Search results for: "Form"
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- Three Parts of Right View… There’s form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness. He calls them clinging-aggregates. The word for clinging, upadana, can also mean taking food or taking sustenance. This is where it’s easy to see how the clinging-aggregates work together as a set, because they’re activities that we engage in as we feed. There’s the form of the body, which needs to …
- Learning from Determination… You see that the first aggregate is form, so you might wonder: How is form an activity? If you weren’t breathing, you wouldn’t sense the form of the body. It’s constantly in motion. There’s an intentional element in the way you breathe. Without that intention, you wouldn’t have form. The others are more obvious. Feeling is something you do …
- To Make Suffering Crumble… Then the form of the body is there, but it’s something separate. In fact, you’ve got to see it as separate. We sometimes hear that the Buddha said that wisdom is seeing things in terms of their oneness. But he never said that. Wisdom sees things as separate—how they’re interacting, but they are separate things. The form of the body …
- The World of Conviction… As for the world, once you’ve focused on that desire, everything in the world that’s relevant to that desire actually forms the world in that becoming. Whatever is either going to help you get the pizza, or get in the way of getting the pizza, forms the foreground. Everything else falls into the background. Everything else in your own personal identity that …
- Question & Probe… The breath forms a cocoon around the body. Then, when you’re coming from that sense of well-being, you can exercise those other forms of fabrication. For instance, verbal fabrication: You can ask yourself questions about what’s going on here. The Buddha has you ask questions about two types of phenomena. One, right away, is to ask “Where’s the stress here …
- A Game of Chess… There’s the raw material for the experience of form, feeling, perception, etc., and then you have an intention that turns the potential into the actual experience of form, feeling, etc.—which means that if you change your intentions, then you change the way these things function. This is how you use them as the path. For instance, form: Even our experience of the …
- Renunciation… You find that there are certain parts of the mind that really thrive when they can put those kinds of thoughts away and just be with the sense of the form of the body in the present moment. The Buddha talks about three different levels of becoming. There’s sensual becoming, form becoming, and formless becoming, “becoming” here meaning the identity you take on …
- A Multilingual Mind… In particular, he focuses on the connections between what he calls name and form on one hand and consciousness on the other. Starting with this connection, he points out how suffering is built on top of it. The important elements of name and form are contact and intention. The way you regard the contact is another element of name and form, called attention. But …
- Dethinking Thinking… An image forms and you learn how not to recognize it. Something that would normally key you into another world, you say “Nope, I don’t recognize that.” You could think of the breath breathing right through it. One of the Thai ajaans liked to use the image of a knife. A perception forms and you slash it. Another one forms, you slash it …
- Mud Houses… There’s the form of the body that you’re sitting in right now. The breath is part of that form. There’s the feeling of pleasure you’re trying to create by staying focused on the breath. There’s your perception of the breath, the image you have of it that allows the breath to flow through the body and can direct the …
- The Mind’s Eating Disorders… You’re sitting here with the form of the body. How do you notice the form of the body? Well, there are the different elements. There’s earth, water, wind, fire, and the space around it, the space penetrating it. These are the kinds of sensations that let you know you’ve got a body here, and it’s a useful vocabulary to adopt …
- Parsing Out Suffering… Then the different forms of clinging also relate to feeding. There’s sensual clinging, clinging to habits and practices, clinging to views, and clinging to doctrines of the self. In an embryo form, we find all these things in the way we like to feed. Sensual clinging is basically liking to fantasize about food. They say that when people first arrived in concentration camps …
- Questions of Skill… That’s called form. As you start taking on an identity—you as a meditator—within this form of your body, that’s going to teach you a lot about craving for becoming. And when you get states of mind that you don’t like, that’s going to teach you about how you deal with craving for non-becoming. So it’s in …
- Skills for Dying Well… Well, the pleasure of form is very different from the pleasure of sensuality. Sensuality, of course, is your fascination with thoughts about the pleasures of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensastions. The pleasure of form is something else—how you feel the body from within. That’s not sensual, and it doesn’t have all the drawbacks of sensuality. So you’re lifting the …
- A Questioning Attitude… And she told him, “You’re confusing nibbāna with equanimity.” As the Buddha points out, you can be thoroughly attached to equanimity and it’s still a form of clinging, still a form of attachment, a form of suffering—very subtle, but it’s there. But if you spend your time just noting everything else, you’re going to miss it. Or looking at …
- Concentration Develops Right View… A lot of the factors around that process are the factors of “name” in name-and-form. You’re sitting here in the form of the body. The breath is an aspect of form. As for the sub-factors of name, there’s going to be attention to your topic, your intention to stay, your perception that holds you here, the feeling of pleasure …
- Intelligent Restraint… Keep drumming that into your mind, because all the other forms of restraint are based on that. Goodwill is both restraint and a form of mindfulness. In fact, all the practices of mindfulness are a form of restraint. You don’t let the mind go wandering off into thoughts of sensuality, into what the Buddha calls Mara’s territory. You look at just what …
- The Dhamma Wheel… They’re activities. “Form,” as the Buddha said, “deforms.” Feelings feel, perceptions perceive, thought-constructs put things together, consciousness cognizes. These are activities we engage in. We keep repeating them over and over again. It’s with these activities that we feed. You have the form of the body; you have the form of the food. The body needs the food. It feels pain …
- The Economy of Goodness… That’s the second form of noble wealth, in which you abstain from doing harm. No killing. No stealing. No illicit sex. No lying. No taking of intoxicants. You avoid harming yourself. You avoid harming others. In that way, you get to live in a harmless world. Backing up that virtue are two other forms of wealth: a healthy sense of shame and a …
- Fear & Insecurity… You can take your form, feelings, perceptions, thought-fabrications, consciousness, and turn them into a path—like you’re doing right now as you meditate. You’re focused on the breath, that’s form. You’re creating a feeling of well-being. You use perceptions to stay with the breath, and directed thought and evaluation, which are fabrications, to adjust the breath and the …
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