Search results for: "Fabrication"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. The River of Karma
     … As you take apart all the various levels of fabrication and intentions in the mind in the present moment, you finally get to something that’s unfabricated. That, the Buddha said, is the end of action. So it’s important that we learn how to understand the principle of karma and see how it plays out in our mediation, so that we don’t … 
  6. Magha Puja
     … this is the Dhamma they all teach. Sometimes you hear the idea that the Buddha said that everything changes, therefore the Dhamma has to change, too. But he never said that. Fabricated things change. That’s true. But the way of the Dhamma never changes, which is why it’s a teaching that’s as relevant now as it was back then. It starts … 
  7. A Snare of Death Laid Out
     … It means the mind’s fascination with planning them, all the embroidery we create around them, all the perceptions and feelings and thought constructs—verbal and mental fabrications. Often that’s where our craving is focused. Often, when you desire a person, it’s not the person you desire. You desire your perceptions and thoughts of the person. So you want to get the … 
  8. At Home with the Breath
     … Ignorance, fabrication, all those things you read about in dependent co-arising: You actually begin to see them because you’re more quiet, in the same way that you can hear subtle sounds when you’re more quiet. So this is a form of the ease and well-being that, as the Buddha said, is blameless, i.e., you’re not harming anyone else … 
  9. Part II : Common Problems
     … The Buddha identifies perception and feeling as mental fabrications, i.e., the things that create your sense of well-being or not well-being in the mind. But it turns out perception is the really big one. So you want to look for all the different labels you have around the pain. Learn how to see it as impermanent, coming and going, coming and … 
  10. Lessons from the Buddha’s Awakening
     … It doesn’t make much distinction between which parts of the picture come from the Canon, which parts come from the commentaries and later texts—which is a shame, because the later interest in all those different levels seems to go beyond what the Buddha intended, which is to think simply that no matter how good it gets within the realm of fabrication, it … 
  11. The Duty to Understand
     … Ultimately, you see that even that the path has to be let go because it’s fabricated, you can’t totally trust it in and of itself. You can take hold of it as a tool but there comes a point where you have to let your tool go. Your craving for the path turns into dispassion and with dispassion there’s release from … 
  12. An Issue of Control
     … If the body or feelings or perception, fabrications, consciousness were self, then you could say, “I want it to be like this,” or “I want it to be like that.” But you can’t have total control over any of these. The Buddha’s constantly focusing on the issue that your sense of self is built around control. Some people say when the Buddha … 
  13. Abandoning Effluents (2)
     … our thoughts of getting upset around the pain, the things we tell ourselves about the pain, the perceptions we have—in other words, the way we fabricate around the pain. Those added arrows are the ones that really go into the heart. The first arrow only goes as far as the body, yet we don’t realize that because we’re pulling it in … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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