Search results for: "Form"
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- Negotiating with the Committee… There’s a conflict in the mind among your different desires and among the different identities that form around these desires. As the Buddha says, craving takes a location. It’s focused right at something. One of the six senses is where the seed of an identity gets planted, and gets watered, nourished. There’s not just one sense of identity. There are lots …
- Admirable Friendship… It’s not like a free-form art where you can just express yourself. It’s more like a skill. The Buddha was a master craftsperson. He discovered this is how you put an end to suffering. This is how it works. And we want to give his teachings a fair try. Which means trying to maintain them as they are and follow them …
- How to Listen to the Dhamma… Ek’aggatā, the noun form, doesn’t mean one-pointedness. It means “gathered into oneness.” You can still hear, you can still be aware of your body, you can still know what’s going on in your mind, and you’re in a position where you can do something about it. That’s one issue. Another issue the Buddha talks about is how to …
- The Noble Truth of Suffering… Then he boils the common denominator of all those forms of suffering down to the five clinging aggregates. The clinging is the problem, and that, he says, is something you want to comprehend. Here again, there are some problems that people have: For some people, it’s all about simply acknowledging that there is suffering and then leaving it there. But when the Buddha …
- A Foundation for Restraint… He said that it is a form of restraint. You realize that there are certain things you simply cannot do if you really want true happiness. And the path enables you to have a sense of well-being as you deny yourself your old ways of feeding. It’s because you truly want true happiness, and you’d like that happiness to spread around …
- The Truth of Perceptions… You can put aside your perception of the form of the body when the breath gets really still and you can hold a perception of space. That’s a choice you make. You could hold on to your perception of the shape of the body. There are enough sensations here, even when the breath is still, that you can maintain that perception. But if …
- Food Insecurity… It doesn’t mean only “not-knowing.” It also means “lack of skill.” Remember that the four noble truths—which form the knowledge that replaces ignorance—have their duties. You can know that and just let it pass. Or you can know that and say, “I’m going to take on those duties”: an act of will that requires that you talk to yourself …
- Why It’s Good to Know Why… After all, we are responsible for shaping our experience, both through our past actions that send their influence into our present experience, in the form of the six senses, and then through our present intentions that actually shape that raw material coming in from the past in a good or bad way. So why should we keep on doing things in a bad way …
- Educating Equanimity… The compassion is there, it’s learning how to educate it so that it’s wise.” When you say that you’re compassionate for someone who’s sick, for someone who’s dying, or for someone who’s going through some other form of suffering: What does it mean to be compassionate? There are people who would say euthanasia is compassionate. Other people say …
- Free from Animosity… our sense of the form of the body as we feel it from within, our feelings, our perceptions, our mental constructs—mental constructs are the stories we tell ourselves, the analyses, the comments, we make on things—and then finally consciousness at the senses. These are the things with which we ordinarily assemble our sense of who we are and what’s ours. Yet …
- Voices in the Mind… Where is this particular conversation going to take you? Remember, it is a form of karma. Is that the kind of karma you want to take on? And remind yourself that you have the choice not to. All too often we think that because something comes up in the mind it’s our responsibility, we’ve got to identify with it. But that’s …
- Mindfulness Gets Intimate… You’re now in a becoming of form or the becoming of the formless level. The “I” and the “me” are still implicit, because you still have to make decisions as to what to do, what not to do. It’s only on the third level of mindfulness practice—when concentration is really solid and your insight is really good—that you can drop …
- Goodwill, Gratitude, No Guilt… There are certain forms of happiness that are not a zero sum game—that when you’re good, when you’re happy, the happiness spreads around. In fact, it erases boundaries rather than creating them. The other motivation for strengthening your resolve to do good is gratitude, realizing that you’ve benefitted from the actions of others, and you appreciate the effort that went …
- Fighting Spirit… Whoever taught those things, the Buddha would seek them out to argue with them because what they were teaching was simply the most virulent and pernicious form of wrong view. It’s a shame that we see that so much of these wrong teachings in modern Dhamma. A Buddhist magazine years back ran a whole issue on the connection between Dhamma and science. The …
- Lessons from Stilling the Mind… So instead, you employ this pleasure of form—in other words, the body as you feel it from within, and you let it become strong. It’s not a tactile sensation. It’s related to the elements in the body or the properties of the body: warmth, coolness, heaviness, energy. When they come together, they feel really good. That kind of pleasure doesn’t …
- Better to Give than to Consume… Both generosity and renunciation are forms of trade. There’s a passage where a monk says, “I will trade what dies for the deathless. I’ll trade what is limited for unbinding.” You’re trading up. You can’t get the better thing without giving up the lesser thing. When you understand that, you realize that whatever you’re doing in the practice, you …
- Don’t Underestimate Merit… Whereas the forms of happiness that qualify as merit—and the Buddha says that activities of merit are another name for happiness—help to erase boundaries. Generosity: You’re giving something away to someone else. That creates a relationship right there, erases a boundary. When you buy or sell something, there’s a boundary. The fact that money has to change hands is what …
- A Gentle Touch… So first you practice with the breath and then you turn around and apply your improved sensitivity to just be with awareness, noticing how things stir the awareness, what they do, how things get formed. So try to work on this gentle touch, the touch that finds a balance between desire and awareness, that allows concentration and insight to come together. After all, the …
- Your Own Karma… When you speak, ask yourself first, “Is this really necessary?” Because of all the forms of wrong speech, idle chatter seems to be the most difficult to overcome. Yet it also provides fertile ground for other kinds of wrong speech to come up as well. Idle chatter is basically speech that really doesn’t have any purpose: You just open the mouth and whatever …
- A Path Rooted in Desire… We cling to the aggregates of form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, consciousness—and that’s the suffering. It’s the passion and desire that wants to hold on to these things as you’re feeding on them. There’s a hunger, and the hunger is not yet satisfied—that’s where the suffering is. That’s to be comprehended. The cause is the craving …
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