Search results for: "Form"

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  2. Don’t Limit Yourself
     … This enables you to see more and more clearly how thoughts form. And to what extent things coming up in the mind are intended right now, which things were intended from the past, and which things are things you can’t remember the intention at all. You start sorting out present karma from recent karma, and both from long-time-ago karma. The word … 
  3. Unchanged by Loss
     … And it’s interesting that those two qualities that the Buddha said are most important to protect—your virtue and your right view—are also the qualities he said form the basis for right mindfulness. Right mindfulness, of course, is a series of instructions on how to get the mind into right concentration. You need something inside that’s solid so that you’re … 
  4. Staying in Position
     … You begin to see the processes of the mind as it forms a thought, as it drops a thought. You see more and more clearly the point where you choose to go with a thought. You see where that little decision is made when you’ve dropped your intention to stay with concentration, and you decide you want to go off with something else … 
  5. Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
     … Then you look at stars and planets forming and then blowing up. Where are you going to go to find any meaning or purpose in this? There’s nothing there. What kind of accomplishments do you want to make? The things you work on can easily get snuffed out—which is why it makes all the sense in the world to look inside, to … 
  6. The Four-in-One Establishing of Mindfulness
     … All these things are right here, at least in potential form. This is one of Ajaan Lee’s favorite themes: Everything you need to be mindful of is right here, right now. That’s when your mindfulness is established, when you stay with these things right here, right now. In the texts, the Buddha talks about how when you’re with the breath, following … 
  7. Your Quiet Corner
     … What is there in this world? There are the eyes and there are forms. There are the ears and there are sounds. Nose, aromas; tongue, flavors; body, tactile sensations; mind and ideas: That’s the world. In other words, the Buddha never deals with the question of whether there’s something behind our experience. Is there a real world out there that’s in … 
  8. Go in Brightness
     … the pleasure of form. So you aim here. This is one of the meanings of what the Buddha calls having yourself well aimed, having yourself well directed. You aim at a pleasure that’s harmless and blameless: harmless in that it doesn’t intoxicate the mind, blameless in that you don’t create any bad kamma. Nobody gets harmed by your pursuit of pleasure … 
  9. Seriously Happy
     … He says that the aggregates of form, feeling, perception, fabrication, consciousness—the things out of which we create our sense of self—have their pleasures and their pains. He says that it’s because of their pleasures that we get stuck on them. It’s because of their pains that we look for a way out. So when you find yourself missing a particular … 
  10. Cutting Edge Perceptions
     … He says it’s like the bubbles that form on a river when it’s raining. The drop of water comes down from the sky, falls in the water, and there’s a little bubble on the surface of the river, a little circle, and then it’s gone… gone… gone… When you can allow that to happen… and again, it’s not so … 
  11. Work with It
     … Those things come in two forms. With some of them, all you have to do is look at them and they go away. Or you tell yourself, “This is not why I’m here,” you turn your attention away, and they go away. Others, though, hang on and keep coming back. Sometimes in meditation instructions you hear the teacher say that if it’s … 
  12. Your Judgments Matter
     … And it’s good to think about these features because they form the foundation for everything else the Buddha taught. They provide the context. One of the features is that they present dichotomies: the distinction between skillful and unskillful, a dichotomy that gets more refined in the four noble truths. As the Buddha points out there are things you do that cause suffering, and … 
  13. Everyday Feeding Habits
     … Even equanimity in concentration is said to be a very subtle form of pleasure. That’s the food that keeps you going. Of course, you’ll find that, out of the force of habit, you will sometimes drop this food and go for something else. You have to ask yourself, “Why?” This is where insight comes in. Concentration doesn’t solve all the problems … 
  14. When You Hit a Plateau
     … I discovered that the Buddha gives, in a very cursory form, precisely the approach that Ajaan MahaBoowa was recommending. You get in touch with what kind of feelings you have in the body, and then you ask yourself, “What are the perceptions around this, the perceptions and feelings?” Those are the mental fabrications. “And to what extent are the perceptions the problem? How can … 
  15. Radical Questioning
     … And the clinging can take any of four forms----clinging to a sensual desire, clinging to a particular view, clinging to a way of doing things that’s become almost ritualistic in your mind, or clinging to certain views about yourself. Those are four areas to look into if you’ve noticed that a particular thought is making you suffer. Does it involve any … 
  16. Mountains Moving In
     … And often the things you have to do in order to create those forms of happiness are not things you’re really proud of. But if you look at the qualities that the Buddha asks you to develop as you practice the path—virtue, concentration, and discernment, or wisdom, purity, and compassion: These are all qualities you can be proud of. Ajaan Suwat used … 
  17. Meditation as a Skill
     … Everything else is free-form, almost to the point where you sit there waiting for a spiritual accident to happen. Neither extreme is the Buddha’s approach. He approaches meditation as a skill, where you test things, take steps, working on incremental steps to begin with to get a sense of how cause and effect work in your mind. As you get a better … 
  18. Breath Energies
     … If you can see it not as a constant thing, this sense of self, but as something you keep creating over and over and over again in different forms, then you begin to see how you do it. When you see how you do it and you see that it’s not really necessary, then you can let it go. Most of us have … 
  19. Taking a Stance
     … The way you relate to yourself inside forms the pattern, the template, for how you relate to people outside. So you want to establish a good relation in here, a good family relationship with all these good qualities: mindfulness, alertness, your discernment in telling what’s comfortable and what’s not, your ingenuity in figuring out ways to make things more comfortable. And the … 
  20. Everything Comes Together Right Here
     … Ajaan Lee likes to talk about how evaluation is related to ardency and alertness, and mindfulness is a form of directed thought. In other words, the three qualities that accompany the practice of right mindfulness get turned into factors of jhana. So it’s one smooth, seamless practice. It’s not as if you do mindfulness practice and then you stop doing mindfulness practice … 
  21. Reflect
     … How are you breathing around the thought? That’s form. How are you feeling about the thought? That’s feeling. What are the perceptions that go into it? What are the ways you’re talking to yourself about it? In other words, all the aggregates are right there. You want to see how you’re clinging to them, and how you’re creating suffering … 
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