Search results for: "Form"

  1. Page 60
  2. Question Your Perceptions
     … What makes human life good is the goodness we can do, and here we’ve got a body that can do those forms of goodness. When you see that that’s the value of having a body, then the question of what food is good to eat, what’s a good exercise regime, what’s a good way to take care of the body … 
  3. Choosing Not to Suffer
     … You have the cream separate out, forming a band on the top, right at the neck of the bottle. The cream and milk are in the same bottle. They touch but they’re separate. In the same way, you gain the sense of your awareness separating out from the breath, so that it’s independent. All of these things are useful skills as you … 
  4. Chew Your Food Well
     … The same with the other forms of clinging, such as attachment to views: As the Buddha points out, there’s right view. Right view starts as an understanding about kamma. And it’s interesting to note that when the Buddha talks about kamma, the first two things he focuses on are gratitude and generosity. If you don’t see the virtue, the value of … 
  5. Return of Wisdom for Dummies
     … You see that the second form of happiness is more lasting. The fact of having a choice means that you’re not necessarily compelled by past actions or by anybody else. These two reflections contain an awful lot of the teaching that you do have freedom of choice. It’s one of the most basic principles that the Buddha would teach. Ordinarily, he wasn … 
  6. We All Start with an Impure Heart
     … You keep watering it bit, by bit, by bit, until it begins to take hold and forms the root for even more skillful things. Even then, you have to protect it. This principle holds all the way through the path. Think about those noble disciples on the lower levels: Stream-enterers still have lust; non-returners still have conceit. It’s only when you … 
  7. Samvega & Pasada
     … Then you can turn and look at your other forms of pleasure: pleasure based on greed, pleasure based on aversion, pleasure based on delusion. That can be very chastening as well. There’s a word in Pali, samvega, which is very difficult to translate into English. Part of it is a sense of dismay: looking at your life realizing, “I’ve been spending a … 
  8. Determined to Make a Difference
     … So, even though there are some forms of happiness that are both/and, there are others that *either/or—*you have to make a choice. You have to be happy to give up the things that would be unskillful, and to give up things on a lower level of skill for things on a higher level. It’s not just a question of letting … 
  9. Squeezing Goodness Out of the Aggregates
     … Like the aggregate of form: What can you do with the different elements or the properties of earth, water, wind and fire? Ajaan Lee himself was able to recover from a heart attack out in the middle of the jungle just using his breath. There was no one there to tell him how to do it. He had to use his own ingenuity. So … 
  10. Stay
     … Without this kind of stillness, without this ability to maintain your balance for long periods of time, you’re going to miss all the important things because the important things come in subtle form. It’s not that the Buddha’s asking you to find out what’s happening on Mars, on Saturn, or in the Andromeda Galaxy, or what’s happening in the … 
  11. Merit & Skill
     … That, too, is a form of happiness. So all these things we do are for the sake of happiness. Then you combine it with the principle of skill, meaning that you try to do each of these things in as skillful a way as possible. Take generosity, for instance. Years back there was a group of people who would come regularly and they would … 
  12. Inner Discontent
     … As you keep your focus right here—as long as the work is not done, as long as you haven’t learned to weed out every form of unskillful behavior—he has you acknowledge the fact that there is still something wrong. You don’t just accept things as they are. Sometimes you have to accept that you’ve made a mistake. Okay, you … 
  13. Full, Focused Attention
     … All the qualities you need to develop, you’ve got them, at least in potential form, and you want to develop them. This is why it’s important that you pay full attention to what you’re doing, and be as consistent as possible in maintaining that intention, because otherwise there’d be huge holes and gaps in your knowledge, and it may not … 
  14. Wealth Worth Holding Onto
    In different parts of his teachings, the Buddha described almost every aspect of the practice as a form of wealth. There are the seven noble treasures; he talked of the wings to awakening as the treasures of the teaching; goodwill, he says, is the wealth of a monk; concentration practice is food for the soldiers who are doing the right effort. The different parts … 
  15. Your Tranquility & Your Insight
     … He classes the in-and-out breath as part of the form of the body, part of the wind element, which you feel inside the body, and which permeates the whole body as you feel it from within. So the breath comes from within. As the breath gets more gentle, more subtle, you hold in mind the perception that the breath originates from inside … 
  16. Reliable Action
     … And as you stay here more and more continually, you begin to see the intentions in the mind—and that way you can do something about them, because these are the intentions that form the basis of your actions. In fact, the Buddha at one point says, the intention is the action. In other words, the quality of intention determines the result of the … 
  17. Warrior Knowledge
     … This is why a good meditator keeps lots of tools, lots of weapons on hand — because when the defilements come, they don’t all come in one shape or form. They don’t always attack from the same side. Sometimes the mind feels lazy and is very ingenious in thinking of reasons for letting up in the practice. Sometimes it turns on itself and … 
  18. Friends
     … What we’re trying to do here is watch continually, so that the lines are formed not by our imagination but by the continuity of our awareness. And you actually see where there is a connection: This connects with that. When you focus on the breath in this way, this happens; when you focus on it that way, that happens. When you breathe this … 
  19. No One Size Fits All
     … All you had to do was to reduce it to its simplest forms, make it a fool-proof method. Just tell people, okay, do this, this, this. Fold here, insert tab A into slot B here, and there you have it: insight. Whereas the Buddha kept saying that ingenuity is an important part of the practice and something you have to develop. Not everything … 
  20. Sensuality
     … a pleasure on the level of form. There is the inner sense of the body we’re inhabiting here right now, with its properties of earth, water, breath, fire. In other words, the solidity of the body, the liquidity, the warmth, the energy: When these things are in balance, that balance gives rise to a different kind of pleasure, the pleasure that harms no … 
  21. Mindfulness: The Whole Formula
     … Any little tiny thought that begins to form, even before you can recognize it as a thought—it’s just a little stirring of energy in the boundary between what’s a physical event and a mental event—you realize that if you allow it to become a little knot, a little node, thoughts could gather around it. So you zap it. Think of … 
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