Search results for: "Form"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. An Auspicious Birth
     … It wants this kind of experience of form. It wants this kind of feeling, these kinds of perceptions, thought constructs, this kind of consciousness. We talk of the first kind of birth being auspicious when you’re born into a family that’s got material comforts and you have an opportunity to meet with the Dhamma. But it’s really made auspicious by this … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. Harmlessness
     … Now, there are a lot of times that people will not want to take your advice, in which case Ajaan Lee would say that if you continue to try giving them advice, it’s a form of idle chatter. But if you can see that either through advice or through example you can be a good influence on others, you’re carrying out right … 
  17. Self-esteem
     … Ajaan Maha Boowa calls these forms of conceit the fangs of unawareness. They bite when, for some reason you can’t focus solely on what you’re doing and the results of your actions, you start to focus on other people and compare yourself with them. It’s something we all do. But the question is, “What do we get out of it?” If … 
  18. The Sport of Wise People
     … Remember that what you’re doing here is a very high level activity, in the sense that it raises your mind from its ordinary grubbing for pleasures—with fantasies of lust, fantasies of anger, or fantasies of whatever—and instead finding pleasure on the level of form, the body as you sense it from within. This pleasure raises the mind because it’s a … 
  19. Insight from Developing Concentration
     … Those are mental actions that come under the factor of name, in name and form, part of dependent co-arising. What you’re doing is learning how to look at mental events on that level, in those terms. This is priming you to see the processes that can lead to becoming simply as processes. As you maintain this perception of the breath, it’ll … 
  20. A Sense of Yourself
     … It requires that we develop some qualities that are within all of us in a potential form, but that we have to actualize them through our own efforts. So you have to ask yourself: To what extent are you really convinced of this? At the very least, you’re asked to take this on as a working hypothesis. Base your actions, base your decisions … 
  21. Wisdom Requires Integrity
     … That’s how we get beyond suffering, stress, disturbance—all the greater and lesser forms of dukkha that weigh down the mind.
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