Search results for: "Fabrication"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Respect Opens Possibilities… Thought fabrications—the way you put ideas together, the way you talk to yourself. And finally, consciousness—your awareness of whatever is coming in at the senses, of whatever is happening in the mind. We cling to these things. We cling to these things for sensual pleasure; we cling to these things because they provide us views about what is world is like; we …
- Battling the Hindrances… You have to exert, as the texts say, a fabrication, which means you have to think about things in a new way, breathe in a new way, change your perceptions, until you can finally get past that particular defilement. So it takes work, and as with all work it requires desire. So chandam janeti, try to generate that desire that you really do want …
- Your Own Karma… Then there’s another technique the Buddha recommends, which is relaxing the fabrication of thought. This applies to cases when you’re sensitive enough to the breath energy in the body that you can tell: When a thought arises, there’s a certain part of the body that will tense up. The thought is actually related to that tension in that particular part of …
- A Path Rooted in Desire… You can let go of all this fabrication of the path. That’s how desire leads to the end of desire. The Buddha takes our approach for trying to attain our desires and applies it to the most important desire of all: the desire not to suffer and not to cause any suffering for anybody. So recognize the fact that, as you’re practicing …
- Dedicating Merit… It’s also helpful to remember that we’re here in a large fabric of interconnected people: people we’ve depended on, people we’ve benefitted from, and now we’re in a position to benefit them in return. The attitude that’s willing to benefit others is an important nourishment for your own concentration. This is why dedicating merit is good for you …
- The Karma of Pleasure… Feelings are fabricated. In other words, even in the experiencing of a feeling, there’s already a certain amount of intention. We have potentials that come in from our past actions and then our present intentions shape those potentials into a feeling. That’s what the mind spends a lot of its time creating all the time. We’re doing it right here as …
- A Mind like Wind… The breath, after all, is a bodily fabrication that has an element of intention in it. So take advantage of that. As the breath gets more comfortable, you can start thinking about being aware of the whole body as you breathe in and as you breathe out. This helps you move into the present moment with a sense of belonging here. You’re not …
- The Power of Intention… You gain a sense of the power you have when you’re choosing to focus on something and, from that skillful focus, you can fabricate things skillfully and create a sense of ease even in the midst of a lot of pain. This is an important skill to develop. You might scan through the body to see where there’s some tension that you …
- The Riddle Tree… You see that as you get the mind through stages of concentration, you’re going to be shifting around among issues of thought fabrication or perception or feeling or consciousness or form, the body: all the aggregates. Or you may find that the issue is how you visualize things as opposed to how you feel them: those are issues of the sense media. Or …
- A Concentration Diet… That’s because you have to be very careful not to be overcome by the pleasure in order to hold on to the perception of the breath, which gets you more and more sensitive to the process of perception and thought-fabrication in the mind. You can also begin to see how these things can contribute a little bit of stress to the mind …
- Three Perceptions… Now, it’s true that you’ll frequently find in the Canon the statements that all things compounded or fabricated are inconstant, that they’re all stressful. And all dhammas — all objects of the mind — are not-self. So if that’s the way things are, why not just say that these are characteristic features of these things? Why make a big deal about …
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