness without a surface.” That consciousness—the consciousness of nibbāna, where there is no awareness of any of the elements, or any of the cosmos at all: The cosmos doesn’t impinge on that. But it’s the ultimate happiness. It’s something other, but it is …
- Warm Your Heart… There was a book I was given when I was a teenager, Cosmic Consciousness—the first book of comparative religion I ever read. The author talked about his own experience of cosmic consciousness, and he went through different religions, finding evidence that all the great religions have had people who’ve had moments of cosmic consciousness—when everything opened up and they saw the …
- Purity of Heart… Physical food is one type of food of course, but there’s also the food of contact, the food of what’s called intellectual intention, and the food of consciousness. These are the things that we feed on. The body feeds on physical food. The mind feeds on the three other kinds. We feel we need these things in order to survive; that’s …
- The Need for Evaluation… And then there’s the consciousness. To get that pleasure to develop through the breathing and then to be able to spread it through the body, you’ve got to see the body and your mind as aggregates. Get a sense of: Where’s the perception, the label that’s running things here? How do you fabricate ideas? How do you test them to …
- Learning by Doing… Basically, it covers the mental activities that follow on consciousness. Consciousness, too, is active. Sometimes we think that it’s just a passive witness, or even that it’s unconditioned. But as the Buddha said, it’s conditioned by name and form. There’s one version of dependent co-arising where the two of them start the whole process together. It’s all driven …
- Disenchantment… There’s a passage in the Canon where he describes the highest form of oneness, which is the oneness or non-duality of consciousness, in which you have a sense of consciousness as a totality, containing everything. Yet even that, he says, is inconstant, stressful, and not-self. What these two ideas about happiness have in common is that the way things are out …
- Becoming… If you want to understand becoming and birth, you have to consciously create these states. Create a state of wellbeing, create a state of fullness, get good at it. That’s when you understand the process. Before you take things apart, you have to learn how to put them together.” And that’s what we’re doing right now, creating a state of becoming …
- Chewed Up by Your Food… You’ve got the form clinging-aggregate, the feeling clinging-aggregate, the perception clinging-aggregate, fabrications and consciousness clinging-aggregates. The word for “clinging,” upadana, can also mean sustenance. We try to feed off of these things. Particularly, we try to feed off the pleasure that these things have to offer. We look for pleasure in physical things, we look for pleasant feelings, pleasant …
- Location, Location… any of the six senses; any of the objects of the six senses; and then contact at the senses; consciousness at the contact; feeling born of the contact; perceptions for sights, sounds, smells, taste, tactile sensations, ideas; intentions for those things; directed thoughts; evaluation—the way you talk to yourself—around those things. Craving itself can be an object of craving. So you see …
- Load next page...
