Search results for: "Fabrication"

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  2. Suffering Comes from What You’re Doing
     … insight into fabrication. In other words, what is the mind doing? How does it shape its experience? This means you’re not looking just for things arising and passing away, but you also want to see why. This is why playing with the breath, trying to get the mind into concentration, is an important part of discernment. Because you can watch things arise and … 
  3. Determined on Goodwill
     … The other is that the present moment is fashioned through fabrication for a purpose. Our desires, our purposes, have an arrow in them. We’re heading in a particular direction. The problem is that from moment to moment that direction can change, which is why so many people’s lives are muddled. They seem to be going in the right direction, then they turn … 
  4. A Well-thatched Roof
     … To understand that, you’re going to have to look at the mind in terms of the processes of fabrication: the breath, the directed thought and evaluation in and of itself, and your feelings and perceptions. What is it that’s out of balance? What is it that’s wrong? What needs to be changed? It’s only when you get to know the … 
  5. What We’re Here to See
     … the four noble truths, the teachings on fabrication. So keep that framework in mind. But also remember you’re going to be discovering the details about your mind, and a lot of the insights you’re going to gain will be very personal. Still, if you can look at them from the perspective of that more universal framework, it takes a lot of the … 
  6. The Heart of the Teachings
     … The other steps include breathing in and out sensitive to pleasure, breathing in and out sensitive to rapture, breathing in and out sensitive to what are called mental fabrication: the way feelings and perceptions shape your mind. And then calming that effect. Breathing in and out sensitive to the mind, and then noticing if the mind is out of balance, what you need to … 
  7. The Choice Not to Suffer
     … the fact that there is stress simply because things are put together and fabricated—and that’s everywhere. But the stress that weighs down the mind is a different kind of stress. It’s the stress that comes from craving and ignorance. And those are things you can change. This is where it’s good to think of that committee in the mind, and … 
  8. Five Steps to Insight
     … Say you have an angry thought, and the hormones go rushing through your blood system, and then the thought drops away, because after all it is something fabricated—it’s inconstant, stressful, not self—so it’ll go away. But you still feel the impact of those hormones in your body. Something inside you tells you, “Well, I must still be angry.” So you … 
  9. The Buddha’s Conventions
     … In other words, the Buddha is going to condition us as to what kind of perceptions are useful, what kind of thought constructs are useful, what ways of fabricating our experience will be helpful in that direction. He teaches us how to use these things as tools, knowing that at some point we’ll have to put our tools aside. It’s like being … 
  10. Treating the Diseases of the Mind
     … Of the various objects, it has the most variety, in the sense that you can use it to wake yourself up; you can use it calm yourself down; you can use it as an object of concentration; you can use it as a basis for understanding the processes of fabrication that go on in the body and the mind, so that it becomes an … 
  11. Questioning Everything
     … What may have seemed like a great insight was just a passing fabrication. He had to let it go. But in order to be able to pass judgment on things, he had to develop really strong powers of concentration and a very unflinching attitude: the ability to stay away from distractions, to stay away from all the hooks that tend to catch the mind … 
  12. What Am I Becoming?
     … In other words, it’s something you fabricate, something you put together. We’re not sitting here waiting for the nibbana yacht to come over from the other shore to pick us up and take us back. We have to put together a raft out of what we’ve got here. We’ve got the breath; we’ve got directed thought and evaluation. These … 
  13. Heedfulness All the Way Through
     … And then understanding the processes of fabrication: That’s the insight. How do you go about doing that? From that ability to step back and watch yourself. So as you develop these five strengths, it’s not as if you’re going from one house to another house to another house. You’re really settling into this one house, but you’re doing it … 
  14. Up for the Challenge
     … First, you should try to comprehend suffering, which means seeing that suffering is in the act of clinging to form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrications, consciousness. You want to see yourself suffering in the act of clinging itself. Sometimes we’re told that we suffer because we cling to impermanent things. But it’s possible to cling even to permanent things and still suffer. You … 
  15. Choiceful Awareness
     … You don’t want to explore their content because first you want to get really, really skilled at knowing what the mind is like when a very minimal level of fabrication or choice is going on. That’s so you get more and more sensitive to choices when they happen. This is how you approach the advanced level of meditation where the mind is … 
  16. Cook Your Mind
     … As you’re holding to the precepts, as you’re developing right effort, you’re going to be dealing with these different forms of fabrication: the way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself, your perceptions and feelings. Those are aggregates. You get hands-on practice in using those aggregates to develop skillful thoughts, to calm the mind down, to create a state … 
  17. Dreams & Voices
     … We’re constantly fabricating the present moment, putting things together, but then the present moment passes away, so we have to put together another present moment, and then another one. We’re constantly doing this, and we need guidance. Sometimes the mind communicates guidance to itself through visions or dreams, and sometimes other beings can communicate. But where these visions and dreams come from … 
  18. The Not-Self Discourse
     … feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. They’re not-self. You might wonder why he brought up the topic of not-self. After all, all five of the brethren had attained the Dhamma eye, and one of the consequences of that attainment is that you let go of identity views—views in which you define yourself either as an aggregate, as the owner of the … 
  19. Get Real
     … If you really look, though, you see how fabricated those ideas are. If you let them go, what have you got left? Explore. When you do, you find things softening up a bit. A lot of the tension with which you hold the body to make it fit in with your preconceived notions of what you should be feeling right now, gets put aside … 
  20. Ardency
     … And two, when you’re close to the breath, you’re also close to all the processes of fabrication or intention in the mind. When you’re close to your intentions, you can begin to see where the ignorance is. This is one area where we tend to cover things up. We don’t pay much attention to our intentions. And we’re not … 
  21. Healing Awareness
     … In the Buddha’s meditation instructions, he talks about training yourself to be aware of the whole body as you breathe in and breathe out, how to calm what he calls bodily fabrication, i.e., to calm the breath, how to train yourself to breathe in and out sensitive to rapture, and to breathe in and out sensitive to pleasure. Now, the rapture and … 
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