Search results for: "Fabrication"
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- Wise About Pleasure… Now, notice that the Buddha doesn’t talk about getting in touch with your true feelings about something or what’s truly going on in your mind, because as he says, everything going on in your mind is a fabrication. Something put together. And just because you put things together consistently in a bad way in the past doesn’t mean that that’s …
- The Dhamma Eye… Understanding that suffering is clinging—clinging to the body, clinging to our feelings, clinging to our perceptions of things, clinging to the way the mind fabricates and puts together its experience, and even clinging to our awareness of things. That’s what suffering is. It’s not an intuitive definition. He starts out by talking about the suffering of aging, illness, and death, of …
- The Practice of Right View… So as you get to know more and more about the breath, you’re doing away with ignorance around the breathing process, what’s called in technical terms the process of bodily fabrication. You bring more awareness to the process. As you do this, you’ll notice that you may have some subtle craving around the breath. You may prefer the in-breath to …
- The Graduated Discourse… So it’s not that he’s denying the fact of the pleasures, but as he says, it’s because of the pleasures of form, feeling, perceptions, fabrication, and consciousness that we’re stuck on them—that’s the problem. But still, he wants people to have a sense that, yes, he does appreciate that there are pleasures in life. Then, when he gets …
- The Noble Eightfold Path to the Deathless… That’s when you start to turn on the path itself, analyzing your concentration in terms of those five clinging-aggregates, seeing that it, too, is fabricated. No matter how good the bliss, rapture, and equanimity that come from concentration, they still have to be maintained. There’s still an effort involved there. And they can fall away. You want something more secure. Now …
- The Rewards of Stream Entry… The one noble truth where you don’t have to do much is to realize the cessation of suffering, because it’s not something you have to fabricate, it’s not something you have to put together. It just is. So work on the development, work on the maintaining. In other words, if good qualities are not there in the mind yet, you try …
- Investment Strategies… Some of the chants we repeat, many, many times because it’s a way of drumming particular messages into the fabric of your thought. “May I be happy, i.e. may I be truly happy.” That’s a useful thought to keep in the back of your mind, to remind yourself that this is your motivation, so that when there’s a temptation to …
- Scribe Knowledge, Warrior Knowledge… It’s based on fabrication. And so it’s got to change. It’s got to be inconstant. And that’s where you see it. Before, you’d heard it. But now you’re trying to push against the principles of inconstancy, stress and not self. You’re making the mind as constant and full of ease and as much under control as you …
- Using Your Many Minds… form feeling, perception, mental fabrications, consciousness. They’re all there in the concentration. When you learn how to let go of the most subtle levels, then you’re totally free. But you can do this only if you’ve mastered them. It’s not the case where you say, “Well I’ve had a taste of concentration, so now I’m beyond that, I …
- All Three Functions of Mindfulness… From there, you calm bodily fabrication which, the Canon tells us in another place, means getting the mind into the fourth jhana. That doesn’t happen on its own. Similarly with feelings: The sutta talks about feelings of the flesh, which are the feelings that arise willy-nilly at the senses. But then it also mentions feelings not-of-the-flesh, which are things …
- The Taste Is Release… Then you can start analyzing it to see that, if you really want to rest, you have to find something that’s not cooked, not fabricated, not put together. And where would that be? Pose that question in the mind. When the mind is ready, things will open up. You can’t determine ahead of time when it’s going to happen or what …
- For Your Benefit Here & Now… You want to learn to look at what the Buddha calls the process of fabrication going on in the mind. That’s where the insight comes. It’s right here as you’re doing the concentration. So maintain this balance between going for the pleasure and going for the insight. They can’t be two radically separated things; they have to come together if …
- Stake Out… But there’s an act of construction, an act of fabrication, beginning to put things together, and there’s going to be some tension and some stress there: Breathe right through it. Dissolve it away. Then wait and be quiet for a while. Something else will begin to form, and you zap that, too. A part of the mind may say, “This is getting …
- The Karma of Pain… What’s the perception? What’s the feeling? What are the thought-fabrications you’re building around these things? What’s the body in relationship to the pain? What is your basic awareness in relation to the pain? If you put these things together to add more pain to the mind, okay, that’s your present karma right now. It’s a choice you …
- The Challenge of Faith… The intention just stops, because you realize there’s no way any intention would not involve some level of fabrication and stress. That’s the point of genuine freedom. And that point of freedom is where everything opens up. As the Buddha said, that’s where your conviction becomes verified, that there really is a deathless. The door has been opened. You’ve gone …
- Appropriate Attention… You’ve got directed thought and evaluation—those are the *saṅkhāras *or fabrications. Then there’s your consciousness of all these things. It’s as if you’ve roped the five aggregates into one place where you can watch them all at the same time. And you’re making good use of them. They allow you to apply the three characteristics or the three …
- Dhamma Warrior… If one judges others, one destroys oneself.” That whole passage beginning with “Therefore, Ananda,” is total fabrication. The Buddha did talk about judging other people in terms of how skillful their behavior was, and the purpose of judging them is to look back on yourself: “This is what skillful behavior looks like. Can you do that as well? This is what unskillful behavior looks …
- Insight into Pain… Wherever there’s a process of fabrication where conditions come together to create other conditions, there’s going to be stress. There’s stress inherent in the fact that things arise and pass away, and that their coming together cannot be permanent—but that’s not the suffering that weighs down the mind. The extent to which it does weigh down the mind comes …
- Conviction & Confidence… Train yourself to calm the sense of fabrication that comes with the breath. The meaning of these instructions isn’t obvious, but you can figure out how to do them on your own through experimentation. Trying to figure them out is a good exercise for your discernment. Before teaching breath meditation, he’d encourage you to develop an attitude of patience. He said to …
- Fear & Anger… least my death wasn’t a cowardly suicide.’” The Buddha says, “Okay, you’re prepared to go.” This monk’s way of thinking is his way of working with the mental fabrication, the perception, that “This body is me. If the body gets killed, that’s the end, wipeout, total annihilation.” You have to remember that that’s not the case. Certain mental processes …
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