Search results for: "Form"

  1. Page 38
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. The Door of the Cage
     … This is where he brings in the practice of concentration, and has us form a right view around the concentration. This is a habit and practice you can cling to, and, as I said, the habit-and-practice clinging that he provides you with is going to be pivotal. This is going to be the central one that he focuses on. In terms of … 
  10. The Intelligence of Restraint
     … So it’s important that we learn to see restraint as a form of intelligence, especially when it’s informed by the four noble truths. That way, you can exercise restraint without any concern about what other people might think, because you know what you’re doing. This afternoon, I was talking about the famous encounter that Ajaan Mun had with Somdet Mahawirawong, the … 
  11. The Problem Is Birth
     … Notice that when he was asked, “What happens when a being goes from one body to another?” he didn’t say, “There’s no such thing as a being.” He said that wherever there’s attachment to the aggregates—form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness—there is a being. It’s in taking on that identity as a being: That’s why we keep on … 
  12. The Energy You Broadcast
     … I want to get involved with the happiness of form, the body as I feel it from within.” Try to keep that particular current as consistent as you can, and the mind can’t help but get into concentration. So keep your determination strong. Keep the quality of your determination as consistently wise, discerning, compassionate, and benevolent as you can. That way, you protect … 
  13. The Pursuit of Happiness & Goodness
     … We call this the pleasure of form, which is different from the pleasures you get from having the body touch something that’s smooth and comfortable, not too cold, not too hot. This is the pleasure of the body as it’s felt from within, and it’s a different kind of pleasure. In the beginning it may not seem so different, but it … 
  14. Protection Through Mindfulness
    The Buddha often talks about mindfulness as a form of protection, in that it protects you from doing unskillful things—because you have a fund of knowledge, and if you’re mindful, you have it at your fingertips. You can remember things that you’ve done in the past, things you’ve learned, things you’ve heard, the lessons you’ve learned, and then … 
  15. The Energy in the Body
     … The different forms of fabrication are all right here. There’s bodily fabrication, which is the in-and-out breathing. Verbal fabrication: directed thought and evaluation, in which you’re directing your thoughts to the breath, and evaluating the breath as it comes in and out. And mental fabrication: feelings and perceptions—feelings of comfort or discomfort, and your perception of how those relate … 
  16. Introduction to the Breath
     … He’d woken up from his delusions, form his ignorance. That’s the quality of mind we’re trying to develop here: to be awake to what we’re doing. When the breath starts getting comfortable, you can think of spreading the comfortable sensation throughout the body. In other words, find one spot in the body where it’s easy to keep track of … 
  17. Think Like a Thief
     … If you feel desire or passion for form, feeling, perception, thought formations, consciousness, all of which are activities, you feed off of these things the way the fire feeds off fuel. And you get stuck on these things the way fire stuck in its fuel. The basic image the Buddha uses here, as you know, is in the word nibbāna. It refers to a … 
  18. Rightly Directed
     … How is it that a thought forms in the mind? How does it become an emotion as it involves the breath, and then from the breath it gets into the body? How do you take on an identity within that emotion, and how do you get out? If you can see these steps, then you can step out at any time. That way, you … 
  19. Measuring Progress
     … The more quickly you can see how a distraction forms, the more quickly you can drop it. That’s how you develop your mindfulness, that’s how you develop your alertness. It’s not a matter of simply sitting here very still and trusting in the process. There is a kind of momentum that develops. But the possibility of its really developing and also … 
  20. Turtle Meditation
     … When the mind is really still and fills the whole body, you sense little thoughts beginning to form, like little cysts or knots in your energy field. And when a thought first appears, it’s hard to say whether it’s physical or mental. It’s both. Or it has both aspects. And if you’re on the lookout for thoughts, if you’re … 
  21. Joyous Endurance
     … We’re looking for happiness in the form of the body, which is something different. It’s a higher level of pleasure. The second right resolve is resolve on non-ill will—in other words, goodwill for all. Here again, you’re showing goodwill for yourself by trying to develop the resources you have inside with goodwill for others. No one else is harmed … 
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