Search results for: "Fabrication"
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- Compunction & Awe… Dispassion is the sense that you’ve been feeding off of your fabrications, willing to put in the effort to construct them, because you have a passion for the pleasures they provide. But now you see that they’re just simply not worth it. You lose any enthusiasm for continuing with this process, and you stop. Saṁvega is one of the ways of inducing …
- Opportunities Everywhere… He started with a warning, “Fabrications are inconstant, subject to arising and passing away. Achieve completion through heedfulness.” In other words, he was talking about an attitude, an attitude you bring to the practice, realizing that things slip away, slip away very quickly. And you’ve got work to do. You can’t be complacent. If you let yourself be complacent, all the opportunities …
- A Noble Warrior’s Path… And as you’re thinking about your breath and evaluating it, that’s the aggregate of fabrication. Meanwhile, your consciousness is aware of all of these things. So you’ve got the five aggregates right here in right concentration, which is your nourishment on the path. Without the well-being and nourishment that come from right concentration, the path gets dry pretty fast. And …
- A Mirror for the Mind… These are called mental fabrications because they’re the mental processes that really have an impact on shaping your state of mind. In this case, the perception of the breath and the different ways of perceiving the breath allow it to become more comfortable. The sense of well-being, the sense of refreshment sooth both the body and the mind. So you’ve got …
- Right Speech, Inside & Out… Because this business of verbal fabrication inside the mind, as Ajaan Lee pointed out, is the most important issue on the path. It can do the most damage, but it can also be the most helpful. It can be helpful in the sense that it reminds you of what right view is, and in that way it’s an essential part of mindfulness. As …
- Is ‘I Am’ the Problem?… Then, as your concentration develops, you find that you get more and more sensitive to the fact that you are fabricating it. Even the subtlest levels of pleasure that come with concentration do have to be maintained. That’s when the mind begins to incline to the deathless, something even better. When you’ve had an experience of the deathless, you realize that it …
- Gratification… When you enjoy a pleasure, there’s an element of fabrication even in the present moment of the enjoyment. When you try to enjoy a nice sound or a nice sight, the mind embroiders an awful lot around the sound and sight in order to enjoy it, because those things are pretty fleeting. The mind has a tendency to advertise the sound and sight …
- Levels of Truth… 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 to watch as it’s actually happening to understand how it’s happening. Then, in the course of performing that duty, you learn to see the cause of stress: what’s …
- Patient & Inquisitive… When he talks about calming bodily fabrication, how do you do that skillfully? If you try to stifle the breath, it’s not going to work. Ajaan Lee gives some good recommendations: Think about the breath energy as having channels that go through the body. Think of the channels all opening up and connecting together. As you think of the body in those ways …
- Learning How to Learn… get there? You have to turn around and look at the means: “What do I do to get to where I want to go?” This reminds you that concentration is something fabricated: It’s done with a purpose. But, to do it well, you have to focus on the causes. Then, based on that desire, you develop your persistence: You actually do your best …
- What Should & Shouldn’t Be Done… So when you hit a state like that, you have to remember what the Buddha said about the fabrications of the mind. We can create different states out of the way we breathe. We can create them out of the different perceptions we have. So what is the perception that’s holding you in those states? Look at that action and the perception and …
- A Pleasure Not to Be Feared… It’s fabricated. It’s willed. As you begin to see the slight variations and slight fluctuations in this sense of ease and well-being, you look for something deeper, more solid. That’s how right concentration becomes a step to greater insight. You can become more and more a connoisseur of pleasure. Your sensitivity for what’s stressful and what’s inconstant gets …
- An Island of Concentration… After all, the breath is a kind of fabrication. It has an intentional element, so you can make use of that: You can try not only long breathing and short breathing, but also fast, slow, heavy, light, deep, shallow, to see what feels best right now. Then, when you have a sense of breathing that feels good, try to make yourself aware of the …
- No Mistakes Are Fatal… There’s a lot of air in there, a lot of fabrication going on. So what you want to do is keep things basic but be very observant, because you’ve got a lot of tricks up your sleeve for creating something out of nothing, making mountains out of the tiniest molehills. So, keep it on the level of molehills, very simple, very basic …
- The Graduated Discourse… There’s the suffering of the fact that things are inconstant, stressful, and not self, that they’re products of fabrication. And then there’s the suffering of the four noble truths, the suffering that’s based on craving. The main message of the four noble truths is if you focus on this second kind of suffering—the suffering that your mind is creating …
- Make the Most of This Breath… the verbal fabrications, the directed thought and evaluation that run your meditation will have been exercised. After all, the mind talking to other people is the same mind that’s talking to itself. So you want to be really clear about what’s happening, how you describe things, making sure to be as accurate as you can. After all, when you’re going to …
- Self-Healing… The word the Buddha uses is *saṅkhāra. *We translate in English as “fabrication.” In Thai, they translate it as prung deng, and prung and deng are the things that you do with food so that you can eat it. So think about that. You’re feeding on the world. And you usually feed on the world in hopes of getting some pleasure out of …
- Bringing Daily Life into the Practice… What the Buddha calls verbal fabrication is something you’re engaging in all the time: directed thought and evaluation. Every time you speak, you first have to choose a topic and then make a mental comment on it. You’ll be bringing those two activities, or those two skills, into your concentration, so make sure they’re well trained before you apply them to …
- A Good Independent Self… What have you got? The three kinds of fabrication: You’re breathing; you’re talking to yourself; you’re dealing with perceptions and feelings—but you can learn how to do all three of those things in skillful ways. You keep on breathing, but now you breathe in different ways. You breathe with the whole body. You think of the breath energy coming in …
- Housecleaning… It’s called the bodily fabrication because it’s the process in the body that responds to your intentions, and it has an effect on the rest of the body. You can make use of that fact to get the rest of the body comfortable. Or at least, if you can’t make the whole body comfortable, you can give yourself a spot, an …
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