Search results for: "Form"

  1. Page 40
  2. Rottweilers in the House
     … And restraint takes two forms. There’s restraint over what you bring in—through your eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind—and restraint over what you let out: your physical actions, your words, and your thoughts. Ajaan Lee makes the comparison: It’s like having a house, and restraint means knowing when to open the windows and doors, and when to keep them … 
  3. Unlearning Unskillful Behavior
     … So remember that the teachings are a very consistent form of common sense, working on what is your responsibility, and putting aside things that are not your responsibility. Your unskillful habits are your responsibility, so do whatever you need to do to overcome them.
  4. The Right Place to Look
     … So even though you’re focused mainly on the breath, ultimately you’ll find that you start seeing these other forms of fabrication as well. And that’s when you can really see the mind, as you watch it in action. Those same fabrications are the ones you’ll have to deal with as death comes and you’re leaving the body, so it … 
  5. Goodwill Is Respect
     … Use all the different forms of fabrication—bodily, verbal, and mental—to foster a really heartfelt attitude of goodwill. You learn how to breathe in a way that gives rise to a sense of well-being in the body. You allow the breath. Notice that: You allow it. You can’t make yourself breathe comfortably. Sometimes, the harder you try to make it comfortable … 
  6. Take Care of Your Tools
     … Unhealthy conceit is thinking that you’ve made yourself better than other people because you’ve got this concentration, or because you have some form of knowledge—whatever’s come up. The Buddha has you remind yourself that once you have that kind of thought, then the basis for the thought, the basis for your claim, has disappeared and turned into something else. In … 
  7. Lessons from Generosity & Virtue
     … They also remind you also that you’re capable of overcoming some of the mind’s more blatant forms of greed, aversion, and delusion. As the Buddha pointed out, the way we define ourselves as beings is around the act of feeding. To maintain your identity, you have to eat physical food, but there’s also mental and emotional food that you take in … 
  8. Resolute Good Humor
     … pleasure, rapture; more pleasure, more rapture; pleasure without rapture, but still very pleasant; and equanimity, which was also a form of pleasure. That’s food along the path. Now, the other extreme is the idea being that we’re coming to a goal that’s totally relaxed, totally without tension, totally without any kind of stress, therefore we shouldn’t have any stress on … 
  9. The Demands of Goodwill
     … The author said they formed the social dimension of Buddhism, whereas everything else was totally devoted to the training of your mind—as if you could separate the two. One of the reasons we practice is that we look at our lives, we look at our desire for happiness; but then we also turn around and look at how much harm our desire for … 
  10. Expert’s Mind
     … In his meditation instructions he doesn’t set everything out in a nice step-by-step form that even brainless people could follow. Instead, he plants suggestions in our minds, points out areas where it’s fruitful to explore, and then leaves it up to our own ingenuity to continue the exploration. He wants to make us curious, so that we follow our curiosity … 
  11. The Alternative of Concentration
     … From its perspective, you can see which pleasures are innocuous and which ones aren’t; which forms of being harsh with yourself are innocuous or actually helpful, and which ones are not. You can measure them right here. Which is what happens with any skill. As the mind gets more and more centered, more and more absorbed in performing whatever the action is, and … 
  12. The Strength of Conviction
     … how it focuses on things, how its attitude can change an experience from pleasant to painful, from painful back to pleasant—all depending on your perception, all depending on the feeling, all those elements of fabrication or the elements of name in name-and-form. What you see as important, what you see as unimportant: This can really change how you experience the body … 
  13. Shoulds & Desires
     … It’s a form of wealth that doesn’t require that you take anything. You’ve got the resources inside. Simply by the way you think, you can create a good energy. You can create something that’s a gift to others. And of course, you benefit. If you have goodwill for all beings, you’re very unlikely to do unskillful things. You’re … 
  14. The Light of the World
     … At the very least, they’re a form of happiness that’s harmless. You harm no one when you’re generous; you harm no one when you’re virtuous. Finding well-being with thoughts of universal goodwill causes no harm at all. This is very different from the happiness defined by the world in terms of gain, status, praise, physical pleasures. Happiness of that … 
  15. The Samsaric Mud Fight
     … It can be a form of generosity. But you have to realize that people have their choices, too. They can choose to follow along with your idea of what’s good or they can choose not to. The Buddha never said that we’re here to clean up the mud fight. We’re here to get out of the mud fight. And your idea … 
  16. When This Is, That Is
     … Your sense of the form of the body becomes the object of your meditation, along with the feelings that arise from the breath when it’s comfortable. Those can be a part of right concentration. The perceptions you have can be part of right view, but also right concentration and right mindfulness as well. The thought constructs you have, directing your thoughts to the … 
  17. The Power of Attention
     … In name and form, there’s attention, how you pay attention to things, the questions you ask. These two go together. As you’re focusing on the breath, that’s the first choice you’ve made. You’re going to choose the breath as your topic. You can choose other meditation topics as well. If you find that it’s best to start out … 
  18. Defilements as Not-self
     … The goodwill is a form of indoctrination. For a lot of us, having goodwill for ourselves is hard. We come from a guilt culture in which we’re taught to feel bad for ourselves, to feel that we don’t deserve happiness. This is a vein that lies deep in our culture. It’s one of the things that Ajaan Suwat had the most … 
  19. Goodwill as Wealth
     … That sense of well-being in the body is an important form of wealth. When you think about being generous with material things, it’s a lot easier to be generous when you have wealth, when you have a sense that you have more than enough. And it’s the same when we’re spreading thoughts of goodwill, thoughts of compassion to other people … 
  20. Inconstancy
     … In other words, the simple process of forming a concept in the mind based on something takes so much time, even though it’s a flash of the eye. But in that flash of the eye, whatever it was that you based that concept on has already changed. Change is that pervasive and relentless. So even the mountains are impermanent, but they’re permanent … 
  21. Focus on the Precepts
     … of which is to comprehend suffering. Suffering itself is an action. It’s the act of clinging to the aggregates. The aggregates are actions, too. The Buddha defines them as verbs. Form deforms, feelings feel, perceptions perceive, and so on. Then you apply the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and non-self to those actions and their results, because the duty with regard to those … 
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