Search results for: "consciousness"

  1. Page 34
  2. Teachings to Rahula
     … When he talks about what are called the aggregates, there’s feeling—like feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain; perceptions—in other words the labels you apply to things; thought fabrications—the thoughts you put together; and then your consciousness of all these things. These are the terms that the Buddha has you use as you try to figure out what … 
  3. A Safe Haven Through Alertness
     … If there’s a part of the body that’s not occupied, then other people can occupy it with their energy, whether they’re consciously doing it or not. You feel invaded; you don’t feel quite safe. And if you’re not safe in your own body, there’s really no place where you can be safe. So you’ve got to learn … 
  4. Outside the Box
     … He goes on to point out that when you’re practicing concentration, you’re taking these inconstant aggregates—body, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness—and you’re trying to make them as constant as possible. You see that they do have their constant side. These things that are stressful do have their pleasant side. You can create a sense of ease in concentration, a … 
  5. Chopping Off Thoughts
     … Just consciously go through the whole body from the head down to the toes. If you sense any tension or tightness anywhere, think of it dissolving away and have it stay dissolved away as you breathe in, as you breathe out, as you breathe in again. Try to find some part of the body that you can maintain in this state of relaxed comfort … 
  6. Mature Strategies
     … Form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, even sensory consciousness: They all break down. But we’re strongly addicted to this approach, to hanging onto them as ends in themselves. Which is why, again, we spend so much time misinterpreting what the Buddha said. “The Buddha says there is no self,” we think, “but he can’t be right.” We’re not looking at what he … 
  7. A Sense of Yourself
     … You’re just relaxing into the aggregate of consciousness—and yet that’s something you have to comprehend, to see where you’re clinging to it. It’s not a place to rest. It’s something you have to investigate. Learning how to investigate is when you have to use real mindfulness, which is the ability to keep things in mind, to keep your … 
  8. Parsing Out Suffering
     … Then there’s consciousness, awareness of all these things. We enjoy knowing these processes, we can’t conceive of not being aware of them. If you weren’t aware, then you wouldn’t be able to follow any of these other activities. Those are the aggregate as they relate to feeding. Then the different forms of clinging also relate to feeding. There’s sensual … 
  9. Useful Thinking
     … Your experience of form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness itself has an intentional element that’s operating right here, right now. That’s what you want to see. Now, because you’re shaping the present moment in this way, you can’t simply sit here and be totally passive. If you’re making the decision to be passive, okay, that’s a decision, there … 
  10. Active Truth
     … He doesn’t cite his own memories of previous lifetimes or proof that someone can have a consciousness that goes from one life to the next and then remember what had happened in previous lifetimes. That’s not the proof. When people say that all the Buddha’s teachings have to be proved in an empirical way, they usually use this as an argument … 
  11. Happiness is a Skill
     … the form of the body in the breath; the feeling of pleasure that comes when the breath feels good; the perception—the mental image of the breath being the energy going throughout the body—that holds the breath in mind; fabrication, the conversation you hold with yourself about the breath as you’re evaluating it; and then consciousness, which is aware of all these … 
  12. Mindfulness Defined
     … You can be attentive to something for only a very short period of time, then you have to consciously return to it if you want to keep on being attentive to it, again and again. This means that you need to keep remembering to stitch those moments of attention together, from moment to moment to moment. That’s what mindfulness is for. It’s … 
  13. Right Inner Speech
     … There’s some form in there, and there’s some feeling and some perception and thought-constructs and consciousness. Learn how to perceive it in those terms. Once you start taking things apart this way, then you can put them back together in more useful ways. Your sense of the form here can become a basis for concentration. The feeling that comes when you … 
  14. The Limits of Old Kamma
     … But the potential for experiencing infinite space or the potential for experiencing infinite consciousness is all right here. You learn how to ferret it out and make the most of it. So this is how we live with our past karma: Accept whatever limitations there are, but also look for the areas that are not limited, to see in which direction freedom lies. This … 
  15. More than a Sliver of Mindfulness
     … They don’t happen unless you consciously do them. As I said, you do your feelings anyhow. But with ordinary pleasures of the senses, you’ve gotten so good at doing them that you’re not really conscious of what you’re doing. But feelings not of the flesh come only when you’re conscious of doing them. Pain not of the flesh is … 
  16. Questions of Skill
     … And then there’s consciousness, aware of all these things. So if you want to know those five clinging-aggregates, this is where you know them best, as you use them to create and maintain a state of concentration. When you want to know craving, this is where you know it best. You see that there’s craving for sensuality. Sensuality is not so … 
  17. Between Either & Or
     … Saccaka was trying to say that everybody knows that form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness are your self. And the Buddha picked his argument apart, to the point where Saccaka really lost face, in front of all the people that he, Saccaka, had brought along to watch his victory. So the issue is the intention. But then again, you can’t take that as … 
  18. Learning from Desire
     … And finally there’s consciousness, which is the awareness of all these things. So all five aggregates are right there in the concentration. And the question is, how are you going to get the mind into concentration without clinging? And the answer is, you’re not. You’re going to need to cling, but you’re going to cling for the purpose of understanding … 
  19. The Middle Way
     … specifically, the suffering that comes from craving, the suffering in clinging to the five aggregates of form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness. All the different kinds of suffering in world that really weigh on the mind come down to clinging to any one of these five aggregates or any combination of them. So when you see the suffering simply as that—an example of … 
  20. Lust
     … We may not be consciously doing it as a practice, but it is a habit. It becomes a way of nurturing, of training the mind in that particular direction. But when we come to actually developing the factors of the path, somehow it seems awfully hard. This is where we have to generate desire to abandon what’s unskillful and develop what’s skillful … 
  21. The World of the Noble Truths
     … We think, “Why is this pain afflicting me?” “Why is this situation in the world outside afflicting me?” But the Buddha is saying that suffering is the act of clinging to form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, or consciousness. It’s something we do. It’s not something we’re just on the receiving end of. We’re actively doing the suffering. He then defines the … 
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