Search results for: "Form"

  1. Page 33
  2. Ugly Body, Happy Mind
     … The gladness of liberation is the best form of gladness there is.
  3. Training the Committee
     … He had qualities that all of us have in potential form in our mind. He had them in a potential form to begin with, but he was able to develop them through three qualities he mentioned: ardency, resolution, and heedfulness. The heedfulness is the knowledge that what we do really does make a difference in our lives, so we have to be careful in … 
  4. Making an Effort
     … It’s simply that some forms of effort are things we’re more used to, more habitual, so they seem easier. When you train the mind to be still for a while, though, and then look at the effort that goes into ordinary, everyday pleasures, you see there’s an awful lot of effort, and the rewards are pretty slim. The kind of happiness … 
  5. Concentration & Renunciation
     … the discernment to see what kind of perceptions you’re applying to the pain, in your relationship to the pain, that are aggravating it, that are actually forming a bridge from the physical pain into the mind, where they turn it into a mental pain and make it more than it has to be. So the meditation is here to help you not be … 
  6. Respect for the Training
    There’s a chant we often recite about the forms of respect that bring you into the presence of nibbana. One of them is respect for the training. The training is very basic—virtue, concentration, discernment—and in some cases it’s so basic we tend to overlook it. We want to go to the higher Dhamma, things that are more abstract that seem … 
  7. The Walls of Ignorance
     … We tend to think of ignorance, or avijja, in very abstract terms — not knowing the four noble truths, not knowing dependent co-arising, not knowing the Deathless — but you can’t chip away at those forms of ignorance until you’ve chipped away at the more blatant, immediate ones: the mind’s habit of disassociating, of leaving gaps in its inner conversation. Say you … 
  8. The Noble Search Makes Us Human
     … And that search comes in two forms. One is what he calls the ignoble search: You look for happiness, you look for an escape from pain and suffering, in things that will age, grow ill, and die, or that will be affected by your own aging, illness and death. And then there’s the noble search, in which you search for something that is … 
  9. Taking an Active Role
     … It’s not that you’re presented with the present moment fully formed and then you react to it. Instead, it’s as if you’ve got lots of potential present moments, and you choose among them. So even though there may be the potential for pain in a particular part of the body, you don’t have to exacerbate the pain. You don … 
  10. Learn from the Ants
     … tend to change over time, still the basic problem is the same: Suffering is still clinging to the aggregates, and the aggregates are basically the same now as they were then: form, feeling, perception, mental fabrications, and consciousness. Once you read the definitions, you realize that these are things you do, and you’re doing them all the time. How the mind functions, how … 
  11. The Purity of Your Intentions
     … You see how intentions are formed, the stages by which a little inkling comes into the mind, turns into something bigger, and then seems to be something real. It can pull you away if you’re not careful. The inkling develops hooks if you’re not careful. So you have to be quick. You’re learning about the body; you’re learning about the … 
  12. Energy & Efficiency
     … One time, she developed a form of cancer that required radiation, but she was allergic to the anesthesia. So she told the doctors, “Look, I’m a meditator. I can handle pain. Let me just use my power of concentration.” So they tried it, and she got through, but it took all her energy, and left her feeling drained. But she was able to … 
  13. Truth in Action
     … Even the highest form of non-duality, the Buddha said—the non-duality of consciousness—is still fabricated. It’s still something that’s put together. And you want to see that as an activity. That’s how you get to go beyond it. So it’s not the case that we work at being very careful about what we’re doing up to … 
  14. Fear of Others
     … If anything that’s subject to harm leaves you open to danger, leaves you open to suffering, why identify with it? If you can think in this way, you find yourself shedding all kinds of unskillful forms of pride, including the pride that masks as extreme shame. A lot of unskillful things hide around these things that we’re afraid of, these things where … 
  15. One Foot in the Present
     … This is called, rūpa-bhava, or a sense of the form of the body. It helps pull you out of those other worlds. So try to stay in touch with the breath, the feeling of the process of breathing, the breath energy as it flows through all the breath channels in the body. The more fully you’re present to the breath throughout the … 
  16. Owners of Our Actions
    One of Ajaan Suwat’s favorite teachings was that there are many things in Buddhism that are not-self. Form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness: These are all not-self. But then the Buddha has us reflect, “We’re the owners of our actions.” Kamma is not not-self. What we do is our responsibility. What we do is our refuge. Given the situation now … 
  17. Endurance
     … You have to see which forms of stress are things that you simply have to put up with in life, and which ones you can change. If you can’t put up with the effects of inconstancy, stress, and not self, you’ll never get to focus on what the real problems are—which is not the fact that those things that are inconstant … 
  18. Preparing for Death
     … It’s a pleasure of form. It’s a higher level of pleasure. It doesn’t have all the drawbacks of sensuality. It has a few drawbacks: It is, after all, something fabricated. But it’s fabricated with skill, fabricated with knowledge. It’s the kind of pleasure that doesn’t require that you deny the harm that you may be caused in the … 
  19. Stop & Think
     … Of course, the irony there is that to get into the formless jhanas, you first have to go through form, i.e., through the body. You’ve got the processes of bodily fabrication, i.e., the breath, and your mental fabrication, and your verbal fabrication. You have to get these all smoothed out so that you can see the mind clearly. We have to … 
  20. One Hand Clapping
     … It’s almost as if, as a thought begins to form in the mind, we think it’s a little present. We want to see what’s in the thought. We open it up, and sometimes there’s something entertaining there. Sometimes there’s something interesting, something practical. Sometimes the little box of the present is like Pandora’s box. You open it up … 
  21. Discernment in Concentration
     … You’ve got the breath, which is form. You’ve got the pleasure that comes with being with the breath: That’s feeling. There’s the perception that holds you with the breath, the image of the breath that you have in mind that helps you stay with the breath: That’s perception. You’re thinking about the breath and adjusting the breath, evaluating … 
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