Search results for: "consciousness"

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  2. Understanding Aggregates
     … We look at the categories of the aggregates—form, feeling, perception, fabrication, consciousness—and they can seem strange, but you have to remember that we, coming from the West, tend to look at issues of how we engage with the world by taking the sense of sight as our major paradigm. From there, we ask the questions that come with the sense of sight … 
  3. Concentration Food
     … With the formless states, like space or consciousness, you really depend on the consistency of the perception because there’s nothing else to hold your attention in place, nothing to fill in the gaps if the perception goes. So first you work with the breath, because the breath is there even when the perception lapses. That helps to create some continuity. In this way … 
  4. The Limits of Control
     … What use is that perception? If you’re feeling one with things, can you change them to be better? Can you exert control over them? And even though there may be a sense of wellbeing that comes with that oneness, how lasting is it? The Buddha himself pointed out that the highest sense of oneness is the sense of consciousness being totally one and … 
  5. Grounded in the Elements
    When I first translated Ajaan Lee’s Keeping the Breath in Mind, I added a little introduction in which I talked about the properties or the elements—the six properties of earth, water, wind, fire, space, and consciousness. I explained to Ajaan Fuang why I did that—that these concepts would be very foreign to Westerners. He gave me a quizzical look, “Why would … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. Strategic Thinking
     … form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness as they’re clung to. The cause of suffering is craving, specifically craving for sensuality, craving for becoming, craving for not-becoming. To abandon the cause of suffering and to understand suffering, you take some of those elements out of those two noble truths and you plug them into the fourth noble truth: the path to the end … 
  8. Name & Form
     … feeling, perception, mental fabrication, and consciousness. In other cases, mental fabrication gets divided up into attention, intention, and mental contact. This gets us into dependent co-arising. All this is dependent on consciousness, consciousness is dependent on this, and the two of them together are dependent on fabrication, which is another word for intention. Insight lies in seeing that: the extent to which your … 
  9. Perception
     … The first, simply acknowledging the presence of something, would be an act of viññāṇa, consciousness. You cognize it. The perceiving, sañña, is the act of identifying. Of course, it was more than just having the pad swept that allowed me to identify those tracks. I had to remember that these are the characteristics of these kinds of tracks. These kinds of tracks are raccoon … 
  10. The Buddha’s Map
    The Buddha once compared consciousness to a magic show. It can make things appear and disappear, but none of them have any substance. You can think about something you did thirty years ago, and all of a sudden it gets you all worked up. And then in five minutes’ time, you drop that and go to something else. What seemed so important five minutes … 
  11. Cutting the Fetters
     … You see that this consciousness that you have of the deathless, which the Buddha calls “consciousness without surface,” has nothing to do with the aggregates, nothing to do with the six sense spheres. Those all go away at that point. So there’s no reason to identify yourself around those aggregates. You’ve found something that has nothing to do with them at all … 
  12. Random Word Generators
     … I found one of the ways of dealing with that was to consciously not understand what they were saying. Perhaps it was easier because it was in a second language. But I would consciously say, “Okay whatever that word was just now, I’m not going to consciously connect it to the next word. I’m not going to connect that to the next … 
  13. Just Events
     … form, feelings, perceptions, or thought-fabrications, if you can see the act of consciousness as something separate from these things, and see the consciousness itself as something you can step back from—not that you go unconscious, just that the consciousness of things is something you can step back from—then as these things change, there’s no suffering. So learn to be fluid … 
  14. Appropriate Attention
     … We’ve got consciousness in the present moment all the time. Whether we’re paying attention to that or paying attention to something else, the consciousness in the present moment is here. Alertness is more focused. It’s focused on what you’re doing, either outside or inside the mind—because that’s what makes all the difference. So we’re here not because … 
  15. Deconstructing Suffering
     … infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness, neither perception nor non-perception. Each is something you fabricate. You make up your mind to go there or not go there. That’s an important insight. Let that insight go really deep. Only after you’ve been with these things for a while, when you get very familiar with them, should you take them apart. If you take … 
  16. Controlling
     … You do have some control over your body, over your feelings, over your perceptions, your thought constructs, and your consciousness. It’s not absolute, but you can learn how to control these things in a way that can take you to the end of suffering. And that’s quite a lot. There may be plenty of events in the world outside that you can … 
  17. Close to the Heart
     … I was going through the six elements, and when I finally got to the chant on consciousness I realized that I wasn’t chanting about some foreign, abstract idea of consciousness. I was chanting about my own awareness, my own mind, my own heart, right here, right now. I felt as if a huge block of ice inside me just shattered. I was able … 
  18. The Buddha’s Wisdom
     … Ajaan Lee talks about them as being, sometimes, other consciousnesses in your body. Why are there other consciousnesses in your body? Well, there are little beings in your body. Some you can see; some you can’t see. But they, too, would be a manifestation of past karma. Or you can think of them as the committee of the mind. You have lots of … 
  19. Not-self for the Sake of Happiness
     … And of course, the consuming self identifies with consciousness, its awareness of the feelings. The reflective self may not identify so much with the body, but does employ a lot of thinking, perceiving, and consciousness as it figures out, “Is the producer doing well? Could it do better?” So we employ all these aggregates as our strategies for happiness—and we cling to them … 
  20. Recollection of Hell
    Recollection of Hell February 9, 2010 We’re sitting here fabricating, putting together a sense of the body, putting together feelings, perceptions, more fabrications, even putting together our consciousness of these things. It’s something we do all the time. And the things we put together are not totally mind-made. The raw materials come from our past actions. Sometimes those materials are good … 
  21. Respect for What’s Noble
     … form—this body of ours, which is constantly changing—feeling, perception, thought-fabrications, and consciousness. These are all activities that are involved in feeding: The form is the form of the body, the form of the food we eat. Feeling, in the feeling of hunger that drives us to eat, and in our desire for the feeling of pleasure that comes when we’re … 
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