Search results for: "Form"
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- The Power of Action… Then as your mind gets more still, you begin to see these actions in more and more subtle forms. Of course, ultimately we’re working to a point where, as Ajaan Mun says, nibbana has no action. Each of the four noble truths has a duty, but nibbana doesn’t have a duty. There’s no action there at all. But you get there …
- Games the Mind Plays… all those vague feelings and half-formed desires. The reason they’re vague is because if they became clear, you’d see right through them. So it’s not a matter that your feelings are right and your reasons are wrong, or that all the words you’ve learned from other people are bad for you. You’ve got to learn how to use …
- The Karma of Pleasure… And the only way you’re going to see those drawbacks is to give yourself a more blameless form of pleasure, so you can look at, say, sensual pleasure, and not be so hungry for it. If you’re hungering for it, it’s got to be good. That’s the attitude we have. But if you can appease that hunger for pleasure with …
- Defabricating Anger… In that way, they form part of the path. And as you get used to them—realizing that you have choices in how you breathe, how you talk to yourself, what perceptions you hold in mind—then you can apply that same knowledge to other issues that arise as you go through the day. One of the big issues, of course, is anger. We …
- Strategies for Happiness… People who have a very poorly formed sense of self have trouble managing their lives. A certain level of identification is needed, a certain sense of self is needed, just to function properly. And so, in learning to be more skillful, the Buddha has us take that sense of self and try to make it more coherent, so that it can promote your desire …
- A Safe Harbor… This is a form of safety that can come from training the heart. Even more so when your concentration develops and you develop even further insight into the ways the mind can create suffering for itself: You develop the qualities of mind that can see through those habits, let them go. Your mindfulness is continuous, your alertness is really sharp, concentration and discernment grow …
- Passion for Dispassion… We talk about the committee of the mind, and that’s what it is—the different forms of craving. If you can clear them out, have some quiet time inside, some solitary time inside without your craving constantly making comments on things, you find you can be wherever you are, and you can be happy. Like that old Zen koan about the sound of …
- What’s Relative, What’s Constant… The process of fabrication here and now takes the potential for form, the potential for feeling, perceptions, thought-constructs, even consciousness, and turns it into actual aggregates. I was listening to a Dhamma talk the other day in which someone was saying, “Consciousness has to be unconditioned. After all, how could one conditioned thing know another conditioned thing?” Well, that’s what actually happens …
- Staying Normal… And it starts with this, with virtue, bringing the mind to a place where it can easily refrain from killing, stealing, illicit sex, intoxicants, and all the unskillful forms of wrong speech. Once that becomes your habitual way, you’re developing a lot of the good qualities that help keep the mind at normalcy. You learn to resist the impulse, say, to do something …
- Virtue & Right View… There are some forms of practice, the Buddha said, that can be pleasant now but will cause long-term suffering, so watch out for those. There are those that are difficult now but will create well-being further down the line. With those*,* he said you should be willing to put aside your preferences for pleasure right now, and put up with the difficulty …
- Perceptions & Potentials… The whole point of the path is that you can take your sense of the form of the body, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness, and you can turn them into something else. They don’t have to be a weight on the mind. They can be a path. You’re making something different out of them. Now, the suffering comes from wanting the potentials …
- Sensitive to Fabrication… But ask yourself, “Where’s the clinging? What are you feeding on here? Is it a form? Is it an image you’re holding in mind? Is it a feeling? Is it a perception? Is it a fabrication? Is it just the fact of consciousness? How are you feeding on these things? And why do you want to feed on them? What is it …
- Look after Yourself with Ease… You’re going for pleasures of form, and these don’t have nearly the bad effect on the mind that thirst for sensuality has. The Buddha does warn there may come a time when you decide that you’re content to get stuck on this kind of pleasure. That’s something to watch out for. But this pleasure is the path. You can’t …
- In Earnest… We feed off our ideas of ourselves, all the different forms of clinging: sensuality, views, habits and practices, views about who we are. We feed on these things but they keep changing on us and never really provide any real sustenance. They just bring more and more suffering. This is why the Buddha said to feed the mind in a different way, a way …
- Gratitude, Goodwill & Generosity… We often read the texts that right view consists of seeing things in terms of the four noble truths, but there’s a more preliminary form of right view that reminds you of the power of your actions. In particular. it focuses first on the power of your good actions:, that there is a special value to generosity. There’s a special gratitude you …
- Three Perceptions… As this contemplation gets more refined, you see that even the most stable level of concentration you can attain — the one that has formed your highest experience of pleasure and ease — is composed of five aggregates on a very subtle level, and even on this subtle level their behavior displays these three features all the time. You apply the three perceptions to them to …
- What’s Not on the Map… You may already know something about these qualities in their potential form, but as they grow they can branch out in unexpected ways. They can open up and connect to other qualities in the mind as well. So there’s always an element of uncertainty in the practice that requires your own active participation in taking what you’ve learned and adjusting it to …
- Training Your Moods… But why? If you can have a sense of well-being inside, then it’s easier to separate yourself from your moods and understand the process of how they get formed. You begin to realize that what the Buddha taught about fabrication is a really applicable lesson right here. Because your mood is composed of what? The way you breathe, the way you talk …
- Culture Shock… Exactly where are they going to take you? They take you back to that world of opposites, the world where there’s nothing in a really pure form. If you’re nurturing your desires in that context, you’re simply learning to put up with second best. There was an article recently in Tricycle where a psychologist was arguing that the true Buddhist attitude …
- Appreciation… As the Buddha pointed out, there are some good forms of happiness where everybody benefits. In terms of generosity, the person who gives benefits and the person who receives benefits. The same with observing the precepts. The person who observes the precepts benefits and the person who’s not killed, not stolen from, not lied to, doesn’t have to deal with people who …
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