Search results for: "Fabrication"
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- Catch Yourself Lying to Yourself… Because it’s in seeing the distinctions that you understand the whole process of what the mind is doing, what it’s fabricating. And these distinctions are very subtle. If you don’t learn how to be subtle in your speech and don’t learn how to be discerning in a subtle way about your precepts, it’s going to be impossible to be …
- Happiness is a Skill… the form of the body in the breath; the feeling of pleasure that comes when the breath feels good; the perception—the mental image of the breath being the energy going throughout the body—that holds the breath in mind; fabrication, the conversation you hold with yourself about the breath as you’re evaluating it; and then consciousness, which is aware of all these …
- Right Inner Speech… Any acts of directed thought and evaluation, which are thought-fabrications, become part of your concentration as well. Everything is right here. These things that before were a cause of suffering when you clung to them, now can become the path. In this way, we learn how to use our perceptions. If we have the intention to drop them, that means that the new …
- The Uses of Equanimity… But eventually you have to step back from the equanimity itself, because even it is fabricated. This is when the mind goes beyond equanimity to non-fashioning: not fashioning a sense of “I” or “mine” around even your highest attainments. And hopefully the practice you’ve had in learning how to cut through your old narratives can help you in this step as well …
- The Pursuit of Excellence… When you get that point in your practice, your sensitivity toward happiness, your sensitivity to what’s involved in fabricating experience gets so acute that you really do see that the unfabricated is the ideal alternative even to very bright and expansive mind states. Until then, there’s a tendency in the mind to say, “Well, I can imagine something else I’d prefer …
- The Wisdom of Tenacity… They may seem fabricated and constructed, and sometimes you wonder how something constructed like this could be worthwhile. But the mind is used to constructing things, and as long as it has this habit you might as well construct things that help take you further. That’s part of the genius of the path. You could be sitting here creating all kinds of narratives …
- Between Either & Or… Saccaka was trying to say that everybody knows that form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness are your self. And the Buddha picked his argument apart, to the point where Saccaka really lost face, in front of all the people that he, Saccaka, had brought along to watch his victory. So the issue is the intention. But then again, you can’t take that as …
- Sensitive to the Breath… As he says, you calm bodily fabrication, which means that you calm the effect the breath has on the body. But before you can calm it, you have to give yourself a sense of energy, what he calls rapture, which can also be translated as refreshment: the sense that the breath energy is filling, that it saturates the body. And it feels good. It …
- Holding On to the Path… You try to develop a sense of ease, a sense of comfort, stability, through the processes of fabrication, and that’s a balancing act right there. Sometimes when there’s a sense of comfort, it’s not all that stable. You phase in and you phase out, because it’s so easy to leave the breath and go wallowing in the comfort. So you …
- Working Hypotheses… What this means is that we’re already embedded in a fabric of actions and intentions. Whether we like to think in that way or not, this is the way things are. When you look in the Buddha’s accounts of his own quest for awakening you see that there were a lot of things he questioned, but the one thing he never questioned …
- Learning from Desire… Where is the breath flowing? When the breath comes in, where does it come in? How do you know a sensation of breath? Then there’s fabrication, the intention to do this and that, along with the inner conversation we engage in: what the Buddha calls directed thought and evaluation. So we’re** **thinking about the breath and evaluating whether the breath is good …
- The Middle Way… specifically, the suffering that comes from craving, the suffering in clinging to the five aggregates of form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness. All the different kinds of suffering in world that really weigh on the mind come down to clinging to any one of these five aggregates or any combination of them. So when you see the suffering simply as that—an example of …
- The World of the Noble Truths… We think, “Why is this pain afflicting me?” “Why is this situation in the world outside afflicting me?” But the Buddha is saying that suffering is the act of clinging to form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, or consciousness. It’s something we do. It’s not something we’re just on the receiving end of. We’re actively doing the suffering. He then defines the …
- A Leap of the Heart… The dispassion then undercuts any motive for continuing to fabricate whatever you used to take as food. So this is the process. Look for the origination. Look for the passing away. Look for the allure. Look for the drawbacks. And finally there’ll be the escape. All of this is motivated by heedfulness, along with your desire, as Ajaan Mun says, not to come …
- If These Walls Could Talk… We keep fabricating our experience in the old ways that we’re familiar with, and even though we may not think that we’re passionate about it, we are stuck in our ways. That’s a kind of passion. We need to realize that we can be freed from our old bad habits. A good analogy is a game that you used to play …
- In Search of What’s Skillful… Because after you’ve learned very carefully to watch for your actions and to watch for your results, and you keep the framework of that questioning in mind, you finally get to something that is not maintained through any fabrication, through any intention at all. And you know that because you’ve detected even the subtlest kinds of intentions that can come with these …
- Perfection in an Imperfect World… When you think in these ways you’re using mental fabrication to shape your experience, right here, right now. You find you have resources inside that you hadn’t imagined before. That’s what allows your resolution to grow. The other quality the Buddha said was important for his awakening was not being content with skillful qualities. It sounds strange. Of course, it means …
- Examine Your Happiness… You focus instead on the fact that some aspects of form, feeling, perception, mental fabrication, and consciousness are actually pleasant, and you want to pursue them for that pleasure. There’s the pleasure of the precepts, the pleasure of generosity, both of which are conditioned things. There’s the pleasure in concentration, which is also conditioned, and you want to motivate yourself to develop …
- A Refuge Inside… All fabricated things are suffering. But then there’s also the suffering of the four noble truths, what he calls the five clinging-aggregates. The first kind of suffering is just the way things are, in and of themselves. The question is: Why does that create suffering for us? Because of our clinging. So you’ve got to watch the mind to see why …
- Trust in Heedfulness… If you look at it really carefully — and this takes very subtle, very intent powers of observation — you begin to see even there there’s an element of fabrication. Intention. It’s willed. So you learn how to drop that, realizing that it wasn’t the underlying principle of the nature of — the underlying awareness of — reality that you thought it was. To see …
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