Search results for: "consciousness"

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  2. Duties in the Present
     … What you’re doing is very consciously setting up an intention and trying to maintain it. As for any other intentions that may come in the way, just let them pass. If they knock you off the original intention, then as soon as you realize what’s happened, get back to the original intention. So at the moment we’re developing mindfulness and concentration … 
  3. Using Your Many Minds
     … form feeling, perception, mental fabrications, consciousness. They’re all there in the concentration. When you learn how to let go of the most subtle levels, then you’re totally free. But you can do this only if you’ve mastered them. It’s not the case where you say, “Well I’ve had a taste of concentration, so now I’m beyond that, I … 
  4. Matters of Life & Death
     … But if you want to perform, you have to be able to perform in an auditorium where there are lot of people, lots of distractions, and of course your self-consciousness suddenly comes to the fore. You have to learn how to put that aside so that you’re just there with the music. In the same way, you’re just going to be … 
  5. Antidotes for Clinging
     … We feed on the form of the body, we feed on feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, and sensory consciousness. When these things are pleasant, they’re not too heavy. But they can turn around and turn unpleasant very quickly. They gobble us up, for we’ve opened the way for them to get to us. Once you start clinging to the good ones, you start … 
  6. Reflect on What You’re Doing
     … And then there’s consciousness, which is aware of all these things. You begin to see that the state of ease and well-being even in the best state of concentration is still not perfectly easeful. There’s still the effort that goes into maintaining it. You start looking at those aggregates for the concentration in terms of their being stressful, inconstant, not-self … 
  7. Training Your Selves
     … You latch on to something—to form, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, fabrications, consciousness. In latching on to these things, you make yourself subject to things that you don’t want. So there is a way out that doesn’t involve just being accepting or resigning yourself to the way things are. We were talking today about the translation of dukkha sometimes as unsatisfactoriness. It … 
  8. Habits of Perception
     … What in the realm of your experience right here corresponds to infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness, neither perception nor non-perception? We investigate these things to see the power of perception, so that ultimately we can let it go. So this is a very important thing to focus on as you meditate and as you go through the course of the day: how you … 
  9. Breath Meditation: The First Tetrad
     … You consciously manipulate things in the breath and the mind to get a sense of how cause and effect function within you. For instance, he says, you train yourself to breathe sensitive to the whole body. You try to spread your range of awareness from one spot so that it covers the entire body—and to sense the breathing process as a whole-body … 
  10. As They’ve Come to Be
     … I was talking this evening to someone who said, “What’s the big deal? Why don’t we let people breathe naturally?” Well, the nature of breathing is that it is intentional—it is fabricated—and you don’t really realize how fabricated it is until you start doing it consciously. Then you begin to realize the subconscious ways in which you adjust your … 
  11. Fully Here
     … So one way of bringing it back into consciousness is to ask yourself that question: What direction does the energy go when you breathe in? Does the energy in the body feel coordinated? Or does one part seem to be fighting against another part? Centuries ago, there was a Japanese master, Hakuin, who suffered from what he called Zen sickness. When you read his … 
  12. The Path of Mistakes
     … form, feeling, perception, fabrication, consciousness. These all have to play a role in the path, which means we have to learn how to change our attitude toward the aggregates. Instead of just clinging to them as us or ours, we learn how to use them as elements in the path. The important point here is to realize that these things have to be used … 
  13. Dedicating Merit
     … You have to take the lessons you’ve learned in the meditation, the qualities of mind you’ve developed in the meditation, and consciously bring them to bear on the rest of your life.” This is one of the ways you bring the merit of your meditation out and spread it around. So when you leave meditation, don’t really leave it. Try to … 
  14. For Your Benefit Here & Now
     … To get out of that cycle, I had to very consciously breathe in a way that was not at all pleasant—I had to fill up the abdomen as much as possible, expand the abdomen in all directions as much as possible, breathing long for quite a while. And even though it wasn’t pleasant, it would get me out of the unhealthy breath … 
  15. Life in the Context of the Practice
     … We have to consciously take this on as our value because there are so many arguments and so many voices saying that there are times when you do have to kill, for instance, to protect yourself or protect others. But we say we don’t want to harm anybody, we certainly don’t want to kill anybody or steal. This is what the precepts … 
  16. Shifting Your Paradigm
     … If you can’t notice any tension, consciously flex your muscles for a minute in different parts of the body, and then relax them. You’ll run into some areas that are already pretty tense, that you don’t have to flex at all. Those are the spots you want to work on. That sensation of relaxation corresponds to the breath. Allow yourself to … 
  17. It’s up to You
     … From there, he would have you go into perceiving successively more subtle perceptions — space, consciousness, nothingness. Each is more empty of disturbance than the preceding one. You follow that, and you finally get the mind to where it sees that its greed, aversion, and delusion are the problem. They’re disturbing you. You let go of those. Then you stop your fabrication of the … 
  18. The Third Noble Truth
     … You want to do this really consciously. When you see coming and going, you want to see what’s coming and going along with it. When you can see that when the craving comes there’s going to be stress and suffering, you want to see that connection directly. Then, when the craving goes, the stress and suffering go, too. You want to see … 
  19. Insight into Pain
    Insight into Pain June 5, 2010 Pain is a fact of consciousness. It’s probably what distinguishes us from robots. They can have sensors, but they don’t feel pain. It’s our main subjective burden—which is why the Buddha’s teachings are such a gift. There’s a principle in postmodern thought that every attempt to teach people anything is an act … 
  20. The Ennobling Path
     … It starts with the breath, starts with your own awareness, your feelings, your perceptions, your consciousness, and turns them into something that can take you to another dimension entirely. In that way, it could be called an ennobling path. It takes these normal things that we use to create our experiences, create our sense of self, and it turns them into something better, gives … 
  21. Practicing for Dispassion
     … answer is, ‘the end of passion for the aggregates.’ Why would he teach the end of passion? Because when you have passion for the aggregates of form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness, and then those things change, you suffer. If you have no passion for them, then even though they change, there will be no suffering.” It’s interesting: Sariputta didn’t start with … 
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