Search results for: "Form"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Boxed Stories… Remind yourself that the mind goes for physical pleasure because there’s pain in your sense of what’s called form, i.e., in the way you sense the body from within. Often when you’re tempted to go for, say, a drug or something, there’s going to be a particular type of feeling in the body, and the mind immediately interprets it …
- What Is Skillful?… You study your mind as it moves away from the breath, and you learn, okay, that’s how an intention forms. If it all happens in ignorance, it’s going to lead to suffering of one kind or another. If you do it with knowledge, then it becomes part of the path. So here we are with the breath, right next to the place …
- Maintenance Work… So have a strong sense of the value of maintenance work, maintaining your intention, and maintaining any good sensations you’ve got in the breath as best you can to form the basis for helping that intention along. You learn how to help the intention by encouraging yourself, by giving yourself a good place to stay. The task becomes lighter and lighter. And by …
- Heedful, Attentive, Mindful… So mindfulness is associated with heedfulness in every way, every form—skillful or unskillful. What makes it skillful is that you apply it to the right things. Here, you keep in mind what appropriate attention has taught you. At the same time, you try to be alert. This, too, is a quality that goes with heedfulness of any kind—you’re alert to what …
- Friendship Leading to Seclusion… But even then as you work with the defilements that come up—the subtle forms of greed, aversion, and delusion, states of becoming—you’re going to need some good friends to talk to you: the knowledge you gained from the texts, the knowledge you’ve gained from your teachers, the knowledge you gained from your own practice It’s not the case that …
- Passion for Nostalgia… Why do you go for it? What are you missing right now? And what are the stages by which the mind goes into it? A thought pops up and it doesn’t come up fully formed: It’s going to be, again, hints and whispers, and part of the mind says, “Hey, this could be a memory of my old time back then—let …
- True Values… This involves developing other forms of noble wealth, such as a sense of shame and a sense of compunction—“shame,” here meaning the healthy kind of shame that’s the opposite of shamelessness. Compunction is the realization that if you do something unskillful, it’s going to cause suffering, so why bother? Why do it? You have the choice not to do it. Then …
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