Search results for: "Form"
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- Disposable Worlds… All this comes from what in the beginning seems like a very innocent process, “Let’s entertain the mind with a few thoughts.” Or you see a thought forming and you say, “Let’s see where this one is going to go.” Curiosity kills meditators in that way, or at least, kills their meditation. So we have to remind ourselves of the drawbacks of …
- Change… It’s interesting that in Thai the words mindfulness and discernment, sati and paññā, form a compound that means intelligence: sati-pañña. Intelligence is not only wisdom but also the ability to keep things in mind. You’re both wise enough and mindful enough to remember what is important to keep in mind: the things that will protect you. This is why it’s …
- Renunciation Isn’t Deprivation… So renunciation is basically freedom in its highest form. That’s where the practice is aimed: at a mind with that freedom. But in the meantime, before you get there, the Buddha also recommends two practices in particular. They compensate for the fact that you’re not able to indulge in the pleasures of the senses and indulge in your thoughts of sensuality—your …
- The Treasure Hunt… The Buddha once said that insight is knowledge of sankhara, fabrication, and fabrication comes in three forms: physical fabrication — that’s the breath; verbal fabrication — the directed thought and evaluation that give rise to words; and then mental fabrication — your feelings and perceptions. When you’re focused on the breath properly, all these things are brought together. There’s the physical fabrication of the …
- A Good Buddhist Ego… The fact that you’ve made the raft out of things on this side of the river means basically that you’re taking the aggregates—form, feeling, perceptions, thought constructs, and consciousness—and turning them into the path. Like we’re doing when we concentrate: You’re focused on the breath, which is an aspect of form. You’re trying to develop a feeling …
- Reading & Meditating… Well, feeling and perception are together in the factor for fabrication, and they’re together in the factor for name and form. Sometimes the feeling is invading your mind because of the way you talk to yourself: directed thought and evaluation, also in the factor of fabrication. Sometimes the feeling is related to sensory contact. Sometimes it’s related to craving. Sometimes it comes …
- Fixing the Present… It’s because we have these forms of fabrication—taking the raw materials and turning them into our experience of the present moment—that we can make a change in the present. This way, when anything unpleasant comes up, we can ask ourselves, “What’s the past potential that I’m feeding on right here, and how am I fixing it?” It’s like …
- The Sublime Attitudes in Context… He reasons that these brahmans regard gaining union with brahma as their goal, so he teaches the brahman these four attitudes, not just in a simple form, but developing these attitudes toward all living beings of all kinds, in all directions without limit. The brahman follows the instructions, and when he dies, he’s reborn as a Brahma. When Sariputta goes back and sees …
- Wisdom & Compassion… Sometimes we think of Buddha’s wisdom as very abstract and intellectual, but in its original form, that wasn’t the case at all. It was devoted specifically to this problem: the fact that everybody suffers, and yet we don’t have to. The question is, how to put an end to that suffering. Even though we live in a human world that’s …
- Things Don’t Have to Be This Way… In severe depression, people have a very ill-formed sense of self. This is one of the real misunderstandings of the Buddha’s teaching: When he talks about not-self, he’s not telling you, “Don’t have any sense of self; try not to identify with your desire for happiness.” That’s not what he’s teaching at all. Because, if you think …
- Three Levels of Concentration… But there’s enough continuity so that the phrases form a larger whole. The same holds true when you start trying to stay with the breath. You may stay with a couple breaths and wander off, say, maybe between the in-breath and the out-breath, or the out-breath and the in-breath, and then start up again. This is normal. The important …
- Three Noble Truths Versus Four… That’s form. The feeling of pleasure that comes when you stay with the breath is feeling. The mental image, the mental label that tells you, “This is where the breath is. This is how the breath flows. This is where you should be focused”: That’s perception. The directed thought and evaluation that adjust the breath to fit the mind, adjust the mind …
- The Precepts… You take your ability to think, your ability to form thoughts, and you put it to good use. It’s not that you’re just supposed to snuff out thoughts of past and future, and be totally aware in the present moment. Now, if you could do that, or if you did do that, you’d have to go down to the looney bin …
- Respect for Concentration… This is the kind of concentration that forms a basis for discernment. In other words, you can begin to analyze the concentration. You can think, but it doesn’t knock the concentration off its foundation. When the Buddha talk about the concentrated mind, he called it “ mahaggattam cittam ,” which means an expanded mind. Not a narrowed mind. It’s an expanded mind. That’s …
- Keep the Mind from Wandering… The potentials you focus on are the ones that tend to get emphasized, that tend to be stirred up—the Pali word is “provoked.” The potential was lying there very still or in a subtle form, and as you focus on it, you amplify it. We tend to do this in a very unskillful way because we’ve never thought about it systematically. We …
- Feeding on Ardency… It’s because of intention that you take the raw material for an experience of form, feeling, perception, fabrication, or consciousness, and turn it into an actual experience of those things. So there are many layers of feeding that go on in our experience, and because we can’t simply stop feeding, the Buddha’s path gives us something good to feed on. Think …
- The Limits of Control… So what we are doing as we’re meditating is to find out exactly how much control we can exert over form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. This is the point of all the aspects of the practice. Generosity, for instance: One of your first experiences of freedom is when you have something that’s yours, but you decide you want to give it …
- Why Mindfulness… good answer? Sariputta’s answer is interesting: “Our teacher teaches the abandoning of passion and desire.” And the follow-up question is: “Passion and desire for what?” For the five aggregates: form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and sensory consciousness. There’s another follow-up question: “What danger does your teacher see in having desire and passion for those things?” The answer: When you have desire …
- The Heart to Keep Going… Part of your approach is to keep trying to develop a sense of the pleasure that can come from form, the way you feel the body from within. Whether or not the pleasure comes automatically, the fact that you’re aiming in this direction—trying to think of the breath, trying to think of the body right here, right now, as you feel it …
- The Rewards of Right View… Goodwill is a form of mundane right resolve. When the Buddha talks about mundane right view and mundane right resolve, mundane right resolve grows out of right view. Mundane right view, of course, is about karma and rebirth: teachings that the West has hated for so long. This hatred goes back to the eighteenth century, when people began to learn about Buddhism and right …
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