Search results for: "Fabrication"
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- Expand Your Expectations… You’ve got all the different aggregates; you’ve got all the different types of fabrication. Everything’s happening right here. It’s just a matter of putting things together just right. Maybe part of the problem is that you narrow yourself down to a little tiny corner and keep yourself cornered there. So it’s important that you open things up a little …
- In Accordance with the Dhamma… It’s tired of playing around with fabrications. As when you mature, as you go from childhood to your adolescence, you look back at your childhood games and say, “Those are stupid.” That’s dispassion. That’s the kind of attitude we want to practice for. So see the practice as an all-day affair. That’s when it’s Dhamma in accordance with …
- Abusing Pleasure & Pain… In other words, anything that’s fabricated like the body or the mind—any of the khandhas or aggregates—is going to involve some stress simply by virtue of the fact that it’s fabricated. That’s part of the natural order of things. But there’s also a deeper stress, a deeper pain that comes from craving. That’s stress and pain in …
- A Unified Committee… That’s a type of fabrication. It’s something you have to put together, something you have to make happen. And all of that depends on conviction. So you have to be convinced in the worth of concentration: *samadhi-garu atapi—*one who is ardent with respect for concentration. Respect, faith, trust: They all go together. You have to trust concentration. It may not …
- What Should I Do?… As the Buddha would say, “Exert a fabrication.” Change the way you breathe, change the way you talk to yourself, change the perceptions you’re holding in mind, and the feelings you’re focused on—to get rid of unskillful qualities and bring skillful qualities more to the fore. Equanimity is when you look at it to see how things are going. Notice that …
- Giving Ballast to the Mind… In other words, the skillful qualities of attention, alertness, and mindfulness get quicker than the fabrications of the mind. In that way, you can begin to have some control over your thoughts. This is what it means to train the mind. It can’t pull any fast ones on you. And when it can’t pull any fast ones on you, that’s when …
- The Uses of Pleasure… We need to see that the pleasures even of concentration, the pleasures of fabrication, have their limitations, so that we can get past them, because we are practicing concentration, as the Buddha said, for the purpose of letting go. All the factors of the path have that purpose. You develop them, you use them, and then you let them go. So it’s the …
- The Power of Intention… We’re already shaping things with our fabrications: the way we breathe, the way we talk to ourselves, the perceptions and feelings we have. So let’s do that well. As the Buddha said, create a path. The central factor in the path is right concentration, so work on this, because it’s right here where things will become apparent. You use your intentions …
- The Power of Your Actions… Then you have the directed thought and evaluation—that’s fabrication, as you direct your thoughts to the breath, adjust the breath, and read the results of your adjustments, deciding what you like and don’t like, and deciding what would be a better way to get the mind even more concentrated. Finally, there’s consciousness: the act of being aware of all these …
- Success by Approximation… But their calm, clarity, and purity are all fabricated, whereas the calm, clarity, and purity of the goal are on another level altogether. You get there not by imitating the goal; you get there through a process of approximation. Even though awakening can happen in a moment, and you’re awakening to something that’s potentially right here in the present moment, you still …
- Learn from the Ants… form, feeling, perception, mental fabrications, and consciousness. Once you read the definitions, you realize that these are things you do, and you’re doing them all the time. How the mind functions, how the mind works: That’s a constant. If it works certain ways, it’s going to cause suffering. If it works in other ways, it’s going to lead to the …
- The Right Focal Length… What’s going on with this breath? What is the mind doing with this breath? Is it staying with the breath? Or is it fabricating all kinds of issues, developing all kinds of problems, long commentaries on this, that, and the other thing? The reason we have that reflection on the requisites—food, clothing, shelter, and medicine—is to remind you that you have …
- Giving Meaning to Life… There is more to experience than simply the conditioned and fabricated things we normally experience. That right there cuts through a lot of fetters. It’s like cutting off your arm, which may not be a pretty idea, but once the arm is cut off, it’s off. And even though the doctors may try to sew it back on, it’s never quite …
- Owners of Our Actions… Form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness: These are all not-self. But then the Buddha has us reflect, “We’re the owners of our actions.” Kamma is not not-self. What we do is our responsibility. What we do is our refuge. Given the situation now, it’s good to remember what really is ours, what’s not ours. Because with so many things that …
- Discernment in Concentration… All of that is fabrication. And then there’s your consciousness, your awareness of all this. These are the things you’re going to need to know, and this is the best way to get to know them: by turning them into concentration, a state of body and mind where things come together. So it’s important that you realize that as you’re …
- Common Ground… The form of the body, feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, consciousness, these we have in common. And the ways we cling: We cling through sensuality, through our habits and practices, through views about the world, and through ideas of who we are. And although the views and the ideas of who we are, and our habits and practices, and the particularity of our ideas of …
- In Accordance with the Dhamma… We cling to form, we cling to feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, consciousness, which means we feed on them, hoping to get some satisfaction out of them. As the Buddha points out, that’s why we’re suffering. So he wants us to gain a sense of having had enough of this kind of feeding. It’s through having had enough that we gain release …
- The Mind Comes First… He puts the activities of fabrication, including the breath, prior* *to your sensory experience. Again, we usually think of things coming in to the senses and then the mind responds. We forget the extent to which we’re already going out *looking *for issues. It’s actually fortunate that that’s the real problem, because if the problem came from the fact that there …
- Refuge in the Dhamma… There’s a feeling going into it, a way of breathing that goes into it, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness. Seeing things in those terms helps pull you out. So there’s the alertness to see what you’re doing, and the mindfulness to remind yourself, “Okay, this is a mind state.” That puts it in a framework. Then, recognizing what mind state it is, you …
- People Who Think Too Much… Tranquility is the process of settling in; insight is how you look at your concentration, how you look at your states of mind in terms of the process of fabrication. You need both tranquility and insight to get the mind to settle down to deeper and deeper levels where it’s really useful, and to cut through your defilements. For those of us who …
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