Search results for: "Fabrication"

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  2. Fear of Concentration
     … That’s where the* sankharas—*bodily fabrication, mental fabrication, verbal fabrication—all come together. In a case like that, you’ve got to tell yourself that there must be some spot in the body where you feel safe. Try to find that one spot. Take that as your beachhead and then gradually expand your awareness as you begin to feel comfortable. As for any … 
  3. Truths of the Will
     … The other day, someone was mentioning to me he’d been told that, yes, the path is composed of fabrications—things you intend—but you have to learn how to hold these fabrications lightly so that they don’t weigh on you. That’s true only in some circumstances. The path is like a tool. With some tools, you have to hold onto them … 
  4. Me, Me, Me
     … form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness. That gives you five. In each of those cases, you can either identify directly with the aggregate or you can think of yourself as someone who has that aggregate, or somehow you’re in the aggregate, or the aggregate is in you. That’s four times five: twenty. Twenty possible ways of thinking about your self. On top … 
  5. Space for Sustained Contemplation
     … And as you’re dealing with the types of fabrication around the breath—the directed thought and the evaluation, perceptions and feelings around the breath—that sensitizes you to the fabrications that are always going on in the mind. Whatever the attachment is, whatever the craving is, you realize it has to be made out of these things. That’s what you want to … 
  6. The Sport of Wise People
     … After all, when you’re getting the mind to settle down, you’re engaging in what they call verbal fabrication: directed thought and evaluation. If you can’t control your verbal fabrication as you go through the day, it’s going to be really hard to control it as you sit down to meditate. So keep very careful control over your mouth, because it … 
  7. Normalcy
     … And even though this is a fabricated state of stillness and equanimity, still it’s part of the path—because, after all, the entire path is a fabrication. So we are not trying to induce special experiences. Sometimes they may happen and then the question will be: When they happen, what you do with them? How to get yourself back to normalcy? But if … 
  8. Feeding While You Work
     … After all, the breath is an ideal way of seeing the process of fabrication in action: that you’re shaping things and you can tell pretty quickly whether you’re shaping them well or not. So be careful. While you’re following the breath and trying to make the breath comfortable, there will come times when the comfort is surprising. A sense of ease … 
  9. Ask Yourself the Buddha’s Question
     … The breath is close to your awareness, and it’s what the Buddha calls a bodily fabrication. In other words, it’s something that you can intentionally make changes in that have an effect on the body. There are also verbal fabrications, which are feelings and perceptions—in other words, the labels you apply to things. That’s another area where you can question … 
  10. Discerning the Middle Way
     … Those are the ones that are going to require a lot of work—what the Buddha calls “exerting a fabrication.” In other words,you apply all three kinds of fabrication: You work with the breath, work with the way you’re talking to yourself about the issue, look at the perceptions you hold around the issue to see maybe if the perceptions are part … 
  11. Dispassion Isn’t Oatmeal
     … In fact, he says the highest dhamma, whether fabricated or unfabricated, is dispassion. Ajaan Lee talks about how the moment of dispassion — when fabricated and unfabricated dhammas fall away from each other — is the highest possible experience. Yet it just doesn’t sound attractive to a lot of us. We think that life without passion would be oatmeal without any flavoring. But that’s … 
  12. Practicing for Dispassion
     … So we have the Dhamma, which are fabrications that the Buddha left behind, his verbal fabrications, his instructions on how to practice, but then he also made it very clear what the attha of the Dhamma was: It was so that we could train our minds to find the true peace that comes with dispassion. Now, a lot of people don’t like the … 
  13. The Hedgefox
     … Why do these pleasures have that bad impact? If you get to know them really well, you begin to see that they’re associated with certain perceptions, certain mental fabrications. So even though you’re focused mainly on feelings here, you find that they connect up with the other aggregates. In the beginning, you don’t have to think about the other aggregates that … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. Images for Right Effort
     … those that go away when you simply look at them, and those that require the exertion of a fabrication. With the first type, all you have to do is look at them. You don’t have to do much, and they’ll go away. The other type requires more effort. Think about the three kinds of fabrication that you could use against a particular … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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