Search results for: "Form"
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- For the Survival of True Happiness… You want to remind yourself that the dangerous forms of craving are the ones that deal with sensuality, becoming, and non-becoming—in other words, getting fascinated with sensual pleasures, or wanting to take on an identity. You see that you’re losing the body and you’re afraid, “If I don’t have a body, where am I going to be? What’s …
- Two Types of Dukkha… In fact, the way you breathe sometimes plays a role in how a thought forms. So, try to stay here as much as you can. In the beginning, you don’t want to get involved in anything else. Just stay right with the breath, be as steady as you can, as calm as you can, and learn how to relate to the breath in …
- Something New… There are forms, feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness. Out of those five, fabrications covers the widest variety of mental events. It’s the way you talk to yourself. It’s the way you think. It’s your emotions, your world views, your ideas of what you have to do, what you don’t have to do, how other people should be, how other …
- The Four Noble Truths… All of this falls under the stress that comes from clinging to form, feeling, perceptions, thought-fabrications, and consciousness—consciousness here being the consciousness of the senses. All of this, the Buddha says to comprehend. Now, for most of us, when we run into pain, comprehending is not the first thing we have in mind. We want to push it away; we want to …
- A Trained Observer… When you’re sitting here, you’ve got form, which is the breath. Feeling, which is the feeling of pleasure you’re trying to develop. Perception, the image you hold in mind of how the breath moves through the body, where it starts, where it finishes. Fabrication, how you talk to yourself about the breath, evaluate it, make adjustments. And then consciousness, which is …
- Learning from Labor… And we see how we’ve constructed it out of form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness. Then we can get the mind into very subtle states, so that you can drop the directed thought and evaluation, and just be with the sense of oneness—body, awareness, breath, a feeling of pleasure all one, filling the whole body. Whatever sense of rapture there is after a …
- Treasures from the East… But what does that mean for us? It means that there’s a human being who, through his own efforts, was able to find a deathless happiness; who able to teach it so that other people can find it too; and the qualities he used to find that happiness are things we all have in a potential form—the implication being that if he …
- Defilements at the Door… name and form, or fabrication. What perceptions fuel your greed, anger, and delusion? What intentions fuel it? What ways of paying attention to things fuel these things? Look into those, because that’s where you can make a difference here in the present moment. You may not be able to choose who’s going to appear at your door or who wants to get …
- Get Attached to Jhana… It’s called the pleasure of form. It differs from sensual pleasures. Sensual pleasures have to do with your thoughts about sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations—in other words, the things that come and touch the body—whereas this is different. This is the body in and of itself as you feel it from within, what they call “proprioception.” Learn how to …
- One Thing at a Time… You want to bring them together so that they form a good whole: breath filling the body, a feeling of pleasure filling the body, your awareness filling the body. You don’t have to pay attention to anything else right now. The sound of the plane going overhead: Just let it go right through. It’s really none of your business. Your business is …
- Things that Arise & Pass Away… by noticing the extent to which we can shape our experience, then using that sensitivity to get things as still as possible so that we can improve our sensitivity even further to see even more subtle forms of fabrication. You might call this sensitivity training, but it’s not just getting in touch with your emotions. It’s getting in touch with everything that …
- Good for What Purpose?… And pragmatism, in its pure form, can’t really say that any one particular purpose is better than another. This is why the Buddha put so much emphasis on his four noble truths and on the fact that suffering can be ended. It’s something that human beings can do. And when that can be done, why settle for anything less? The answer for …
- The Meaning of Insight… Actually, you use these perceptions properly when you put them in the context of the four noble truths, or more specifically in the context of the analysis the Buddha recommends for gaining escape from the forms of suffering included in the first noble truth. You see their origination, you see their passing away, you see their allure, and then you see their drawbacks. It …
- Dependent Co-arising in Fifteen Minutes… But it’s important that the Buddha notes that these things come first—particularly with reference to the sub-factor of intention, under name and form, coming before sensory contact—because contact at the senses, the Buddha said, is basically your old karma coming back at you. But here there’s intention, karma, *prior *to that. That prior intention is your intention in the …
- The Kamma of Meditation… The factors of fabrication, intention, in name and form, come well before the six senses. Now, the six senses are your experiences of the results of past karma. So you’re approaching the results of past karma through your present karma, and that present karma is free to change. That’s what we’re training. That’s where the focus is—because right there …
- Exploring Fabrication… Basically, you take the potential for, say, a form or a feeling or a perception, fabrications, or consciousness—these potentials come from your past kamma—and then you fabricate them into an actual experience of the aggregates. There’s an intentional element in all of these things. As the Buddha said, the essence of insight is learning how to investigate the process of fabrication …
- From Dependence to Independence… These are qualities that we all have, at least in potential form: the ability to be mindful, to be alert, to be resolute in what we do. Now, there’s a large part of the mind that would rather not make the effort, would like to dismiss the whole thing. But you can ask yourself: “What kind of part of the mind is that …
- Detail Work… The defilements, in their seed form, are more like little sparks that start a fire. The fire can spread very fast, and you don’t want to wait until it’s spread, because then it’s hard to contain. You want to catch these things when they’re small. So by making yourself more habitually meticulous, you see details in other things as well …
- Resisting the Germs of Defilement… The germs in the world just keep mutating into more and more and more forms. But even though the germs of the mind are many, they have certain classes, certain types. And it is possible to come to the end of them so that the mind can be in a state of perfect health. That’s what the Buddha called nibbana: health. But it …
- Tough Goodwill for a Tough World… It’s totally possible to have boundaries within limitless goodwill, because the help you give to others is a form of generosity. Goodwill may be limitless, but your generosity has its limits in terms of your strength, your wealth, your position in life. It’s good that you see the difference between the two. When people are taking advantage of you, you can say …
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