Search results for: "Fabrication"
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- Comprehending Clinging… And you have to look into to see, well, what exactly is this you? Look at the identities that would pull you away from the path and notice that they’re simply constructs made out of form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness: things that come and go. It’s like building a house out of frozen meat. As long as it’s frozen, you’re …
- Alertness: What Are You Doing?… If you pose the right questions, the question is always, “What am I doing right now? What’s maintaining this?” You learn to see that maintaining even that knowingness involves some fabrication. That’s how you learn how not to get stuck on things. Always look for that question, “What am I doing right now? How can I change?” The alertness that lets you …
- Analysis of Qualities… This is in line with the Buddha’s instructions where he says you want to be sensitive to mental fabrication, i.e., feelings and perceptions, and then to calm them. Which perceptions are most calming? One that I find very calming is, instead of thinking of the breath coming in from outside, thinking that there’s breath energy originating in the body, and it …
- Action & Result… When you cling to form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrication, or consciousness, there is some pleasure. The Buddha doesn’t deny that. But the clinging itself can turn things into pain and can lead to more suffering. We go around defining ourselves this way all the time. This is why we get reborn. We find that the things by which we define ourselves are falling …
- Oozing Bodies, Oozing Minds… So try to compare the two, the sense of well-being that comes from the stillness, and then the charge you get out of creating those narratives, fabricating those thoughts about the body and about how you might get somebody else to lie down next your body, or whatever. Just keep comparing those two, and try to see them in an objective way: Which …
- Savor Your Breath… Play with all the different kinds of fabrication that go into making up your sense of the present right here, right now. It’s in playing with them that you get to know them. It’s like learning how to play a guitar. You take the guitar into your room, you close the door, and you pluck at it. You discover a few things …
- Present-Moment Intelligence… You calm bodily fabrication. You breathe in ways that gladden the mind, steady and concentrate the mind, release the mind. This doesn’t happen on its own. It’s a training. In the course of the training, you’re going to be talking to yourself as you give yourself directions: “Do this, do that.” Then you learn from what you’ve done. This is …
- What Is One… form, feeling, perception, and fabrications. It’s only arahants who don’t need to feed on these kinds of food. They feed physically, but their minds no longer need to feed, because they don’t identify themselves as beings. To be a being, you have to be clinging to something, attached to something. But arahants have no attachments, no clinging, so they’re not …
- Craving & Desire on the Path… You fabricate the processes of directed thought and evaluation to settle in, and you’re aware of all these things. Well, that’s the five aggregates right there—creating right concentration. Then there are four forms of clinging around the aggregates. One of them you don’t use on the path, which is clinging to sensuality. But then there’s clinging to habits and …
- The Buddha Didn’t Play Gotcha… Repeatedly, the Buddha talks about analyzing the concentration in and of itself, seeing what in the concentration is form, feeling, perception, thought fabrication, or consciousness. You realize that even when you let go of outside aggregates, or the grosser aggregates, there are still these subtler aggregates inside. It’s right here that the work can be done. So the Buddha’s teachings are very …
- Commit & Reflect All Around… That’s called the fact of fabrication. Then you want to get a sense of its value. When you’re making something—as when you’re putting together a state of concentration—is it worth it? For the time being: Yes. You want the mind to have a place to settle down. In the process of settling down, you’re going to learn about …
- Negative Emotions… And you have to make the mind really as still as possible, so that you can catch these emotions as they begin, before the curtains come down to hide all the dressing up and the fabrication that goes on—before the emotions come on in full dress, full-blown. This is why the practice of concentration is so important—and why it’s an …
- To Comprehend Pain… That would come under fabrication. One of the worst things you can do is sit here and say, “I’ve been sitting with this pain for *this *amount of time, and there’s *that *much more time that I have to sit with it.” You’re weighing down the present moment with past and future, and that’s more than it can bear. Remind …
- Equanimity in Action, Equanimity at Rest… You train yourself to breathe in a way where you’re aware of the whole body, or where you can calm bodily fabrication. Breathe in a way where you can be sensitive to rapture, sensitive to pleasure. These things don’t happen on their own. They come from seeing what you’ve got, accepting what you’ve got, and then seeing that there are …
- Feeding on Ardency… It’s because of intention that you take the raw material for an experience of form, feeling, perception, fabrication, or consciousness, and turn it into an actual experience of those things. So there are many layers of feeding that go on in our experience, and because we can’t simply stop feeding, the Buddha’s path gives us something good to feed on. Think …
- Why Mindfulness… form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and sensory consciousness. There’s another follow-up question: “What danger does your teacher see in having desire and passion for those things?” The answer: When you have desire and passion for those things, you do things that cause suffering. But if you abandon that passion and desire, you put an end to suffering. So notice that Sariputta’s answers …
- Calm… If you’re going to calm the mind, calm the body, you have to realize the extent to which you fabricate your experience of mind and body. In other words, influences come in from your past karma, and you shape them into how you’re experiencing your body and mind right now. So, you are playing a role. It’s not just that you …
- Contemplating the World You Create… All these fabrications that we’re creating can’t be a place to stay. Because as soon as we do them—and they are things that we do—as soon as we do them, they’re not going to just stay there. They ignite and disappear. You have to keep doing them again and again and again. You did it yesterday and today you …
- The Rewards of Right View… There’s a passage where he talks about developing the perception of inconstancy with regard to all fabrications. And it’s interesting, he says the result of maintaining that perception, making it consistent, is that you develop a sense of dismay over praise, gain, and honor: in other words, the things that society holds in high esteem. On the one hand, you see that …
- Overcoming Complacency… The Buddha says that the khandha of fabrication or sankhara, is the one that molds the others from potentials into an actual experience of the khandhas. From the potential for form, we create forms. From the potential for feeling, we create feelings. And so on with perception and consciousness as well. An act of creating that’s going on all the time. And then …
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