Search results for: "consciousness"
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- The Four Noble Truths… All of this falls under the stress that comes from clinging to form, feeling, perceptions, thought-fabrications, and consciousness—consciousness here being the consciousness of the senses. All of this, the Buddha says to comprehend. Now, for most of us, when we run into pain, comprehending is not the first thing we have in mind. We want to push it away; we want to …
- Learning from Labor… How do you learn to unlearn that toxic kind of conversation and train the inner voices to be more helpful? And your consciousness: Where do you focus your attention? How do you create a consciousness that fills the whole body and yet is well anchored? These are things you have to explore from within. As you explore them from within, you begin to see …
- The Kamma of Meditation… This is especially important when you start getting into states of spaciousness or what seems to be pure consciousness. Those states are fabricated. You are doing things. You’re holding onto perceptions that allow you to get there. Some people say that consciousness is always there every time you turn your mind to it—therefore, it must always be there. But, as I’ve …
- The Psychology of Harmlessness… The best way to figure out how you’re already fabricating things is to consciously change the way you fabricate things and see which parts of the mind resist. If the breath is pleasant, energizing, and then calming, it feels really good. That way, you get around a lot of the resistance. But still there are parts of the mind that want to do …
- Hold a Mirror to Your Mind… The right questions are, “What are you doing as you’re tuning in to the, say, the aggregate of consciousness?” Your emphasis should be not so much on the consciousness, but how you tune in. What’s the process of tuning in? How do perceptions play a role in that? How does your mental conversation play a role in that? The big question, though …
- Training Your Intentions… With fabrication, we fabricate form for the sake of form-ness; we fabricate feeling for the sake of feeling-ness; perceptions for the sake of perception-hood, I guess you’d say; consciousness for the sake of consciousness-ness. It’s a weird grammatical construction in Pali, which is why it sounds strange in English, too. But the basic message is that we have …
- Analyzing Suffering… Finally, consciousness. It’s very similar to perception but it’s more passive: consciousness of different sensations, sensations at the eye, ear, tongue, nose, body, mind—basic bare awareness of these things. These are all activities. Clinging to these activities means that we keep trying to do them again and again and change them into other activities so that they’re better. We change …
- Conceit Defanged… With the last one, you can have an infinite sense of self—a cosmic sense of self—within which the body moves or simply an enlarged sense of, say, consciousness that involves the body. In that case, you identify with the consciousness. But at the same time, you have a sense that the body’s inside you. So you have five aggregates, four ways …
- All Fabrications Are Stressful… Everything else—even the deva worlds, the Brahmā worlds—has to be filtered through form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, consciousness. And the simple fact that they’re fabricated in this way—whatever the experience is—means that they’re going to be stressful. You can’t take them as a place where you can really rest. That’s one level of stress, one level …
- A Good Dish of Concentration… And then you’ve got consciousness, which is aware of all these things. So here you’re taking the aggregates and you’re making good use out of them. From this vantage point, you can look at other aggregates. And here it’s good to think of aggregates not as things—and that’s one of the problems with the word “aggregate” in English …
- Action & the End of Action… When the Buddha talks about gaining insight from your meditation, it’s not a matter of gaining insight into the Oneness of all things, or to the ground of being, or infinite consciousness. Infinite consciousness is something you do. It’s one of the stages of concentration. And you need to see it as something you do—it’s something you’ve fabricated. That …
- On the Surface of Things… Can you see them as separate things—separate notes in the bird song? The same goes for perceptions, thought constructs, acts of consciousness: They’re all happening right here. Our problem is that we tend to be conspiracy theorists. We want to know: What’s happening behind the scenes? Who’s operating the lasers that shot lightening over northern California last year? We have …
- sBeyond Acceptance… There’s that passage in the sutta we chanted just now where the Buddha talks about how, with form, feeling, perception, fabrications, consciousness, it’s hard to say, “Be like this, be like that, don’t be like this, don’t be like that.” And for that reason, they’re not-self. It’s possible to take that as meaning that you can’t …
- Borrowed Wealth… Because your body, your feelings, your perceptions, and thought constructs, even your consciousness, acts of consciousness: They come and they go, and you have to leave them at some point. And the question is, in taking possession of these things and taking care of them, what do you have to show for your effort? Most people go for a life of sensual pleasures: nice …
- Days Fly Past… He said nirvana is reached from unestablished consciousness, a consciousness that doesn’t plant itself in anything at all, neither here, nor there, nor in between. But before you get there, make sure your consciousness is very firmly planted here in the present moment. Because it’s around here in the present moment that you’re going to find this spot that has no …
- The Dhamma Mirror… Then consciousness is aware of all these things. You can learn the words, but where do these things happen? Actually, they’re happening all the time. You’re doing them all the time. And you’re going to see them clearly as you try to get the mind to settle down. Things that distract you are usually perceptions and thought fabrications, although sometimes they …
- The Riddle Tree… How are you going to label this experience? You can label it as space, or you can label it simply as infinite consciousness: what’s aware of the space. Or the sense of oneness in that infinite consciousness. What happens if you drop the perception of oneness? Nothingness. And what happens when you drop the perception of “nothing”? And so on down the line …
- Imagining Freedom… He mentions in one of the suttas a state of concentration which is literally mindless, with no awareness, no consciousness, nothing at all. And he states very clearly that that’s not the goal. He does mention twice that there is a kind of consciousness in nibbana, but it’s not the kind of consciousness that we know in our world of the six …
- Feeding the Mind… There’s physical food, the food of contact, the food of intentions, and the food of consciousness. He asks, how are you supposed to regard these things? In each case, it’s nothing very positive. The fact that you’re born with this body that constantly needs to have food stuffed down the throat or else it’s going to die, and before it …
- The Five Aggregates… There’s a potential for form, a potential for feeling, for perceptions, for fabrication, for consciousness, coming from our past actions. But for the actual experience of these things to happen in the present moment, you have to fabricate them a little bit more. Which means that there’s an intentional aspect to all your experience. Whatever you experience has to have a certain …
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