Search results for: "Form"
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- Specifically… There’s the feeling that comes right after sensory contact, but there’s also the feeling that’s in the name factor under name-and-form. There it hangs out with intentions, attentions, perceptions, and feelings, and contact among these things in the mind. It also appears in fabrication, where it’s hanging out with the way you breathe, the way you talk to …
- Your Committee of Addicts… It’s in this way that you can use the Buddha’s teachings on the aggregates and the four forms of clinging to learn how to deal with all the different members of the committee inside. Learn how to identify them, which type they belong to, and then you get a sense of what strategies you want to do with the different ones. You …
- Dispassion… You realize that you’ve been feeding off of form and feelings and perceptions and fabrications and consciousness: all these things that make up your sense of who you are. Now, though, you’ve found something better, which doesn’t require that you need to feed anymore. And you realize that all of this clinging and holding on is suffering. So you feel dispassion …
- The Intelligent Heart… But you have to realize that many forms of immediate gratification are very uncertain in the long-run. They bring a lot of pain and suffering in their wake—either because they’re so short-lived and you want to keep grabbing after them even as they’re slipping away, or because you do a lot of unskillful things in order to get them …
- To Comprehend Craving… When the new universe begins to form, they come down to check it out, and they move along over the waters, lit by their own luminosity. They see a film on the water. They say, “What’s that? It looks delicious.” One of them, a little more wanton than the others, tastes it with his finger. And he says, “It tastes like a combination …
- Not-self Is a Value Judgment… Even when he was talking to people on the verge of becoming arahants giving them that questionnaire, notice how he phrased the questions: “Form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness: Are they constant or inconstant?” — “They’re inconstant.” “If they’re inconstant, are they easeful or stressful?” — “They’re stressful.” And then the final question is not, “Then is there a self?” No, the question is …
- Purity of Heart… a more harmless form of feeding. That way, you have something to compare: There’s this kind of feeding, and then there’s the ordinary kind of feeding that goes on out there in the world outside. Which would you rather be involved in? When the mind is really still, there comes a sense of ease, rapture, and equanimity from the stillness. This not …
- Determined to be Happy… All the forms of goodness—generosity, virtue, meditation—are totally harmless and they’re based on goodwill. With generosity and virtue, that’s easy to see: When you give to others, they’re happy. When you abstain from harming them, they’re happy. But especially meditation—getting the mind under control so that your greed, aversion, and delusion don’t take over: That’s …
- The Right Medicine… It’s there under name and form, one of the very early factors in the sequence. Once that factor is pulled out, through applying the four noble truths, all the other factors, like a chain reaction, get pulled out as well. And you see what for the Buddha taught was really true. There is a deathless. This is called the Dhamma of attainment, pativedha …
- Immersed in the Body… What’s it made of? What’s the form here? Where’s the feeling? Where’s the perception? Where are the thought-formations? Where’s the consciousness? It’s all right here, relatively still, enough that you can really observe it. There are lots of advantages to having a sense of mindfulness immersed in the body, your sense of self immersed in the body …
- The Mind When Trained Brings Happiness… So we have to look carefully at where we’re looking for our happiness because there are some forms of happiness that, if you pursue them, will get in the way of true happiness. You have to be willing to let them go. We focus on the qualities of the mind that really will take you to a happiness that’s solid and secure …
- Skillful Desire… That desire may be a form of suffering, but it’s also our motivation for getting on the path. We choose the path because we realize that simply wanting an escape from these things is not going to make it happen. But we take that desire, we focus it properly, and that’s how we give rise to the path. As when you’re …
- Tenacity… It requires a lot of ingenuity and a lot of discernment to notice where you’re causing yourself suffering, and how the avoidance of one form of clinging often leads you to go and cling to something else. The path lies in learning how to take that habit to your advantage, as when you leave one clinging go to another one that’s more …
- Look after Yourself Happily… There’s that famous questionnaire where he asks, starting with the body or form, “Is it constant or inconstant?” “Inconstant.” “If something is inconstant is it stressful or easeful?” “Stressful.” “And if something is inconstant and stressful, is it worth calling your self or identifying as yours?” Notice he’s not coming to the conclusion that there is no self. He comes simply to …
- Equanimity on the Path… There’ll be a very subtle attachment there, a very subtle form of clinging, but you’ve got to get beyond all clinging. The proper way to respond is, “Oh, there’s this.” And you watch it. Ajaan Chah talks about an experience that may have been his awakening experience. He hit something that sounds very much like the deathless three times in a …
- Hindrances Based on Delusion… It’s a form of temptation that stands in the way of what you’re trying to do and pulls you away someplace else. In other words, Mara is not just a being who came to tempt the Buddha. It’s also thoughts in your own mind that tempt you off in random directions. So you have to be ready for these things. They …
- To Know the Buddha… As they say in Pali, rūpa ruppati, which means form deforms; feelings feel; perceptions perceive; fabrications fabricate; consciousness cognizes. They’re not things. When we talk about them as aggregates, it sounds as if they’re piles of gravel, but they’re actually activities. And the activity itself is suffering, stress. We do these things for the sake of happiness—we cling to them …
- Some Assembly Required… Things come up from the past, and as the Buddha said, we take these potentials and shape them into forms, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness—for a purpose. Our primary purpose is simply to have these kinds of experiences so that we can then use them, to get some pleasure out of them. That means that our experience is purposeful. We’re not just …
- Shame & Acceptance… The qualities that the Buddha developed on the night of his awakening, or leading up to his awakening, are qualities that we all have in a potential form: mindfulness and alertness; heedfulness, ardency, and resolution. These things can be developed. If we think that we’re here just to accept the way we are, we’re not accepting the fact that we could develop …
- Fear of Death… This pleasure that we have in the meditation is called the pleasure of form. It’s not a sensual pleasure; it’s the pleasure of being able to inhabit your body with a sense of well-being. It can help alleviate your fear of missing out on human sensual pleasures. But then there’s attachment to the body itself. Here again, meditation helps, starting …
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