Search results for: "consciousness"

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  2. Observant & Ingenious
     … When the Buddha gave his shortest description of his awakening, it wasn’t that consciousness was the ultimate reality or that your everyday mind was the enlightened mind. It was a principle of causality—and it’s a complex one. Two simple principles, but they work together to become complex: “When this is, that is. When this is not, that is not.” Then, “From … 
  3. Examine Your Happiness
     … You focus instead on the fact that some aspects of form, feeling, perception, mental fabrication, and consciousness are actually pleasant, and you want to pursue them for that pleasure. There’s the pleasure of the precepts, the pleasure of generosity, both of which are conditioned things. There’s the pleasure in concentration, which is also conditioned, and you want to motivate yourself to develop … 
  4. The Need for Agency
     … You very consciously look at your actions to see whether they’re in line with what the Buddha recommended, and if not, you figure out how you can change them. This is a point that seems so obvious that you wonder why anyone would have to mention it. But there are a lot of people out there who teach some very strange things about … 
  5. Ingenuity
     … space and consciousness. When they call these properties “elements,” it can lead to a misunderstanding. They’re not talking about the chemical elements, they’re talking about elementary sensations, elementary properties. The belief was that you have these potentials in every spot of the body for solidity, warmth, liquidity, and movement or energy of the breath. They’re all there. And they can be … 
  6. Analysis of Qualities
     … One is to notice, as you’re breathing in, at what point does tension build up in different parts of the body? Can you keep breathing in without that tension building up? Can you consciously relax it? If it’s building up in your shoulders, relax your shoulders and still breathe in. See if that works. If it doesn’t work, then you can … 
  7. Why Train the Mind
     … See if you can consciously relax those spots and still breathe in. Or notice, when you’re breathing out, if you tend to squeeze the end of the breath or push it out a little bit too long. See if there’s a way you can allow the breath to stop without squeezing it. Before you start squeezing it, you let the out-breath … 
  8. Asalha Puja
     … the form of your body, your feelings, your perceptions, mental fabrications, or consciousness. The fact that we cling there: That’s the suffering. The third level of knowledge is when you know that you’ve completed the duty: In this case, you’ve comprehended the suffering *fully. *Now, that level of knowledge doesn’t come until you’ve completed the duties for the other … 
  9. Things As They Function
     … You trace them back to clinging and craving, feeling, sensory contact, the senses, name-and-form—in other words, your sense of the body, activities in the mind—consciousness, and fabrication. Fabrication here is three things: bodily fabrication, your in-and-out breath; verbal fabrication, your thoughts about an object, when you direct your thinking to an object and evaluate it, make comments on … 
  10. The Context for No Context
     … Even your sensory consciousness: You have to see that as something separate—separate both in the sense that these are individual events that arise and pass away, and in the sense that they’re separate from your awareness, your sense of you. You want to pare back your sense of you because as long as you claim something to be you or yours, you … 
  11. In Line with the Dhamma
     … What’s it made of? It’s made out of forms, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, and acts of consciousness. That’s it. We’ve cobbled our sense of self out of these things. When you actually look at them, you can see that there’s really not that much there. These things keep changing and changing and changing, so how could we find any … 
  12. Beyond Nature
     … As the Buddha points out, all of the aggregates — form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness — have an element of intention in them. There are lots of different potentials from your past kamma that you can focus on in any given moment. Your choice of what to focus on is going to determine what you experience. For instance, there are potentials for different kinds of … 
  13. Wisdom Through Training
     … You also have to consciously bring the qualities you’ve been developing in your meditation to bear on your life. I know some meditators who will sit very quietly for a while and then as soon as they get up from their meditation, they drop it entirely and go back to their old way. It’s like someone who goes down to the gym … 
  14. Dhamma Medicine for Free
     … If you’re not really clear about how you’ve been imaging the breath to yourself, consciously create different images and see how they feel. If you do all these processes— bodily fabrication, verbal fabrication, and mental fabrication—with as much knowledge as possible, that cuts through a lot of the suffering that would ordinarily develop around the breath. We don’t think of … 
  15. Many Desires, Many Selves
     … That’s consciousness. There are also intentions that keep you here. There are acts of attention: What are you going to pay attention to? What are you going to ignore? You learn to look at your mind in impersonal terms. The problem is that a sense of self can move in here as well, and it can be either helpful or not helpful. A … 
  16. Tuning-in to the Breath
     … In other words, there’s a potential for a form, a potential for a feeling, potential for perception, fabrication, consciousness; and the act of fabricating is what turns these potentials into actual aggregates. It sounds abstract, but it’s a very important lesson for the meditation even from the very beginning. You sit here in the body — and of course, that’s a fabrication … 
  17. The Path to Stream Entry
     … There’s no form, no feeling, no perception, no fabrication of anything, and no consciousness of the six senses—and yet there is an awareness. As a result, there’s no tendency to want to identify yourself with any of the aggregates ever again. You still have a lingering sense of self that hovers around them, but you never hold to the view that … 
  18. The Buddha’s Last Word
     … You have to consciously remind yourself, “Okay, I’m here to learn something. I’m here to look at my actions, to learn how to read the results of my actions so that I can figure out what’s wrong and I can change them.” This is why so much of the training is self-training, because you’re the only one who knows … 
  19. Views & Vision
     … If you’ve read any of the texts, you know that when the mind gets into deep concentration, the sentences and dialogues that go on in the mind get pared down really far to the point where there’s just a mental note, like “infinite space,” the sañña of “infinite consciousness.” That’s all the talking that’s going on in the mind. But … 
  20. Ironies
     … clinging to form, to feeling, perception, thought constructs, consciousness. This is what it all comes down to. Again, it’s stuff that’s happening all the time in the present moment, but we tend to miss it. So we need to develop our powers of mindfulness and alertness to see these connections and to understand our duty toward suffering, which is to comprehend it … 
  21. Metta Metacognition
     … You consciously decide how you’re going to breathe. Make it as comfortable, easeful, soothing, refreshing as possible. You’ll find that the desire to follow through, say, with a bout of anger, a bout of lust, gets weakened a great deal. So we’re here to learn about the mind and the heart. This is another important lesson you learn from metta metacognition … 
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