Search results for: "Fabrication"
- Page 53
- Solidly Here… You can understand the intentions that form around sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, feelings, perceptions, fabrications—the whole gamut. They’re going to form right here and they’re going to play out right here. If you don’t stick with them, you don’t see how things play out. You don’t see how a cause leads to an effect—or even …
- Energizing Your Meditation… You’ve learned how to use the processes of fabrication and, at the same time, you’ve found a quality of alertness and stillness that give the mind some genuine rest.
- 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 …
- Doing Meditation… There’s an activity of fabrication going on. You’re creating the path, putting the path together. The discernment comes in learning how to do it more and more skillfully, with more and more precision, more and more finesse. And that comes from observing. Sometimes we hear that meditation means that you stop doing and just simply “be the knowing” or “be with” things …
- Pain & Patience… form—the way you create the sense of your body, inhabit the sense of your body; feeling—feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain; perceptions, the labels you put on things, either words or images; fabrications—the thoughts you create around things; and then finally, consciousness, which is aware of all these things. These are all activities you’re engaged in. And …
- When Aging Closes In… You’ve got a body that’s created out of fabrication. It’s going to go. But you can make sure that your mind doesn’t have to suffer from this. Part of that is accepting that this is the nature of bodies, this is the nature of karma. Still, there’s always that aspect of present karma where you really can make a …
- Intelligent Effort… It’s fabricated. Its nature is to slip away. So we have to be constantly shoring it up, protecting it. Have a sense of its value. Ajaan Lee’s image is of a dish of food. You want to keep it covered. Make sure the flies don’t come in and land on it. So, to protect your concentration as you go through the …
- Appropriate Attention… The more you get sensitive to this—the work the mind has to do in order to fabricate its experience—the more your understanding of what dukkha is, is going to develop, to the point, as I said, that Ajaan Fuang mentioned. When you’ve had the experience of the ultimate happiness, the happiness of the unconditioned, and you come back to the engagement …
- Two Kinds of Middle… Then start asking yourself: “Where am I in the body? What fabrications have I built up around that sense of where I am in the body?” You can begin to take these things apart. In other words, the pleasure becomes a basis for understanding a lot of the mind’s strange perceptions, replacing them with new perceptions, trying out new perceptions to see how …
- The Best Place to Practice… What are you going to do with it? Are you going to give in? At the very least, can you watch it? Can you—in the Buddha’s terms—exert a fabrication against it? In other words, how does your breathing affect it? How does your thinking affect it? What thoughts are you thinking about when this defilement comes up? What perceptions are you …
- Fix Your Views… So the teaching on all fabricated things being stressful may always be true, but it’s not always useful. It’s not always right for the context. Then, of course, there are the many teachings on taking yourself as your mainstay, using yourself as your governing principle. If you try to bring in the teaching on not-self and say, “Well, everything’s supposed …
- A Concentration Checklist… What’s form, what’s feeling doing right now? What’s perception doing? What’s fabrication doing? What’s consciousness doing? How do these things work together to create a state of concentration? Can you see that? Look. Take an interest—and you’ll realize there’s nothing to get bored about. All the processes by which the mind is creating suffering for itself …
- Skilled in Leaving Concentration… You develop the base of power based on desire and the fabrication of exertion. Once you arrive, then you can put that desire away.” That’s one instance. Another passage is where he tells a nun that even though we practice for putting an end to craving, we have to use craving in order to get there. The desire to get there is what …
- Concentration that Bears Great Fruit… As the Buddha said, consciousness doesn’t have to depend on the body; it depends simply on fabrication and craving. It can find a new body that way. The question is, how does it go from here to there? Actually, consciousness never leaves “here.” It’s always “here.” It’s just the question of which body is “here” right now for you. It’s …
- Using What You’ve Got… Your directed thought and evaluation are sankharas or fabrications. And then you’re conscious of all this. What better place to settle down so that you can learn about the five khandhas? You’ve got all of them present here. You’ve got them all acting—because this is what the khandhas are. The aggregates are activities. The Buddha defines them with verbs. So …
- Specifically… It also appears in fabrication, where it’s hanging out with the way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself, and again with perceptions. All of this means that the factor that’s actually making the pain invade the mind right now could be any of its friends in the different factors of dependent co-arising. So there are lots of things you …
- Strong Against Anger & Fear… This is why it’s useful to think about the different kinds of fabrication that go into an emotion. There’s the way you breathe, there’s the way you talk to yourself, the images, the perceptions you hold in mind. You have to realize that you can breathe in different ways, you can talk to yourself in different ways, you can hold different …
- Meditate to Win… You train in how to breathe calming bodily fabrication, which basically means calming the breath itself. And, as a couple of suttas say, you get to the point where the breath stops. That’s when it’s really calm. Similarly with training in feelings, mind-states, mental qualities. So when you come here, you’re submitting to a training. We often translate those passages …
- Whole-body Consciousness… Now, the sutta calls it “pure consciousness,” but it’s still fabricated. This is an important point. One of the reasons why the forest tradition monks call it phuu ruu or “the knower,” is that if there’s any sense of identity there—and there will be, you create a sense of identity there, and you know that it’s through a perception that …
- Not-self Is a Value Judgment… Even when he was talking to people on the verge of becoming arahants giving them that questionnaire, notice how he phrased the questions: “Form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness: Are they constant or inconstant?” — “They’re inconstant.” “If they’re inconstant, are they easeful or stressful?” — “They’re stressful.” And then the final question is not, “Then is there a self?” No, the question is …
- Load next page...
