Search results for: "Fabrication"
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- Changing Your Default Settings… They were all fabricated. So as long as these things are put together, you have the right to put them together well. When you’re going through a bad period of life, it’s the same sort of thing. You don’t have to add any extra suffering on top of it by breathing in a way that’s weighing you down, or perceiving …
- At the Door of the Cage… As the texts say, the first stage in insight is to focus on the drawbacks of anything that’s fabricated. The next stage is for the mind to incline to the Deathless. Normally the mind will not incline to the Deathless unless it feels that that’s the only way out. Otherwise it’s always going to find some other place to go, some …
- Owning Your Actions… In other words, it takes the mind to a dimension where nothing has to be created, nothing has to be fabricated, nothing has to be put together. There there’s no stress, no suffering at all. That’s where it’s all headed. And it starts right here with noticing what you’re doing. So be clear about what you’re doing and try …
- Anybody Home?… form, feelings, perceptions, mental fabrications, acts of consciousness coming and going, coming and going. They’ve been coming and going in all kinds of zigzags. You want to learn how to see that they’re really not worth getting involved with. He represents this by the little children suddenly getting sick and tired of their mud houses, realizing they’re nothing but mud, and …
- An Inside Job… One of his big discoveries is the extent to which we fabricate our experience from within, through our intentions. In other words, we’re not just on the receiving end of the material world. We actually shape the world we live in. The whole point of the path is to learn how to take advantage of that fact—so that, on the one hand …
- The Pleasure of Concentration… And be sensitive, as the Buddha said, to breathe in and out sensitive to mental fabrication. This is largely an issue of the perceptions that you use around the breath. Remember, we’re not trying to pump air into a solid body. Our immediate experience of the body is breath energy. So as the breath flows in, it’s simply energy mingling with energy …
- The Kindness of Body Contemplation… your feelings, your perceptions, thought fabrications, states of your mind, any qualities that would pull you away from staying with the body here in the present moment or any qualities that would help in that direction. You want to be able to see these things clearly for what they are and while they’re happening. The more you’re able to step back from …
- Appropriate Attention… You know that in those two things—the craving or the passion and desire on the one hand, and these aggregates of form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness on the other—the craving is to be abandoned, while you have to comprehend those aggregates that you’re clinging to. When you think in these ways, that’s called appropriate attention. So, as you go …
- The Lightness of the Concentrated Mind… These different layers of sankhara, fabrication, fall away one by one by one. And the mind can become very light. The reason we don’t experience lightness in our meditation is because we’re not willing to let go. We feel that we’re going to need some straw. So we keep that big load of straw on our backs. The purpose of the …
- It’s All in What You’re Doing… You’ve got the thought fabrications that are directing your thoughts and evaluating to get the breath and the mind to settle down together. And then you’ve got the awareness, the consciousness, that’s aware of all these things. That’s where you’re going to see those five aggregates. It’s not that they’re going to be set out some place …
- Freedom Undefined… When you hold onto any of the other aggregates, you’re classified as a feeling-clinger, a perception-clinger, a mental-fabrication-, or consciousness-clinger. You create your identity by what you cling to. This is why the Buddha never answered questions about what a human being is, because a human being can be almost anything. So this noble eightfold path that we’re …
- 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 …
- Equanimity… That’s when the Buddha says that you have to use the fabrications of exertion. In other words, you use the way you breathe, you use the way you think about things, evaluate things, you use your perceptions and feelings to deal with those problems: to figure out where they’re coming from and what you can do to undercut them so that eventually …
- Happily on the Path… not just sitting here, passively watching things coming and going. We’re proactive in trying to figure things out. Look at dependent co-arising, all the factors happening before sensory contact: fabrication, intentions, attention, perceptions, feelings. We’re actively shaping things, and that’s what we’re trying to train: the way the mind shapes its experience. Part of that is learning how to …
- Evaluation… That forms the foundation for deeper and deeper levels of concentration, and they in turn allow you to watch the process of fabrication. This way, you can see areas in which you’ve been adding unnecessary stress to what’s going on and you can learn how to stop. So always remember this factor of evaluation. It’s the beginning of discernment. If you …
- In Accordance with the Dhamma… You see that all the stress that’s weighing down the mind comes from your passion for fabrication. You’re making all kinds of worlds out of your experiences, and in the course of that you’re making yourself suffer. But a lot of those worlds are hard to give up. The different hopes and ideals we have: Some of them are in line …
- The Committee of the Mind… He’s teaching us new ways to breathe, new ways to talk to ourselves, new ways of applying perceptions to the world—all three of the fabrications that go into shaping the present moment. To really take them on, it’s good to keep in mind that it is possible to put an end to suffering. There’s something better than the ways we …
- Safety in Awareness… Let go of your awareness of feelings, perceptions, fabrication.” He goes through all the five aggregates, all the elements, and all the sense bases. He finally gets to the point where he says, “You have to let go of your consciousness of consciousness. Don’t let your consciousness rely on consciousness.” This is the point, of course, where Ananthapindika starts crying. “All those years …
- The Solvent for Sticky Narratives… Then, of course, the Buddha has you step back from this whole process of creating narratives in your mind, and remind yourself that it’s all just fabrication. You happen to breathe in a certain way, talk to yourself in a certain way, certain perceptions come up, and all of a sudden you’re back in that old thought world. Well, it doesn’t …
- Self-Doubt… Ajaan Lee makes the point that of the various fabrications—bodily, verbal, and mental—the really important one is verbal. It’s through the way we talk to ourselves that we can destroy ourselves, we can sabotage the practice. It’s through the way we talk to ourselves that we can pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and encourage ourselves to move on. It …
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