Search results for: "Fabrication"
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- Refuge… There’s fabrication, your internal conversation about the breath, your directed thoughts and your evaluations of what’s going on; and then consciousness, which is aware of all these things. There you’ve got them all here, the five aggregates, and you turn them into the path. They become your home right now, a much more solid home than any other one you could …
- When Nothing’s Happening… The fact that there is a present moment there, that present moment is conditioned by fabrication. Remember the Buddha’s statement about the different aggregates. Each aggregate is a potential coming in from the past, and then it’s fashioned through fabrication into an actual experience of the aggregate. That’s how you have the present moment. This is one of the tests for …
- A Good Path to Be On… The in-and-out breath is what’s called bodily fabrication, and fabrication contains an element of intention. So the way you breathe already has a subconscious element of intention. The best way to realize that is to try to breathe in different ways. Consciously change the way you breathe. Find a way of breathing that’s comfortable, interesting, soothing when you need to …
- The Six Properties… You breathe so that you’re aware of the whole body, so that you calm bodily fabrication, i.e., calm the in-and-out breath, even to the point where it stops. You breathe in ways that gladden the mind. You breathe in ways that concentrate the mind, release the mind. That’s proactive. It’s a skill you’re developing, but you can …
- Questioning Your Way to Certainty… You see form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness, and you ask yourself, “Are these things constant?” Well, no. And the Buddha here is not asking in the abstract. He’s asking you to look: to look at your sense of form, your sense of the body that you’re experiencing right here as you sit here. Look at the feelings that arise and pass …
- The Will to Awaken… This is one of the paradoxes of the teaching, but one that the Buddha is very upfront about—you’re looking for something unfabricated, but you have to fabricate the path. As he said, the highest of all fabrications—which is another word for the highest of all things you can will—is the noble eightfold path. There is a dhamma higher than that …
- Pleasant Practice, Painful Practice… In both cases, you’re learning how to look at the role of perception in your mind, along with the role of feeling and fabrication, which are the central aggregates in any attempt to free the mind from the aggregates. That makes you more and more sensitive to what the mind is doing to deceive and create unnecessary suffering for itself. As for which …
- To Know the Buddha… As they say in Pali, rūpa ruppati, which means form deforms; feelings feel; perceptions perceive; fabrications fabricate; consciousness cognizes. They’re not things. When we talk about them as aggregates, it sounds as if they’re piles of gravel, but they’re actually activities. And the activity itself is suffering, stress. We do these things for the sake of happiness—we cling to them …
- Freedom, Conditioned & Not… But as the Buddha pointed out, even the highest state of Oneness of non-duality is fabricated. There’s a state where there’s the Oneness of consciousness, a sense of your awareness being one with the object. But that’s fabricated and it’s going to let you down. Even more so when you just slap the label of Oneness on everything without …
- Taking Stock… We had that chant just now about how form—one of the forms in our life, of course, is the form of the body—feelings, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness: All these things are not-self. They don’t really lie totally under your control. But it’s not as if you don’t have any control over them at all. You do have some. So …
- Learning by Doing… All the different forms of fabrication, all the different aggregates: They’re right here. You’ve got the form of the body, you’ve got the feelings of pleasure or pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain. Hopefully you can work with the breath so that you can give rise to a greater sense of pleasure. Then there are the perceptions that hold you here …
- Intelligent Design… It’s a constructed path, a fabricated path. It leads to something unfabricated, but the path itself is a fabrication, which means that it’s dependent on conditions. Sometimes the conditions aren’t all they could be, but we do have this intelligence within us that can learn how to make the best of difficult things, makeshift things, to hammer things together in a …
- An Equanimity You Can Feed On… But it is something you fabricate. In other words, you do work on this. You adjust the condition so that it feels good breathing in, feels good breathing out, it feels good just sitting here, inhabiting your body, inhabiting the form of the body. Allow yourself to gain an appreciation for this level of pleasure, this level of refreshment. As the Buddha says, you …
- The Wisdom of Dualities… Even when you get to the ultimate state of oneness in the mind, the Buddha said that that, too, is fabricated, just like all the other parts of the path. So there’s something better to do there, which is to learn how to let go, because underlying all of this activity of discernment is the realization that experience comes in two types: fabricated …
- Using the Committee of the Mind… It’s when you actually fight off a defilement, it’s actually when you get the mind to settle in and see all the different fabrications that go into getting the mind to settle in—either in terms of the three fabrications or the five aggregates, you see these as activities and you master them yourself: That’s when you gain insight. That’s …
- The Dhamma Protects… Once you’ve gotten sensitive to how long breathing feels and how short breathing feels, then you start training yourself to breathe in and out sensitive to the whole body, to breathe in and out in a way that calms bodily fabrication. Then, to get sensitive to feelings of pleasure or rapture, you have to breathe in a particular way to induce those feelings …
- Big Desire, Detailed Focus… Well, the breath as it is, is—as the Buddha calls it—a bodily fabrication. And the word “fabrication” there means that there’s an intentional element, there’s at least part of the mind that’s watching over the breath and deciding when to stop breathing in, when to stop breathing out. You have to check the settings for that part of the …
- The Heightened Mind… You’re trying to develop this feeling tone, because after all, feeling is one of the mental fabrications, the things that determine the state of your mind. So you want to soothe the mind with a sense of well-being that comes from just being with the body, being with the breath as you feel it from within. In that way, you’re not …
- Duties… They come up with all kinds of fabrications so that they don’t have to be held responsible for the cash short-flow and someone else can take the hit. That’s the way of the world. And many of the things you have to do in the world are demeaning, things you’d rather not do, but either hunger or poverty or fear …
- Clinging to Karmic Diarrhea… The concentration we’re doing right now has form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness—all right here. We want to get to see that when we put these aggregates together in this way, even though they do involve effort and there is some pain in the practice, it’s worth the effort so that we can look dispassionately at other, more blatant forms of …
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