Search results for: "Fabrication"
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- The Quality of Your Awareness… Where are your blind spots right now? How do you notice your blind spots? Ajaan Suwat once made the comment that if you want to see ignorance, look at where things are being fabricated. Right there is where you’re going to find ignorance. So try to notice what’s being fabricated and where is it hiding? What is it hiding? This is one …
- The Cost of Happiness… To what extent is it still fabricated? How are you going to see the process of fabrication? You look to see: Is there still any change? Is there any stress? If there is, then it’s something not worthy of your attachment. You might want to stay there for a while to get settled and still so that you can look and see. He …
- The End of Karma… Any effort to create or imitate the goal is something fabricated, and as the Buddha makes very clear, the goal and the path there are two very different things. The path is fabricated; the goal is not. The path is like a raft; the goal is like the safety of a further shore. Now, when you’re on a raft going across a river …
- Tranquility & Insight Together… It leads you ultimately to something that’s not shaped at all, not fabricated at all. It’s just there. So when you’re working with the breath, trying to get the mind into concentration, you’re bringing some awareness to the way you fabricate the state of your mind and your experience of your body. When the breath starts feeling good, you can …
- Judgmental vs. Judicious… Before there’s contact at the six senses, you’ve got fabrication; you’ve got name and form. Part of fabrication, of course, is directed thought and evaluation itself. Part of name and form is attention, knowing what questions to pay attention to, which ones to ignore. That requires that you use your powers of judgment. As Ajaan Lee points out, this is the …
- To Have a Purpose… That requires a lot of thinking, a lot of fabricating of your thoughts, because you’re doing this for a purpose. When the Buddha describes the aggregate of fabrication, that’s what he talks about: Every fabrication is for a purpose. We’re putting our lives together for a purpose already, so we might as well find a good purpose and do a good …
- Squeezing Goodness Out of the Aggregates… He said, “Why are you trying to adjust the breath? It’s just a fabrication.” She told me what he said. And I told her that if he had said that to me, I probably would have been driven out of the monastery, because I would have said, “Well, why are you bathing your body? It’s just a fabrication.” These things are there …
- Only Natural… These are just fabrications, and you begin to see that, like the flickering light that gets people to laugh and cry, some of the fabrications provide a lot of emotional juice. Anger comes along with them. Lust. Fear. Greed. Envy. All kinds of things. But if you can see it simply as a play of light, then you realize, “Why get involved?” Part of …
- A Becoming Critic… This is how it’s fabricated. This is how all states of becoming are fabricated. And this is as good as anything fabricated can get.” When you really comprehend it, as the Buddha said, then there’s no more passion for it, because you see how ephemeral the whole thing is, how unreliable it is. You see that there’s a lot of suffering …
- Insight Is a Judgment Call… You finally get to the point where the level of concentration is the best thing that fabrication can offer. And you begin to see that this, too, has its drawbacks. That’s when the mind is really willing to give the unfabricated a try. It sees its potential value for happiness. Up to that point, there’s something about lack of fabrication that scares …
- You Contain Multitudes… This is a lot of what the Buddha’s instructions are all about—his instructions on fabrication: bodily, verbal, mental. He’s basically telling you, “These are different ways you can think, these are different ways that you can picture things to yourself, even different ways to breathe, different feelings you can cultivate inside the body, all to your advantage.” So you may have …
- Being Somebody, Going Somewhere… After all, they are fabrications, and fabrications, the Buddha said, are done for the sake of something. It’s good to be clear about that. When I was in France last time, someone on the retreat complained about practicing the path for the sake of something. He thought we should just be in the present moment for the sake of the present moment. But …
- Alternative Conceptions… Reducing everything in your experience just to those terms helps you to see the connections, to see how you fabricate things in such a way that leads to suffering, or in such a way that doesn’t. That’s the basic value of all these teachings. Some people think that meditation is aimed at stripping away all of our preconceived notions, all of our …
- Insight Is a Judgment Call… You could say it’s a web of fabrication. It sounds like a web of lies, which is not quite what the word “fabrication” means here: It’s simply something that’s put together. We’re constantly assembling it. And it’s constantly falling apart. So we keep assembling it some more. We’re driven to do this because we like to feed on …
- Succeeding at Happiness… Oneness, as the Buddha pointed out, is something fabricated. It’s put together, and as you get more sensitive to the process of fabrication, you can see that. You want to develop your sensitivity so that you’re looking for something better, something unfabricated. In other words, you get more and more particular about what you regard as satisfactory happiness. That’s part of …
- A Gift of Well-Being… You’re learning how to fabricate your experience of the present moment in a skillful way. This inner fabrication then becomes a foundation for the way you act in the world outside as well. It’s a benefit that spreads from right here and radiates out in all directions. This is why it’s important that you maintain your center right here as much …
- Neither Here nor There… They’re all fabrications, too, all the same sort of thing. You get to see that any world you could go to, any fabrications, are not worth it. That way, you learn to look positively on dispassion, cessation, release. Then he recommends breath meditation as a way of seeing how the mind fabricates these things all the time, right here, right now, learning how …
- Mastering Causality… You begin to get more sensitive to what the mind is doing, particularly in terms of its perceptions and thought-fabrications, and how these relate to your feelings. Perceptions are the labels you put on things. For example, you may experience the body as something solid breathing in and breathing out. Well, you can change that perception. See everything you sense in the body …
- The First Noble Truth… Are you clinging to a form or a feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness? He puts these in terms that allow you to step outside of the suffering. Because the big problem of the suffering is that you’re often in it, in what the Buddha calls becoming. You’ve taken on an identity in a particular world and it’s causing you suffering. As long …
- Observe Yourself in Action… The first factor after ignorance is fabrication: bodily fabrication—which is the in-and-out breath; verbal fabrication—directed thought and evaluation, how you’re talking to yourself; and mental fabrication—feelings and perceptions. Feelings are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. Perceptions are the images you hold in mind, the labels you apply to things. You have these things right …
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