Search results for: "Form"

  1. Page 42
  2. What You Bring to the Moment
     … Where is the breath in dependent co-arising? It’s down there in the name and form. And even prior to that, it’s in fabrications, sankhara, right after ignorance. If you look at your breath through ignorance—in other words, not in terms of four noble truths—even just the act of breathing together with your perceptions and feelings about the breath can … 
  3. Shelter Through Restraint
     … You’re going to watch for thoughts to form. You don’t leave the breath, but you’re looking in two directions: at the breath and also at the tendency for anything else to come up and disturb it. Because what you’ll find as you catch your thoughts more and more quickly, is that they begin with a little knot of tension in … 
  4. Look at Yourself
     … So even though experience may be formed out of just little impressions that arise and pass away, and we know that, we can still go for things because we think it’s worth it—that there’s something to be gained by going for them. So you want to watch yourself in action as you go for things. If you see yourself going for … 
  5. Brahmaviharas at the Breath
     … about the way you’re breathing; about the way you’re talking to yourself; about the perceptions you hold in mind, the way you relate to your feelings—all three forms of fabrication. The Buddha lays them out as a list of alternatives: bodily, verbal, mental fabrications. If something’s going wrong, it’s with one of these. Which is it? If you’ve … 
  6. Confident, Steadfast, Resolute
     … They’re both forms of desire and passion. Craving is like thirst. Clinging is like eating. There’s desire and passion both in the thirst and in the eating. You begin to see this in your own mind. You can see how you feed on things, and you understand clinging a lot more. It’s in committing yourself that you take what you know … 
  7. Universal Truths
     … Those are the teachings that form the framework of the questions that he encourages people to ask. In terms of skillful and unskillful action, he said, this is what you should ask wise people: “What is skillful? What is unskillful? What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness? What when I do it will lead to my long … 
  8. The Skill of Happiness
     … Here’s a human being who was able to develop qualities in his mind that we all have in potential form in our minds. In so doing, he was able to find a happiness that was not only solid and secure but also totally unburdensome: It placed no burdens on anyone at all. You look at the pleasures of the world, the happiness that … 
  9. Exercising the Mind
     … Even though we may be able to think of some forms of happiness that are not especially peaceful, when you actually look at them, you realize the reason you find them good is because you can stay with them for at least for a certain stretch of time. With the breath, if you’re really mindful, you can stay with it for as long … 
  10. Ven. Ananda’s Awakening
     … We’re focusing on what the Buddha calls “form.” When he classifies the in-and-out breath, he doesn’t classify it as a tactile sensation, he classifies it as an aspect of the wind element in the body, which is one of the elements that make up your inner sensation of the body, what’s called proprioception. And that wind element can be … 
  11. Goodwill Is Respect
     … The Buddha lists one of the forms of suffering as not getting what you want. He goes down the list of things that people want: They’re subject to aging and they’d rather be free from aging. They’re subject to illness and death and they’d rather be free from illness and death. They’re subject to sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, and … 
  12. The Web of Pain
     … They are there in their potential form, but you don’t give them your attention, and so they never really develop into the bad pains they could be. Just this much gives you a lot of insight into the power of the mind, the power of choice you have here in the present moment.
  13. Meaning & Happiness
     … Then, when any other forms of happiness are proposed to you, make sure you keep the Buddha’s happiness in mind, and that you keep your standards high.
  14. Sit with It
     … A simple form of mental strength is just learning how to sit with the mind when it’s being ornery, being obstreperous, when it’s hard to figure out what’s wrong, because the only way you’re going to figure out what’s wrong is if you sit with it and watch. You can think of another analogy: a hunter. The hunter goes … 
  15. Equanimity After Victory
     … So use the concentration to fight off the hindrances and then use it to develop other, subtler forms of discernment. When the mind has come to discernment—the discernment that comes as you peel away layers of fabrication on the mind—then you can arrive at equanimity. But you don’t stop with equanimity in the practice of concentration. You use that equanimity to … 
  16. Discernment Requires Concentration
     … sensory contact. Those are the things you learn about as you get the mind to be still. Otherwise, it all happens in ignorance. All the aggregates are here prior to contact: form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness. You see these things most clearly as you’re getting the mind to settle down and stay right here. So have some respect for concentration. It’s not … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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