Search results for: "Fabrication"

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  2. Selfing & Not-selfing
     … All of that is fabrication. Then there’s consciousness, which is aware of all these things. So you can exert some control over the aggregates. If you couldn’t exert any control, there’d be no path. Discernment, right view, is a matter of perceptions and thought fabrications. Right resolve—a matter of fabrications and perceptions. All the elements of the path—all the … 
  3. Goodwill for Free
     … They still depend on fabrication. Goodwill is something you have to fabricate, especially if it’s going to be universal. Beyond that, though, developing goodwill is one of the bases for developing discernment. It leads to a type of concentration that is conducive to discernment if you apply it in that direction. From there it liberates you to the noble dwellings. So keep these … 
  4. Negotiating with Death
     … As for fabrication, that starts with the process of finding what you want, which you’ve identified as the proper food to feed that hunger. Then it fabricates whatever you’ve got to do to fix the food so that you can actually digest it. You get a raw potato. What do you do with it so that you can actually eat it? That … 
  5. The Steps of Breath Meditation
     … You see all the effort that goes into producing a particular type of experience, and the question becomes, “Is it worth it? Isn’t this burdensome, having to keep making, making, making these experiences all the time?” Then the problem becomes, “What are you going to do to let go of this burden?” If you don’t fabricate these states of concentration, is your … 
  6. Maintenance Work
     … You begin to overlook the act of tuning-in because it gets easier and easier, more and more natural — but it’s still there, the element of construction, the element of fabrication that keeps you there. When the concentration gets really solid so that you can look into it even in its most refined state, that’s when the insight really hits you: how … 
  7. Food for Consciousness
     … But when you begin to see that feeling is a fabricated process and there’s an element of choice, then the sense that this is the “real you”—or what you really feel deep down inside or you really crave deep down inside—no longer seems so compelling. You begin to pull away. You’re not a sucker for pleasures so much anymore. And … 
  8. Finding Extra Energy
     … With others, you have to exert what he calls a fabrication. You have to look at the way you’re breathing around the issue. You have to look at the way you’re thinking about it, how you evaluate it, how you direct your thoughts to it: in other words, the conversation you’re having in your mind about the issue. Maybe that has … 
  9. Take the Buddha Seriously
     … Realize you’ve got bodily fabrication with the breath, verbal fabrication with the way you’re talking to yourself, and mental fabrication with your feelings and perceptions. You see these things clearly because they go into making up your concentration. Once you start seeing them clearly here, you can see them in other parts of your life as well. Say, when anger comes, you … 
  10. Learning from Labor
     … And we see how we’ve constructed it out of form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness. Then we can get the mind into very subtle states, so that you can drop the directed thought and evaluation, and just be with the sense of oneness—body, awareness, breath, a feeling of pleasure all one, filling the whole body. Whatever sense of rapture there is after a … 
  11. Get Attached to Jhana
     … It is fabricated, it’s put together, but then the whole path is put together. When the Buddha talks about the highest dhammas, he says there’s the highest unfabricated dhamma and the highest fabricated dhamma. The highest of the fabricated dhammas is the path; the unfabricated dhamma, which is the highest of all dhammas, is dispassion. But the path is the best thing … 
  12. One Thing at a Time
     … To get to know fabrication, the Buddha says, know that there are three kinds: The in-and-out breathing is a kind of fabrication to begin with, because it’s influenced by your intentions. Then there’s what he calls directed thought and evaluation, vitakka vicara, which is how you talk to yourself. So, here with the breath, talk to yourself in a way … 
  13. Dependent Co-arising in Fifteen Minutes
     … Under the factor of fabrication, you have the breath: What are we looking at right now? We’re looking at the breath. You have directed thought and evaluation: That’s verbal fabrication—how you talk to yourself. You focus on a topic and then you make comments on it. Right now, you should be focusing on the breath, commenting on the breath. If you … 
  14. How to Use the Three Perceptions
     … The form of the body in concentration is the breath; there’s also the feeling of pleasure; the perception that holds you with the breath; the thought fabrications, the verbal fabrications—evaluating the breath and the mind; and even the consciousness of the concentration. You start seeing that these things, too, are inconstant. There’s some subtle inconstancy here. And you incline the mind … 
  15. Nourishing & Interesting
     … It was also learning how to see the processes of fabrication in the mind: the way you talk to yourself about the breath, the images you hold in mind, the feelings you focus on, how you relate to those feelings. There’s a lot to explore here, because you learn that when you hold a certain image of the breath in mind, it can … 
  16. Dealing with Pain
     … And then there’s fabrication. This is where the emotions are along with your more complex thoughts. Then finally there’s consciousness—awareness of these things. The Buddha says we feed on these activities. And in fact, these activities are the activities that the mind usually uses in feeding as well. So there are two levels of feeding going on. For example, when you … 
  17. Capture Your Imagination
     … It’s a fabrication. Sometimes you get the idea that when the mind is practicing just being present, practicing bare awareness, just letting things arise and pass away without commenting, without trying to change them at all, that somehow that’s not a fabrication. Well, the intention to keep that level of awareness going: That is a fabrication. It is experimenting with the present … 
  18. How to Look, How to Listen
     … In other words, you look at how you’re fabricating things in an unskillful way, because this is how dependent co-arising gets set into motion. You’re fabricating in ignorance. You’re putting together your experience, right here, right now, and you’re hardly even aware of how you’re doing it. But if you bring some knowledge to the process, then the … 
  19. The Power of Perception
     … You begin to see in action what the Buddha was talking about, which is that if you’re going to have an actual perception, an actual feeling of the form of the body, or the feeling tones of pleasure or pain, you have to fabricate them from the raw material coming from your past. These things exist in a potential form, coming in from … 
  20. The Need for a Purpose
     … We have a purpose, which means, of course, that we have some expectations, that by fashioning a sense of form, feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness out of the raw material given to us by our past karma, we’re looking for something. We have a purpose in mind. This is the nature of our mind. It’s purposeful. When it has no purpose … 
  21. Attention & Intention
     … As the Buddha said, fabricated things do offer their pleasures. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and ideas; form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness can be very pleasant. He doesn’t deny it. But he says that if you focus on their pleasures, it just gives rise to more passion. And it’s because of our passions that we keep getting involved in … 
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