Search results for: "consciousness"

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  2. How to Use the Three Perceptions
     … The form of the body in concentration is the breath; there’s also the feeling of pleasure; the perception that holds you with the breath; the thought fabrications, the verbal fabrications—evaluating the breath and the mind; and even the consciousness of the concentration. You start seeing that these things, too, are inconstant. There’s some subtle inconstancy here. And you incline the mind … 
  3. Balancing the Bases for Concentration
     … If nothing much seems to be happening, you can start consciously asking questions: How about longer breathing? Try longer breathing for a while. What about deeper breathing? See what deeper breathing does for a while. Progress in the meditation depends on learning how to observe what you’ve done and make adjustments. This requires that there will be times when you simply stay with … 
  4. The Karma that Ends Karma
     … So you can adjust your perception to space or consciousness, and there’s no border to these things. In other words, after dealing with distractions, you’re able to focus on the one intention that forms your concentration and you begin to understand it. What’s the process of fabrication going on in here? If it weren’t consistent enough, you wouldn’t understand … 
  5. Wake Up from Addiction
     … And you can strengthen that determination by being with the breath, by having these tools for analyzing things so that what seems like an overwhelming urge is broken down simply into aggregates, little bits and pieces of physical sensations, feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and consciousness of these things. That’s how you get past. That’s how you wake up out of these bad dreams … 
  6. The World Is Swept Away
     … Even your body, your feelings, your perceptions, your thought constructs, your consciousness: You can’t take those with you, either. These first three Dhamma summaries provide an interesting point to reflect on — that the Buddha’s teaching on the three characteristics may have come from the simple facts of aging, illness, and death. Aging — inconstancy; illness — stress and suffering; and death — not-self. The … 
  7. In Training
     … So when you consciously take on these roles of inner teacher and inner student or inner coach and inner student, you find they help you get through those long periods of drought in the practice—the long periods of just listening to this reverb, reverb, reverb in your mind—and can get you out, get you back on track. And the track will take … 
  8. Audacious & Undaunted
     … We cling to our perceptions, our thought constructs, our consciousness. And in that clinging is the suffering. Why do we cling? We cling because of craving. If you can comprehend the suffering to the point where you go beyond any passion, aversion, and delusion around it, and if you can abandon the craving, that’s the end of suffering. That was the third noble … 
  9. Rebirth is Relevant
     … In the same way, consciousness doesn’t need a body to survive. It can be sustained by clinging, and clinging is sustained by craving as it goes to the next life. Of course, craving doesn’t appear in the mind only at the moment of death. Craving is appearing all the time. It’s causing us to suffer to a greater or lesser extent … 
  10. Attention to Your Potentials
     … Buddha talks about dhatus, he talks about it both in terms of the physical world—the dhatus of water, fire, wind, earth, and space—and in terms of the mental world. Consciousness itself is a dhatu, and then there are dhatus that underlie qualities in the mind. There’s the dhatu of renunciation. There’s the dhatu of sensuality. In each case, with the … 
  11. But Not Sick in Mind
     … If you’re attached to your body, feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, or consciousness, then as soon as these things change, you’re going to suffer. As long as you see that they’re yours—or that they’re you, or in you, or that you’re in them—you’re going to suffer because they’re sure to change. What you’ve got to … 
  12. Mindful of the Buddha’s Shoulds
     … Feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, acts of consciousness—all these are activities that we do. And because we try to feed off these things—that’s what the clinging is—we suffer. In fact, the suffering is in the clinging. Why do we cling? Because of craving. We crave sensuality—the act of fantasizing about sensual pleasures—or we crave what the Buddha calls becoming … 
  13. Forest Bathing
     … You consciously put together a state of concentration as a way of studying these fabrications so that you can fabricate these things with knowledge. And doing them with knowledge creates the path. As you get hands-on practice with states of concentration, you can take the insights you’ve learned about how you breathe, how you talk to yourself, the perceptions and feelings you … 
  14. Acceptance Without Suffering
     … You can feed on acts of consciousness. You can feed on contact at the senses. The problem with feeding on contact at the senses is you start looking for all your food out there in the world. Sometimes the world has good food to offer you and sometimes it has pretty miserable food—which is why it’s good to have something good inside … 
  15. Kindfulness
     … As he once said, the highest state of oneness or non-duality is a sense of the non-duality of consciousness, a sense of knowing, knowing, knowing that permeates everything. It’s a skillful state but it’s not what we’re here for because it’s not the end of suffering. You have to learn to question it in terms of activities: What … 
  16. Cleaning up Your Personal Environment
     … The real suffering is the fact that you’re holding on not only to your body, but also to your feelings and your perceptions, your thought constructs, even to your active consciousness. All those are things: If you hold on to them, if you cling to them, you’re going to suffer. Now, the word holding on doesn’t mean your mind has a … 
  17. Clinging & Feeding
     … We convert our form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness into a state of concentration. We use the fabrication of thoughts to develop wisdom, the perceptions that the Buddha recommends to develop wisdom—the purpose of that wisdom being to develop dispassion and disenchantment. Then we feed the mind with conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, all of which are good food for the mind … 
  18. The Language of the Heart (1)
     … To what extent do people consciously decide they’re going to take on a jhana practice, and to what extent does it naturally come? The answer is “both,” in the sense that when you’re doing a mindfulness practice, you’re not thinking “jhana,” but jhana is the aim of mindfulness—to finally get mindfulness really solid and steady, like the flame of an … 
  19. Questioning the Hindrances
     … One of the purposes of the meditation is to bring all of this up into the light of consciousness, which requires both stillness and a questioning attitude. So you can’t say beforehand, “I only need x amount of concentration in order to gain awakening.” For each person, it’s more a matter of what your habits are, what your problems are, where your … 
  20. Mindful Judgment
     … The Buddha defines this suffering as the five clinging-aggregates, which is the technical term for the fact that we try to feed on the form of the body, on our feelings, on our perceptions, on the way the mind fabricates its thoughts, and on acts of consciousness, in our attempt to find happiness. It’s like feeding on potato chips thinking that you … 
  21. Fighting off Ignorance
     … In other words, very consciously make the breath long, then see how it feels. If it feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t feel good, you can change. You have to exercise your own sensitivity as to what feels good, what doesn’t feel good. If you’re not sure, stick with what you’ve got for a while until you know … 
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