Search results for: "Form"

  1. Page 53
  2. Something to Stand On
     … And two is to look at experience in terms of the four noble truths, because those truths are what form what he calls vijja, the Pali word that means both knowledge and skill. This is a skillful way of looking at your experience so you can develop the other skills you need in order to overcome suffering. That’s the protection he offers. Like … 
  3. Goodwill & Kamma
     … One is that every feeling we have has an intentional element, just like every sense of our form of our body contains an intentional element. Every perception, every fabrication, even plain old consciousness contains an intentional element. Something is fabricated out of a potential, coming from past kamma, and turns into an actuality. Just like the issue of past kamma in general: What you … 
  4. The Message of Mindfulness
     … The steps don’t mention verbal fabrication, but each step is in itself a form of verbal fabrication: the way you remind yourself of what you want to do as you breathe in, what you want to do as you breathe out. Then, as the mind begins to settle in, those fabrications grow more subtle. When you’re able to stay well with the … 
  5. A Mental Fortress
     … Now, what the Buddha doesn’t mention in his image is another form of protection, and that’s goodwill. One of the worst ways you can harm yourself is if you do something hoping for somebody to suffer, and then you have to live with the results of that action. If you really mean ill, it’s a hard, hard action to look back … 
  6. Honesty
    The chants we had just now form quite a juxtaposition, talking about aging, illness, and death, the world being swept away, slave to craving, and then the wish: “May I be happy, may all living beings be happy.” Sometimes the Buddha is accused of being pessimistic. But the whole purpose of his teachings is to find true happiness. Where he talks about the negative … 
  7. A Noble Warrior’s Path
     … So you focus on the form of the body; you focus on the breath, as you feel it. Breathe in a way that gives rise to feelings of well-being and ease. Hold a perception of the breath in mind and try to adjust the perception so that it allows you to breathe in a way that’s really comfortable. You have to question … 
  8. More than Mindfulness
     … As you zap it, you begin to realize that it was actually forming before you zapped it. What were the steps? How did you miss them? Why didn’t you see them? You want to get curious about that. If you’re going to put an end to these things—rather than just noting their coming and going, noting their coming and going—you … 
  9. Doing the Practice
     … It allows you to form a foundation from which you can observe what’s going on in the mind. Then, as your powers of mindfulness and concentration get stronger, you see things more and more precisely. Ultimately, you can see through to what really is changeless here in the mind, something that doesn’t depend on causes. We don’t create it through the … 
  10. Stress
     … So these teachings all form a cluster. They point us in the direction where we should want to take these teachings. For example, the perception on dukkha, stress or suffering: We look at the things that we do to find happiness. We look at the happiness that results. And the question is: Are we focusing our efforts in the right place? Is the happiness … 
  11. Concentration Nurtured by Virtue
     … If there’s any disturbance in the stillness, you can say, “Okay, this is suffering.” When the Buddha talks about stress and suffering, it includes little things like this, in addition to the more blatant forms of outright suffering. If we can cause ourselves this kind of burden with little things like this, it’s very easy to get involved in other, bigger burdens … 
  12. Levels of Truth
     … what are the drawbacks of liking those things? The Buddha talks about common, everyday stress, and then he moves on to an underlying analysis that he calls the five clinging-aggregates: form, feeling, perception, fabrications, consciousness. All these things are things that we cling to, and in the clinging there’s going to be stress. That’s something you want to comprehend. You want … 
  13. Training in Right Resolve
     … At the same time, you’re putting aside the other two forms of wrong resolve, which are resolve on ill will and resolve on harmfulness. The resolve to avoid those two types of thinking, regardless: That’s right resolve. So avoid sensuality, avoid thoughts of ill will, thoughts of harmfulness. Hold that principle as your standard. Remember, the Buddha taught this in pretty radical … 
  14. Tranquility, Insight, & Concentration
     … They form a unified path. The more you can keep things together like this, the more settled the mind will feel, the more at ease, the more grounded. This will be an important ally as you get deeper and deeper into the mind, because you begin to gain some insights into parts of the mind that you’ve hidden from yourself, and part of … 
  15. Nourishing & Interesting
     … You also get to see the processes of how thoughts form. Thoughts will come that having nothing to do with the breath. In the beginning, it’s hard not to fall into them because that’s the way the mind has been acting all along. But if you decide that you’re not going to fall into them and you’re going to watch … 
  16. Exercising the Mind
     … So you focus on learning how to lift properly or whatever your exercise is, trying to do in a proper form, being very mindful, so you can get the most strength out of the exercise. Then you’ve got some strength to take home. It’s not that you leave the strength there in the locker room. It’s the same with meditation. As … 
  17. Strengthening Your Goodness
     … But the pleasure of just being with the breath is called the pleasure of form, your sense of the body as you feel it from within, and that’s totally your own territory. The pleasures of the senses depend on things outside of you and people outside of you being a certain way. If that’s where you find your happiness, then your goodness … 
  18. Guarding the Truth
     … through the processes of fabrication, or through intention or attention, which come under name in name-and-form. These are the factors that come before you even gain any sense-impressions through the six senses. Those are things you can learn. Those are things you can master. And when you know them, you’ve got the most direct source possible for knowledge about the … 
  19. In Your Right Mind at Death
     … the alternative offered by the pleasure and rapture of concentration, the pleasure of form, or the pleasure of the formless. That way you won’t feel so desperate and threatened when you die. As for fear of being punished, sometimes, as you get close to death, you start thinking about the things you did: times when, as the Buddha would put it, you were … 
  20. Thinking Your Way to Stillness
     … You know how to get the mind back into right resolve, so think of the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha, virtue, generosity.” So these forms of meditation are a type of right resolve, and right resolve is meant to bring the mind to concentration. This is a theme we find throughout the Canon. Not only does right resolve build on right view but it … 
  21. Switzerland Inside
     … He was able to find true happiness through his own actions, and the qualities of mind that he developed in his actions are qualities that everybody has in potential form. So you have it within you, too, in terms of your heedfulness, your resolve, your ardency. You can do it, too. But conviction in the Buddha’s awakening also means that you’re alert … 
  22. Load next page...