Search results for: "Fabrication"

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  2. There Is This
     … You see that there are these things, and then there’s the cessation of fabrications with regard to them. Then, the Buddha said, you have to see the escape from that. Imagine how difficult that’s going to be. You see the cessation of fabrications, and it’s as if everything comes crashing down, and something amazing opens up. And even then, you want … 
  3. A Matter of Life & Death
     … Even in dependent co-arising, right after ignorance comes fabrication, and bodily fabrication, i.e., the in-and-out breath, is right there first in the list. If you can bring some awareness and alertness to the process of your breathing, you’re helping to cut away ignorance at a very basic level. And as you get on familiar terms with the breath, as … 
  4. Dealing with the Hindrances
     … You look inside to see how the mind is processing things, how it’s fabricating things, and what the results are, whether they’re skillful or not. When the Buddha was teaching Rahula about the practice as a whole, the image he used was of a mirror. You look at your actions as a mirror to see what’s going on in the mind … 
  5. Your Main Foundation
     … Those stories come from perception and fabrication in the mind, which gets you more into the framework of mind states or mental qualities. Also, the line between mind states and mental qualities is very hard to pin down. You might think of the mind state as being when the whole mental committee has agreed on something, whereas the mental qualities are the specific members … 
  6. The Strength of Conviction
     … how it focuses on things, how its attitude can change an experience from pleasant to painful, from painful back to pleasant—all depending on your perception, all depending on the feeling, all those elements of fabrication or the elements of name in name-and-form. What you see as important, what you see as unimportant: This can really change how you experience the body … 
  7. Single-minded Determination
     … The question is, “Is the effort worth it?” In terms of fabricated things, conditioned things, many times the answer is No. In fact, if you make any conditioned thing an end in and of itself, the effort isn’t worth it, for ultimately it will leave you high and dry. Yet the Buddha realized that conditioned things have another side as well. Not only … 
  8. A Touchstone at the Breath
     … the feeling aggregate, the perception aggregate, fabrication, and consciousness. It’s when your attention is rooted in this awareness of the body from the inside that you can begin to see how those other aggregates function, and particularly how perception and fabrication can totally change the way you experience the body, and how being grounded in the body helps give you a different perspective … 
  9. The Arrows of Emotion
     … One of the purposes of evaluating and playing with the breath is to bring that aspect of verbal fabrication up to the fore, to be clear about what you’re thinking about and how you’re fashioning your thoughts. You deal with the breath right here so that when the breath changes with an emotion, you’re aware of it. You’re on top … 
  10. Just One Person
     … You’re doing your perceptions, your thought fabrications, your consciousness. You’ve even been doing your sense of the body. This is why the Buddha said that all of the aggregates depend on the fourth one—fabrications. That’s what takes the potentials coming from your past actions and turns them into your present experiences. So you’re playing a huge role right here … 
  11. Imagine
     … Even though it’s something created, something fabricated, it’s a good thing to create, a good thing to fabricate. As the Buddha said, right concentration is the heart of the path. The other factors are its requisites. And for discernment to do its work of insight in the present moment, the heart of the path has to stay healthy and strong. You have … 
  12. Tending the Flame
     … You begin to see layers of fabrication in the mind peel away. This is how you maintain your concentration. You get more and more still, and at the same time there’s less energy put in, but more energy comes out. You could say you’re just getting more efficient at getting your mind to settle down. That’s how people can maintain concentration … 
  13. Brahmaviharas at the Breath
     … about the way you’re breathing; about the way you’re talking to yourself; about the perceptions you hold in mind, the way you relate to your feelings—all three forms of fabrication. The Buddha lays them out as a list of alternatives: bodily, verbal, mental fabrications. If something’s going wrong, it’s with one of these. Which is it? If you’ve … 
  14. To Gladden the Mind
     … You’re not confined to whatever the body is already doing, because the breath is called the bodily fabrication, which means that it contains an intentional element. You can let the breath go on automatic pilot, but there’s something in the mind that monitors it. So you want to take advantage of that fact. At the same time, the mind is something that … 
  15. The Core of Experience
     … And the things you’ve got—form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness, what the Buddha calls the five aggregates—are things that if you simply cling to them, are going to cause problems, going to cause suffering. In fact, the clinging will be suffering. But you can turn them into a path, which switches their role as part of the first noble truth, about … 
  16. The Mind’s Eating Disorders
     … Then there are fabrications: all the activities you have to go through in order to get that food, starting with the search, and then, when you find it, what you have to do to fix it so that you can actually feed on it. And then consciousness, of course, is the awareness of all these things. And it’s interesting that we feed not … 
  17. Protection for the Holidays
     … As the Buddha said, there’s an element of fabrication in terms of which feelings you’re going to focus on, and which ones you’re going to ignore. When you focus on certain potentials, you actually turn them into full-fledged feelings. So how are you going to fabricate something skillful out of the pleasures of being home? xx That’s what the … 
  18. Food for Endurance
     … By the way we talk to ourselves, which the Buddha calls verbal fabrication, we can totally change our mood. And then in terms of *mental fabrication—*the perceptions and feeling we focus on—we’re totally free to perceive a situation in lots of different ways, all of which are true. Then we can ask ourselves: “Which of these ways is the most conducive … 
  19. Therapeutic Seclusion
     … Thought fabrications fabricate. Consciousness cognizes. These are activities we’re doing all the time. We’re addicted to doing them in ways that make us suffer, and we don’t realize it, probably because we haven’t seen anything better. So, just as psychologists have a scheme for treating addictive self-destructive behavior, so does the Buddha. One point they have in common is … 
  20. True for What Purpose?
     … As the Buddha said, you could focus on how pleasant feelings and perceptions can be, or how much fun it is to engage in thought fabrication. As he admitted, these things do have their pleasures, but focusing on them in that way just gives rise to more passion, aversion, and delusion. Instead, you could focus on their drawbacks: that no matter how well you … 
  21. Mindstorms
     … This is why we have to get the mind really, really quiet — both so that we can get closer and closer to the part of the mind that simply observes, and to get clearer about where these fabrications are coming from. When you can see that second part in operation, it offers no surprises. And when you get to the point where fabrications offer … 
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