Search results for: "consciousness"
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- Compunction & Awe… else. It was overwhelming. Then he realized that the big problem was inside. So he went off into the wilderness, removed the arrow in his heart, and found something infinitely bigger: consciousness without surface. Unlimited. Not bound by any of the six senses. It’s because we have this confidence in something beyond the awesome things of nature that this sense of saṁvega has …
- A Noble Warrior’s Path… Meanwhile, your consciousness is aware of all of these things. So you’ve got the five aggregates right here in right concentration, which is your nourishment on the path. Without the well-being and nourishment that come from right concentration, the path gets dry pretty fast. And as for perceptions of the three characteristics, don’t apply them too quickly to what you’re …
- Large Perspective, Small Focus… So you look at the suffering, try to identify it, and as the Buddha said, it’s just aggregates, which are just activities of the mind—there’s form, feeling, perception, fabrication, consciousness. And it’s not just the aggregates themselves, there’s aggregates plus clinging, the way we cling to these things. What are you clinging to? Is it a particular idea about …
- Practicing Meditation to Perform at Death… Even a state of infinite consciousness: You can develop a sense of self around that. A sense of infinite space: You can develop a self around that, and a very strong sense of pride. One of my favorite stories about monks meditating and gaining visions is of one monk who was meditating out in the forest. As he was sitting and meditating, devas would …
- Inner Civil War… This is where Ajaan Lee’s image of all the different consciousnesses in your mind comes in really handy. The desire to give in to lust, the desire to stay with your lust, or to stay with your anger: They’ll say, “We’re already here. What are you going to do about it? You’ve already made your choice to side with us …
- Motivation… it infinite? Is it not infinite? Is there an edge to space? Is there no edge to space? And how about human beings? Are we just physical things and is our consciousness a byproduct of our physical processes? Or is there something else separate?” Questions like that. And the Buddha said, “I’m not providing an answer to them. I’ve never answered those …
- Levels of Truth… form, feeling, perception, fabrications, consciousness. All these things are things that we cling to, and in the clinging there’s going to be stress. That’s something you want to comprehend. You want to watch as it’s actually happening to understand how it’s happening. Then, in the course of performing that duty, you learn to see the cause of stress: what’s …
- Streams of Anger… You’ve got to take what you’ve learned from your concentration and consciously apply it. So, you analyze the anger in the same three ways: How are you breathing when you’re angry? How are you breathing when you’re irritated? How are you talking to yourself? What are the things you chose to focus on, and what do you say about them …
- The Not-Self Discourse… There’s some fabrication going on, and there’s consciousness. So there are subtle levels of aggregates there as well. In some cases, the Buddha says, Sabbe dhamma anatta, in order to get you to let go of even that permanent sense of the knower. But apparently the five brethren were able to let go because they were able to reflect on what they …
- What Should & Shouldn’t Be Done… One of the signs of an awakened person is that he or she would never, consciously or intentionally, break the five precepts. Awakened people are not defined by the five precepts. They don’t define a sense of who they are out of the precepts, but virtue becomes a natural part of the mind. So when you hit a state like that, you have …
- The Teacher Inside… Sometimes you consciously work with it, sometimes you simply try to make your awareness of the breath as continuous and non-stop as possible. The fact that you’re consistently watching it seems to iron out a lot of the wrinkles. Once you’ve got it comfortable, what’s next? You know the problem when the breath gets comfortable is that you tend to …
- Calming Mental Fabrication… Now, with the bathman, the bathman has to consciously work through the powder. That’s directed thought and evaluation. There’s a conscious effort to open things up. But once you get past that, think of the spring water coming into the lake. The spring water doesn’t have any intention. Just the fact that everything is wide open allows it to flow. That …
- No Mistakes Are Fatal… So you’ve got all the building blocks for your experience right here, and instead of building them into elaborate worlds, you very consciously don’t. You build them into something very simple: a focused state of mind. Now, “simple” doesn’t mean “easy.” As I said, there are all these other currents going on in the mind. But as you keep coming back …
- In Your Right Mind at Death… But if in your meditation you can develop any of the formless states—staying with a sense of infinite space, a sense of infinite consciousness, nothingness—you don’t feel so threatened when you’re being pushed out of this body. You know that the mind has good places to go that don’t require having a body. It can be okay about the …
- The Radiant Mind… This radiant mind is not the unconditioned mind or the unconditioned consciousness. That’s something separate entirely. But it’s a part of the path there, and it’s a bright path. As Ajaan Maha Boowa points out, at the very end, you have to abandon even the bright path to get to what’s really valuable in the mind. But wherever you see …
- Precarious Knowledge… It’s in feelings and perceptions and thought constructs and consciousness, all of which are based on very changeable factors. When I was doing that collection of similes by Ajaan Chah, I noticed he had several similes where talked about the issue of scholarly knowledge versus meditation knowledge, or the approach of, say, Buddhist scholars as opposed to the approach of meditators. Scholars, as …
- Angry… As for feelings, the way you breathe, even though you may not consciously think of it, aggravates a sense of having something oppressive inside you that you’ve got to get out. Part of you will say, “Well, the only way of getting it out is either to express the anger or to bottle it up and get cancer.” So you just let it …
- The Power of Perception… The best way to actually see that in action is to consciously work on shaping the way you perceive things, these labels, these images you hold in your mind as they relate to the breath. 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 …
- The Karma of Self & Not-Self… breath runs through the body and where you are in the body as you focus on the breath; fabrications would be the intentions that hold you here; and then there’s consciousness. So all five aggregates are here in the state of concentration. You realize that you’ve been holding on to them as your means for letting go of other things that are …
- 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 …
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