Search results for: "Form"
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- The Dhamma Wheel… They’re activities. “Form,” as the Buddha said, “deforms.” Feelings feel, perceptions perceive, thought-constructs put things together, consciousness cognizes. These are activities we engage in. We keep repeating them over and over again. It’s with these activities that we feed. You have the form of the body; you have the form of the food. The body needs the food. It feels pain …
- The Economy of Goodness… That’s the second form of noble wealth, in which you abstain from doing harm. No killing. No stealing. No illicit sex. No lying. No taking of intoxicants. You avoid harming yourself. You avoid harming others. In that way, you get to live in a harmless world. Backing up that virtue are two other forms of wealth: a healthy sense of shame and a …
- Fear & Insecurity… You can take your form, feelings, perceptions, thought-fabrications, consciousness, and turn them into a path—like you’re doing right now as you meditate. You’re focused on the breath, that’s form. You’re creating a feeling of well-being. You use perceptions to stay with the breath, and directed thought and evaluation, which are fabrications, to adjust the breath and the …
- A Path of Aggregates… Form, of course, is the form of the body, and it’s what has to be fed. Then there’s also the form of food, the physical food we take in. Then there’s feeling: the feeling of hunger that drives us to look for food, and the feeling of satisfaction and pleasure that comes when we’ve had enough to eat. Of course …
- The Particulars of Your Suffering… clinging to form, clinging to feeling, clinging to perceptions, clinging to fabrications, clinging to consciousness at the senses. It sounds pretty abstract, and you may wonder where the Buddha got this particular way of dividing up the pie of your experience. Apparently, it comes from his practice of concentration. When you try to get the mind to settle down here in the present moment …
- Compunction… This is why we practice meditation, because there are some forms of putting yourself out where you feel depleted and other forms of putting in energy where you get more energy back, and meditation is one of the latter. So when you’re beginning to feel apathetic or don’t care, it’s a time to meditate. Here again, it’s a principle of …
- The Shape of a Circle… When you practice swimming, some days you have more energy to put into it, some days you have less, some days you have more time, some days you have less, but you’re always careful to maintain proper form in any event. In other words, when you’re doing your formal meditation, try to give it all your attention. Even if you can only …
- Dichotomies… Now, one of the important factors prior to sensory contact is name and form—another dichotomy. Within that factor, there’s no question of physical form being skillful or unskillful. The issue lies in those mental factors in “name.” Those are the ones that will make a difference because they can be skillful or not. You can use form, you can use the breath …
- The Power of Intention… so that we can be clear about our intentions, detecting them in the beginning stages to see exactly how they form and why they form. You begin to realize that sometimes the mind will have one intention but then it’s kind of embarrassed about it, so it tries to cover it up with another intention, which is why our intentions are muddy. So …
- The Equanimity of a Victor… Even form is something you actively maintain. Your perception of form is something you have to keep up. Feelings, perceptions: you feel, you perceive. You fabricate thoughts and you’re aware. These are things you’re doing, and you cling to these actions in ignorance. That’s the suffering. It’s an active verb. Most of us don’t think of it that way …
- Dependent Co-arising Right Now… Your consciousness will affect name and form. Name and form is basically the five aggregates. And those are right here, too, simply that fabrication is divided up here into a few other categories: attention, intention, and contact. You look at how you pay attention to the breath. You can look at your intentions in staying with the breath. You look at how your perceptions …
- The Logic of Not-self… He saw clinging in all of its forms and taught us to see clinging within ourselves in all of its possible forms. Then he taught us to use this logic—the logic of wanting to find the ultimate happiness—to get past all that clinging. When there’s no more clinging, there’s no more suffering. That’s where this path is headed.
- Fourth Truth, First Duty… But getting the mind into concentration helps you separate yourself out from that kind of thinking, gives you an alternative form of pleasure—what the Buddha calls the pleasure of form, sitting here breathing, as you inhabit the body and sense the body from within, the whole body, from the head down to the feet. You can make it all pleasurable by the way …
- The Dhamma Mirror… Form is the form of your body. Feelings are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. Perceptions are the labels you put on things, the images you hold in mind, that tell you what something is and what it means. Thought fabrications are intentions and your inner conversation. Then consciousness is aware of all these things. You can learn the words, but …
- Here Be Tigers… What will happen is that you’ll begin to see every now and then little thoughts forming in the mind, and they’ll be forming right at the spot where the mind and the body meet at the breath. In fact, when something first forms, it’s hard to say whether it’s a thought or a physical sensation. The two go together. It …
- Feeding on the Breath… Form would be the form of the body and also the form of the food we want for the body. Feeling would be the feeling of hunger we feel when we lack something, and the feeling of fullness we get when we’ve eaten our fill. Perception has to do with our ability to perceive what kind of hunger we have, and then to …
- An Island of Certainty… His way out was to look at the fabrications that go into becoming before they formed an identity, before they formed a world. He did that by looking at them simply as events, name and form—mental events, physical events—right here in the present moment. That way, he was able to get past the dilemma. So it’s good to practice that skill …
- Gather ’Round the Breath… There are those that basically head outside, interested in forms outside, feelings and perceptions of those forms, thoughts about those forms, and your awareness of those forms. Then there are those that hover around your mind. So focus on the second kind. There are feelings right here hovering around your sense of awareness, perceptions that hold you here. The breath is very close, so …
- Magha Puja: Showing Respect with the Practice… One of the principles of the Buddha’s teachings is to develop a healthy form of conceit, in the sense of realizing that those arahants were human beings. They started out with lots of defilements just like us, lots of weaknesses just like us. But they were able to overcome those defilements and those weaknesses by developing skillful qualities, which exist in potential form …
- Inner Wealth… That, too, is a form of wealth. It’s a form of protection. The remaining treasures are: having heard the Dhamma, being generous, and having discernment. These are more on the positive side. The precepts, shame, concern: These deal with the negative things you don’t want to do. Generosity is something positive you do like to do, because when you’re generous, you …
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