Search results for: "Form"

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  2. How to Be an Admirable Friend
     … Divisive speech, harsh speech, and using coarse language – those forms of speech show no goodwill at all. You show goodwill by the way you time your words, who’s around when you’re talking – take that into consideration. What kind of mood is the person in right now? Are they in a mood to receive your words or not? If they’re not yet … 
  3. Strategies for Generosity
     … As for other forms of generosity, you build on the original ones, the more limitless ones, and help where you can in ways that are appropriate. So that’s the Buddha’s strategy. The Buddha, after all, was a member of the noble warrior class. He grew up thinking in terms of strategy. But then he turned his strategizing mind to an even more … 
  4. Perceptions of Earth & Space
     … But one drawback to space is that for the mind to gain real strength from the concentration, it has to go back to the form of the body. You can hang out in space for a while, but then in Ajaan Lee’s image it’s like someone who’s worked and then gotten a big payment, one lump sum as a pension. They … 
  5. Perspectives & Priorities
     … Your sense of the body is what the Buddha calls form; pain is something else—it’s a feeling. The body is made up of sensations of earth, water, wind, fire—or, in other words, solidity, liquidity, energy, warmth. But the pain is something else. Just try to look at it that way. Or you can ask yourself: Where is the sharpest point of … 
  6. It’s What You Give
     … fabrication, name and form, intentions, acts of attention, perceptions, feelings, even the way you breathe. This is what you bring to sensory contact, and what you bring is going to make the difference between whether it’s going to be a cause for suffering or part of the path to the end of suffering. So this principle of the mind comes first goes from … 
  7. Good Traditions
     … Following the precepts is also a form of meritorious activity, in the sense that you make a promise to yourself that you’re not going to harm anyone. You’re not going to kill, you’re not going to steal, have illicit sex, lie to anyone; you’re not going to take intoxicants. This, again, is a sign of consideration for others, and it … 
  8. Maintenance Work
     … Sometimes the mind is getting ready to jump off to something and you wonder, “Where is it going? Anyplace interesting?” Or when a thought begins to form: It’s just a vague, inchoate sense of a thought, and the mind puts a label on it. Then you want to see, “Does this label really fit?” And that means you’re fully entangled. If you … 
  9. Refuge
     … He was a human being who was able to develop certain qualities of mind that we all have in potential form, and through them he was able to put an end to suffering. Which means that that event is relevant to what we’re doing right now, whatever it is we’re doing right now, whether right now means meditating, or right now means … 
  10. Training Wheels
     … As death approaches and your faculties get restricted, your mind is rarely at top form, so you fall back on old habits. So in the practice of concentration, we’re trying to develop good habits to have something good to fall back on. You bring the breath, which is part of the body, together with the mind. And you try to fit them together … 
  11. When Things Aren’t Going Well
     … Attention, in name-and-form, can become appropriate attention. Fabrication can become the comfortable breathing and directed thought and evaluation of right concentration. So it’s all right here. When you get bored or discouraged with the practice, remind yourself that it’s because you’re not paying careful attention. You’re letting your expectations get in the way, or your moods get in … 
  12. Limitless Thoughts
     … What does it mean for the mind to act? What’s the difference between a simple event in the mind, the appearance of a feeling, and an action, the intention? How are intentions formed? What goes into that process? What kind of perceptions, what kind of questions do you ask yourself? What kind of contact in the mind and the body forces your decisions … 
  13. Timeless Dhamma
     … You have to make a vow to yourself, a promise to yourself that you’re not going to harm anyone by killing, stealing, engaging in illicit sex, lying or engaging in any of the forms of wrong speech, or taking intoxicants. You set up that intention and then you have to develop mindfulness and alertness to maintain it. This is where training of the … 
  14. Practical Wisdom
     … Insight is a value judgment, and although sometimes the judging mind is criticized, if you train it to be a wise judging mind, your judicious mind will form a large part of the path.
  15. Breaking the Arrows
     … Everything you need to develop, the tools you need to develop to find what’s really valuable, are right here as well—in a potential form. It’s just up to you now to develop them, to make them stronger. This is how we protect ourselves from the dangers all around us and from the even bigger dangers inside—all those extra arrows we … 
  16. It’s All about Action
     … Your meditation is a form of karma and at the same time it allows you to look directly at karma as you’re doing it. You begin to see where the ways you intend to focus on the breath are helping, whereas other ways of focusing on the breath are not. Sometimes something will come in from the past, and one part of you … 
  17. Nibbana Is Better than You Think
     … We work on the pleasure of just inhabiting the body from within, what the Buddha calls form: how you feel the body in terms of the energy of the breath, the warmth of the body, the coolness of the liquid parts, the solidity of the solid parts—how you feel it from within, what we call proprioception. Look for your pleasure there, because this … 
  18. The Wisdom of Wising Up
     … Still better is getting the mind out of the sensual realm and into the realm of form—your sense of the body from the inside—which is what you’re developing while you’re working with the breath energy in the body. So, if you find the mind wandering off to sensual pleasures, remind yourself, “This is not the time for that.” If it … 
  19. Thinking About Your Fears
     … It’s a pleasure of form. That again helps you realize that if you had to leave this human body, it wouldn’t be all that bad. You could have this as a place to go to. One of Ajaan Fuang’s students was meditating one night, and she had a voice come into her head and say, “You’re going to die tonight … 
  20. Together but Separate
     … Sometimes simply the fact that you’ve applied any perception at all to the pain forms a bridge between the physical pain and the sense of mental pain that comes together with it. Sometimes there’s the assumption wherever there’s a sense of physical pain, there’s going to have to be a mental pain. You can question that. Think of the image … 
  21. Do Jhana
     … Where is there stress? Where is there unnecessary stress? You can move the mind into more and more subtle states of stillness so that you can see more subtle forms of feeding. Ultimately, you want to get to the point where the mind is so strong that it doesn’t need to feed anymore. You find a happiness that doesn’t require feeding. That … 
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