Search results for: "Fabrication"
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- A Tale of Two Kings… And they teach you the lessons you’re going to need so that you can dig deeper and deeper inside to see how you fabricate your experience. You get more and more skillful at it. You finally get to the point where you meet up with something unfabricated. And that unfabricated dimension: That’s the way out. Something that doesn’t age, doesn’t …
- Goodwill as Wealth… The Buddha talks about perception as being a mental fabrication that has an effect on the mind. Sometimes the effect is direct; sometimes it’s through the breath. The way you perceive the breath is going to have an effect on how you feel it in the body. The breath is something that we can intentionally do. It’s one of the few bodily …
- The Languages of Right View… It’s another way in which it goes beyond itself, seeing which way of talking to yourself is good to pick up, which way of talking to yourself is good to put aside—realizing that it’s all a fabrication, and realizing the times when you won’t need either: when the conversation gets really simple as you finally settle down with, “breath, breath …
- Merit: Goodness of the Heart… the form of your body as you feel it from within; your feelings; your perceptions; your fabrications, the way you put thoughts together; and your consciousness. All of these things are activities. Even the way you keep reaffirming to yourself where your body is right now: That’s an activity, your sense of form, i.e., how you feel the body from within. The …
- The Wisdom of Restraint… This means that you have to look at your own thoughts not as what you “really think” or who you “really are,” or what your “real feelings” are about things, but simply as fabrications that have habitually come to the mind. We’re here to change those habits. This is one of the reasons the ajaans talk so much about exerting control not only …
- Discernment Through Ardency & Evaluation… You miss the fact that you’re fabricating things, you’re putting things together, the extent to which you are participating, even in something as basic as the fact that you’re picking up sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations—there’s an intentional element there and you’re not going to see it if the mind isn’t very, very still. I’ve …
- Daily-Life Dhamma… So finally the Buddha decided to abandon what he called the fabrications of life, which meant that in three months’ time he was going to die. A big earthquake resulted. Ananda was startled by the earthquake and came to ask the Buddha what that was all about. The Buddha told him what he had done. So Ananda said, “Please reconsider!” And the Buddha said …
- The Truth of Desires… There are these intentions—what the Buddha calls fabrications—and desires that slosh around in the mind and that we don’t know much about. Because we’re ignorant of them, they can influence us, skewing our perception of reality or the perceptions that we want to adopt. Things may seem true because they fit in with a particular desire, and if we don …
- Mindworms… But when you step out of it, you can see that it’s just a bunch of fabrications. So even if you can’t stop the circular thinking, can’t stop the mindworm, you can get out of it. Then show some patience. It takes some time for it to calm down, just like a truck that’s been roaring down the highway. You …
- The Web of Pain… That’s called verbal fabrication. You can think of the breath, if you want, simply as the air coming in and out of the lungs, but that’s very restrictive. You can also think of it as the energy flow in the body, and that can come in and out anywhere. Open yourself to the possibility that it can come in and out of …
- Body Contemplation… the embroidery, the fabrication around the actual feeling of pleasure—our thoughts of the kind of sensual pleasures we’d like and the sensual pleasures we’ve had. The free play of our imagination is what keeps pulling us back—because, in that free play, you’re free to lie to yourself, and the mind likes to lie to itself. After all, what are …
- Equanimity After Victory… 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 look more carefully into the mind, to see the subtler defilements that come up, that are apparent when the mind …
- The Awful Truth… So we want to be able to pull ourselves back, and say, “Okay, what is there right here, right now, really?”—with as little of that fabrication as possible. Because if there’s no delusion, then we don’t fall for these things. That’s a lot of what the skill that we need—so that we can be in charge of where our …
- The Steadiness of Your Gaze… Why is the mind causing itself suffering? Why is it causing itself stress in ways that don’t have to be there? In the context of the Three Characteristics, the Buddha does point out that anything fabricated is stressful, but in the Four Noble Truths he focuses more on the issue of the stress of clinging and craving. The craving causes the clinging, and …
- A Mind Without Inertia… Your greed, your aversion, and your delusion, identifying with your body, identifying with your feelings, your perceptions, your thought fabrications, even with acts of consciousness: These things weigh the mind down if you hold on to them. This is the Buddha’s ultimate mode of attack when you see the mind holding onto something. The phrase, “holding on,” here, is metaphorical. The mind doesn …
- Truths of the Will… The path, after all, is something fabricated. It’s something you have to put together. And it’s not going to happen unless you believe in yourself, unless you believe in the path. So you’ve got to keep that belief strong. Where skepticism should come in is when you look at individual events in the mind. Some of them seem to be skillful …
- Inconstancy… Of course, we’ve heard that the Buddha says all fabricated things are inconstant, stressful, not-self. But for the time being, you want to fight against those perceptions. Make your attention as constant as you can. Make the breath as pleasant as you can. Bring these things under your control. See how far you can go with that. The Buddha says you can …
- Cheating the System… One of the steps, as the Buddha said, is to become sensitive to mental fabrication, which includes your feelings of pleasure, pain, neither-pleasure-nor-pain, and the perceptions around them. But before you do that he says try to breathe in a way that gives rise to rapture, breathe in a way that gives rise to pleasure. That way, you give the mind …
- Wise about Pain… It’s a past fabrication, and you have to patiently wait until it goes away on its own. Neither of those approaches is in line with what the Buddha said about feelings, which is that they come from past actions and present actions together. There are some cases where, no matter what you do in the present moment, the pain isn’t going to …
- Raise Your Standards… What did you do? What was the perception, the change in perception, change in mental fabrication? What caused the stress to go up? Letting go of what caused it to go down? Things you didn’t even realize you were doing suddenly become clear. That’s how you can see where you’re causing unnecessary stress. A lot of it we simply assume to …
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