Search results for: "Form"
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- Bases for Success… This is part of the persistence, but it also forms the basis for your ability to look at what’s going on. When the mind goes out to an object, how does it go out? Or when there’s a lapse of mindfulness, what presages the lapse of mindfulness, tells you to look here, to watch out, something is going to happen? What choices …
- The Good We Already Have… We all come with good potentials, we all have some forms of skillful mental states. The problem is that they’re not usually given that much a chance to develop because we move back and forth: sometimes the mind thinks in skillful ways, sometimes it gets overcome by greed, anger, and delusion, and goes off in unskillful ways. Back and forth like this, and …
- Categorical Truths… Most of us are willing to be happy with things where we say, “If I put in some effort and I get some results, as long as the results seem to be worth the effort, I’ll be happy.” But the Buddha says there’s something that is objectively the highest form of happiness, because it doesn’t change and doesn’t disappoint: total …
- Steering the Raft… It’s the only form of karma the Buddha says is neither dark nor bright. When he talks about the middle way, it’s not just a middling way. It’s very precise in how it looks at the process of control, and how it leads you to a point where you do let go. The letting go is not simply stewing in wherever …
- An Exercise in Sensitivity… Even equanimity is said to be a very subtle form of pleasure. Of course, subtlety comes from doing something again and again, and getting more and more sensitive about what you’re doing. So as you get more sensitive to subtle levels of pleasure, you also get more sensitive to subtle levels of stress. In fact, when you see the stress that comes in …
- An Equanimity You Can Feed On… You adjust the condition so that it feels good breathing in, feels good breathing out, it feels good just sitting here, inhabiting your body, inhabiting the form of the body. Allow yourself to gain an appreciation for this level of pleasure, this level of refreshment. As the Buddha says, you indulge in it, and it helps you to stabilize the mind. As the mind …
- Issues of Control… Even though the Buddha says that, in ultimate terms, the five aggregates of form, feeling, perceptions, thought constructs, and consciousness do not lie under your total control, still you do control them to some extent. If it weren’t for that “some extent,” you wouldn’t fall for them. The question always is, with your sense of self: Is it worth identifying with them …
- Anybody Home?… come in. He says you have to learn how to overcome your fascination with those mud houses. You see that they’re made of nothing but the mud of the aggregates: form, feelings, perceptions, mental fabrications, acts of consciousness coming and going, coming and going. They’ve been coming and going in all kinds of zigzags. You want to learn how to see that …
- The Range of Our Responsibility… the breath? If you think of the breath as the air that you draw in and out of the lungs, does that help the mind to settle down or does it form an obstacle? Are there other ways you could think about the breath? I always found Ajaan Lee’s recommendations to think about the breath as an energy flow in the body to …
- Strength of Mindfulness… And even though the Buddha has you be mindful of other things, that instruction is a form of mindfulness in the sense that he was talking about: keeping something in mind as you going through your activities, reminding yourself of what’s important to act on, what values you want to express in your actions. In the intervening years, the meaning of the word …
- Observe Your Concentration… You can’t have it that your form will be a certain way, or your feelings will be a certain way. Perceptions, thought fabrications, consciousness: If they were your self, he said, you could have them be just the way you wanted them to be. Now, we can have some control over these things, but the problem is that the control is not total …
- An Inside Job… The Buddha resisted those teachings in the forms that they took in his time. Well, we have to resist them again now. We’re not here just on the receiving end. This is why the teaching that mindfulness is just pure receptivity is so detrimental, because it teaches you not to look for what the real problem is, which is that you really are …
- Good Fences… This is in line with the Buddha’s teaching that goodwill is a form of restraint. That’s not how we usually think of it. We think of it as a freeing of the mind’s innate nature, but that’s assuming that its innate nature is basically good. The Buddha, though, never said it’s basically good; he said it’s basically changeable …
- The Lightness of the Concentrated Mind… As it gets still, and there’s that mist, the perception of form can be dropped. You don’t even need to have the idea that there’s a body sitting here. This is how you go through the different levels of concentration: realizing that you’re holding on to a perception that’s really unnecessary for the purpose of sitting here very still …
- Strengthening Concentration… It’s for whatever the form of your attachment to this physical lump here: pride, possessiveness, shame, whatever. If you really look into the body, what do you actually have there? All kinds of things you wouldn’t want to associate with. If your stomach was sitting on a chair next to you at the dinner table, you wouldn’t want to have a …
- True Honesty… What does it mean to act? Where does the intention form? How does the intention move the body? How does it move speech? How does it move our thoughts? This is where we have to look. This is why the issue of skillfulness is so important. It’s not a distraction. I think I’ve told you the story about the young man at …
- A True Man of No Rank… He was very direct with everybody, though he knew the proper forms, especially for people in higher positions. But he was also very direct and very truthful. So even though he didn’t get far in terms of the ecclesiastical ranks, still he won the respect of a lot of people. Toward the end of his life, he was in position to become abbot …
- From Anxiety to Confidence… Those four qualities of conviction, shame, compunction, and virtue form a set. Next in the list of treasures is learning—in other words, having a fund of knowledge about the Dhamma. In the old days, they would memorize it. You probably notice as you go through the day, sometimes bits and snatches of the chants go through your head. It’s good to have …
- The Lotus in the Mud… Defilements, hindrances, all these forms of ignorance, and all the manifestations of ignorance in all of it’s different ways: Those are the things that really prevent the mind from being luminous, from being pure. So you’ve really got to work on those things. You’ve got to learn how to question whichever defilements you tend to invest in. Look at all the …
- Purity Comes Through Discernment… He said some forms of the cause of suffering will go away simply when you watch them. You just sit there and look at them and they’ll go away. Others, though, won’t go away, either because they’re stronger or they’re more subtle. They require that we do some fabrication. The main kinds of fabrication the Buddha talked about are directed …
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