Search results for: "Form"

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  2. Mental Movements
     … clinging to your body or forms of any kind; clinging to feelings, perceptions, thought-constructs, consciousness. There’s clinging only when there’s craving. So, these are the issues we have to watch out for. He says suffering is something you have to learn how to comprehend: understand why it’s happening, how it’s happening. To do that, you have to get the … 
  3. The Right Time at the Right Place
     … Right here in the state of concentration, you’ve got the form of the body, you’ve got feelings of pleasure, you’ve got the perception that holds you here, you’ve got the fabrications of directed thought and evaluation that are your internal analysis—your internal conversation on how to get the mind and the breath together well—and then there’s consciousness … 
  4. Metta Means Goodwill
     … So, as the Buddha says toward the end of the sutta, you should stay determined to practice this form of mindfulness: the mindfulness of keeping in mind your wish that all beings be happy, to make sure that it always informs the motivation for everything you do. Finally there’s another passage where the Buddha taught the monks a chant for spreading goodwill to … 
  5. The Rivers of Karma
    When you’re meditating, you’re engaging in a form of karma, which the Buddha identified with intention. The intention here is to stay with the breath, to try to be fully aware of the breath element in the body, throughout the whole body. You want to maintain that intention in the face of all the other intentions that are going to come up … 
  6. Bodies & Minds Outside
     … So you’ve got to come back to the form realm again, and to the problems of having a body again. The best thing is to get out. So this kind of reflection is both a good equalizer and a good inducement to samvega. As for your body image, it’s good to equalize that, too. Try that reflection on the 32 parts of … 
  7. Delight in Persistence
     … Well, all those mental acts come under the factor what the Buddha called “name” in name and form. If you bring knowledge to these things, they turn from causes of suffering to the path to the end of suffering—and you bring knowledge to them as you use them to get the mind in concentration. So there’s a joy in seeing yourself being … 
  8. Not Just a Witness
     … Sometimes the sentences form the larger context, and we stick our perceptions in that context. Sometimes the perceptions will change in a way that very insistently doesn’t fit into our larger picture, so we have to change the larger frame. It’s all happening right here as we focus on the breath. Then our sense of cause and effect: Where does that come … 
  9. All Winners, No Losers
     … This attitude of non-vera or forgiveness is also one of restraint, just as goodwill is a form of restraint. And it may happen that you set a good example for the other person, too. You’re not taking up the battle. That may inspire them to drop the issue, too. Even if it doesn’t, and they say that you’re a coward … 
  10. The Challenge
     … There are a lot of forms of happiness that get in the way of the true happiness. It’s not simply a matter of choosing pleasure over pain. There are many gradations of pleasure, many types of pleasure, and many things we are really attached to that we have to learn how to give up. The unfortunate thing is we don’t have the … 
  11. A Thread Out of the Maze
     … This takes a huge burden off the mind, and allows you to see the more subtle and precise ways in which even the movements of the mind can cause stress of a more subtle form. When you focus on that, learn how to stop that. Again, it’s a choice. You have that freedom. This is why the Buddha has us focus again and … 
  12. Reflect on Your Actions
     … These are all healthy forms of food for the mind. As you get more and more used to health food for the mind, then when you see the mind beginning to go back to junk food again, you notice it. You’re changing your diet. At first, the mind is strongly inclined to go back to its old diet. But as it stays with … 
  13. Don’t Believe Everything You Think
     … And when you’ve tuned into that level where there’s a still breath energy filling the body like this, then it’s very easy to see how thoughts form. There’s going to be a stirring in the breath which at the beginning you’d be hard put to say whether it was physical or mental. You realize you have the choice of … 
  14. A Happiness Based Inside
     … To get beyond the sensual level, the Buddha says there’s a level of form, which is the way you sense your body from within. This, too, changes but you’re getting closer and closer to something that’s more and more under your control. You can adjust the breath. You can take the sense of ease that comes when the breath feels comfortable … 
  15. Control from Within
     … The material gets ejected out into star clouds, and then new stars form. And the whole process just goes over and over and over again, which is very similar to the way the Buddha saw things. The universe goes through periods of expansion and contraction, expansion and contraction. And it’s all totally beyond our control. So the question is, how do you find … 
  16. Factors for Stream-entry
     … It was the Buddha’s own experience of awakening that formed the basis for the Dhamma he taught, and also the aim of the Dhamma he taught that put an end to suffering. The end of suffering comes only with the experience of awakening, total awakening. But there are stages along the way. Stream-entry is the first. People like to focus on, “What … 
  17. A Much Better Place
     … those who can see the danger coming before it comes; and then there are those who have to be slapped in the face with a danger before they realize, “Yes, this is dangerous here!” Of course, it’s best for us to see ahead of time the danger of identifying, say, with forms, feelings, perceptions, thought-constructs, consciousness, all the things that go into … 
  18. Afraid of Pleasure
     … They form the heart of the path.
  19. Strength to Be Good
     … Meditation is one of those forms of goodness. The more you do it, the better. In this way, the goodness spreads into you, throughout you, and then spreads out into the world.
  20. The Wisdom of Ardency
     … They form the structure for his treatment, and he carries that theme all the way through to awakening—how ardency, alertness, and mindfulness correspond to different aspects of the knowledge of awakening. He translates these three terms pretty much as they’re used in the Canon. Ardent means exerting right effort: abandoning unskillful qualities and developing skillful ones. Alert means watching what you’re … 
  21. Discernment All Along
     … You have to observe, you have to evaluate, and this is a preliminary form of discernment. Especially we here in the West: We think a lot, so we have to learn how to harness our thinking so that we can get the mind to be still. So you work with the breath. Learn from the breath because it has a lot to teach. It … 
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