Search results for: "Form"
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- Therapeutic Seclusion… about: You hold on to things that are making you suffer. The first noble truth is that you’re doing things that make you suffer. After all, the aggregates are activities. Form keeps changing. Feelings feel. Perceptions perceive. Thought fabrications fabricate. Consciousness cognizes. These are activities we’re doing all the time. We’re addicted to doing them in ways that make us suffer …
- Karma as an Island… You’ve got to have the confidence that acting on these qualities, developing them, you can form an island for yourself. If the Buddha could have taken us all to awakening, he would have done it; he was a compassionate person. The same with all the great ajaans. But they realize that it’s something that requires skill, and that each person has to …
- All-around Alertness… But his father had secreted away the text books for that style of medicine, and it had a very different map of the channels for the body from other traditional forms of Thai medicine. I happened to have a bad headache the day I went for the treatment, so he worked on it, following a channel that wandered around the body in a lot …
- Goodwill Permeates the Dhamma… So goodwill forms the context for the path, even as it plays roles in the path. Once you’ve learned the four noble truths, once you’ve learned right view, the response should be goodwill. Then you cultivate more goodwill as part of your resolve on how you’re going to act. That leads, ultimately, to the practice of right concentration, which is the …
- Fear of the Truth… And they did it not because they were gods or goddesses; they were human beings, just like us, and they were able to do it by developing the same strengths that we have in potential form. But conviction comes not just from hearing about these things, but also from putting them into practice. Sometimes it takes a while to gain conviction, not only in …
- Responsible for Your Actions… this, if I do this, where’s it going to take me in the long-term? Then when your concentration is solid, it not only gives you strength but it also forms a good basis for discernment so that you can see things clearly as to what will be skillful and what will not. You clear things away in the mind as much as …
- For Your Good the Good of Others… See if you can learn how to sense the body as you feel it from the inside as a form of energy—because actually when you get down to it, that’s what it is to begin with. We place a shape on it, and we have to notice other things about it, and we add that to our sense of the body. But …
- Concentration Work… However, when the time came to settle on the true path, he started with a form of concentration that was very much with the body: focusing on the breath, giving rise to a sense of ease and wellbeing, refreshment, and rapture. Then he worked the pleasure and rapture through the body in the same way that you knead moisture through dough. It’s when …
- Taking Charge… As the Buddha often said, the things you keep thinking about form the inclination of the mind. And so as with any new habit, it takes a while to get used to the new habit. But you can lay down these new patterns in your brain, you can lay down these new patterns in your actions. So you should ask yourself, what kind of …
- A Message for the Universe… For the purpose of meditation, you’re trying to perceive pain in a way that it doesn’t impinge on you, that it doesn’t form a block. But sometimes even before you can settle down in concentration, you’ve got to change your perceptions about your daily life, the people you associate with. And you have to learn how to question those perceptions …
- Mental Experiments… Generosity is one of the forms of noble wealth. It gives the mind a sense of contentment. You’re not constantly gobbling up your profits. You take part of the profits and share the rest. That provides a different kind of wealth inside. The same with virtue: You see the things you could do that might give you an immediate advantage over somebody else …
- Respect for the Triple Training… When people engage in wrong speech, some of the forms of which don’t come under the precept against lying, but they certainly fall outside of the path—harsh speech, divisive speech, idle chatter—they create a lot of trouble all around. The Buddha was very particular about speech. If you look through the Jātaka tales, you’ll see that the Buddha-to-be …
- The Mind’s Ostinato… But you can turn around and look at how these ideas get formed, and you see that they’re actions. That makes it a lot easier to let go of some ideas about yourself and about the world, and not feel threatened. You realize that they were put together to begin with, and they might not have been put together so well. Like even …
- Lifting the Mind… But that sense of well-being, that sense of fullness inside, as you feel the body from inside, is a higher form of pleasure. So you’re lifting the level of the mind, and you’re strengthening the ability to pull yourself out of different thought worlds, to pull yourself out of different concerns that keep the mind weighed down, from the blatant level …
- A Seeker’s Habits… And it’s not just an idle sentiment It’s something that forms the basic motivation for our practice: May I be happy. And we’re not talking about just any old kind of happiness. We want true happiness. That’s why we’re here, having seen the kind of happiness that the world outside has to offer, and realizing that it just doesn …
- Preparing to Die Well… In one sense, this is a form of letting go. You let go of your desire to do and say unskillful things. But it’s also a form of developing. You have to develop a strong conviction that the sacrifices you might have to make in observing the precepts are really worth making, that there are some things of greater value to be gained …
- Four Roles to Play… As I mentioned last night, when the Buddha described his awakening in the simplest, shortest form, it was a principle of causality: what causes what, and how the process of causation functions, whether it’s immediate or over the long term. That’s the sort of thing that can be found only by doing things and then judging the results. Commitment. Reflection. In the …
- Cleansing the Mind… These are the three ways of cleansing the mind that form a good foundation for the meditation. They remind you of why we’re sitting here learning how to deal with pain, why we’re sitting here learning how to deal with pleasure, why we’re trying to find a happiness that’s blameless. Because a happiness that comes out of greed or ill …
- Patience & Curiosity… So it’s more an active form of patience. It’s coupled with curiosity. This is where you, as a meditator, are different from a clod of dirt. A clod of dirt has no curiosity at all. It just sits there. If you want to meditate well, you’ve got to be curious. When the Buddha says to train yourself to breathe in and …
- Elemental Energy… It worries about this, gets upset about that, all forms of feeding in the wrong places because it’s hungry. But if you got a good sense of satisfaction just breathing in, breathing out, a sense of fullness, a sense of ease that comes from the breath, then you’ve got a good place to feed right there, and you don’t need other …
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