Search results for: "Form"
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- Rooted in Desire… In other words, even before you see a form or hear a sound, the mind has already been active, and the way it’s been active—if it’s colored by ignorance—is going to prime you to suffer. No matter how good or bad those sights or sounds may be, you’re already primed. So what are the things that we do before …
- Knowing the Body from Within… That’s how you begin to understand things like greed, anger, delusion, craving, and all those other mental states that cause suffering—learning how to watch how they form and how not to get hoodwinked into running along with them. But this requires becoming more and more sensitive to how things are happening here in the body, how the mind and the different properties …
- Damming & Diverting… He describes mindfulness as a form of restraint. All too often we hear mindfulness being described as an open, accepting, spacious state of mind. But actually, when you’re establishing mindfulness, you’re laying down some laws. You’re establishing a territory. The mind is going to stay right here and it’s not going to wander out. There’s that image of the …
- Sense Pleasures & Sensuality… the pleasure of form, even though it feels very embodied. I know a lot of people say, “What’s the difference? This feels very sensual.” It’s different: The sensuality of the body relates to your tactile sensations, the things you touch. This is something totally inward that has none of the drawbacks of sensuality. It’s not intoxicating and it doesn’t require …
- The Science of Meditation… Some forms of scientific knowledge like to claim that everything in the universe is predetermined by past causes, but the activity of science itself assumes free will. If people couldn’t make choices, there’d be no sense in criticizing someone whose experiment was poorly designed, or accepting the results of someone whose experiment was well-designed. It would all be very arbitrary. And …
- Sense Restraint… As the Buddha said, the aggregates form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, and consciousness have their pleasant side and their unpleasant side. If they didn’t have the pleasant side, we wouldn’t fall for them. But they do have their pleasures. When the Buddha says that all fabricated things are inconstant, stressful, and not-self—it’s true. But then they have their constant …
- Succeeding at Happiness… Think of the Buddha’s statement about how wisdom begins with finding a brahman or contemplative—in other words, somebody who has practiced the Dhamma—and asking that person, “What’s skillful? What’s blameless? What when I do will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” The basic answer comes in the three forms of merit: generosity, virtue, and meditation. It’s …
- The Challenge of Right View… There’s no one formula that can cure every form of suffering. That’s why the path has so many factors. The problem with this bewilderment and search is that when you get bewildered, you search in the wrong places. You end up trying out all kinds of weird ideas about putting an end to suffering. But basically there is that imperative that underlies …
- Concentration & Insight… But first you want to focus on the grosser forms of suffering. This is how insight develops: You start working at things that are really obvious. It’s amazing how we’re not willing to focus on things that are really obvious. People want to skip to the more advanced levels. I was reading recently about a conference they’re going to be giving …
- Skills to Make a Difference… These forms craving are to be abandoned. Then there’s fact that that craving can be ended, and that when you end the craving, that’s the end of suffering. That’s something you want to realize, to actually see it happening. And you do that by developing the path, which basically comes down to virtue, concentration, and discernment. So the Buddha’s categorical …
- Monotasking… That’s a form of generosity, to share something that you have in terms of your knowledge or your energy. Then when you sit down to meditate and the mind starts feeling dry, you can reflect on that. Now, you’ll find that one act of generosity can be reflected on only a limited number of times before it starts getting dry, so you …
- Habits & Practices… the form clinging-aggregate, the feeling clinging-aggregate, perception, fabrications, consciousness clinging-aggregate. That’s because we’re not familiar with our clinging on this level. It’s easier to relate to the different clingings that the Buddha says get applied to these five aggregates. In fact, that’s what the whole issue of comprehension is. First, to get familiar with how you experience …
- The Dhamma Wheel… Even form, the first of the aggregates, the Buddha defines with a verb: It deforms. Feelings feel, perceptions perceive, fabrications fabricate, consciousness cognizes. And we cling to these activities—in other words, we feed off of them. That’s where the suffering is, so that’s what we’ve got to focus on. Knowing the suffering or knowing that first noble truth is one …
- Asalha Puja… The truth of cessation was the abandoning of those forms of craving. In other words, to get rid of the stress of suffering, you don’t abandon the stress of suffering; you abandon the cause, developing total dispassion for the cause. Then there was the path of practice starting with right view and going on through to right concentration. In setting out these four …
- Mastering Causality… clinging to the form of the body, clinging to your feelings, perceptions, thought-fabrications, or consciousness. When you stop clinging to these aggregates, then even though they’re still impermanent and there still may be some stress in them, it doesn’t weigh on the mind. The bridge has been cut so that it doesn’t connect. You stop lifting things up, as in …
- You Can Make a Difference… It’s can actually form part of the path. When there are unskillful qualities in the mind, it’s okay to desire for them to not be there. When there are skillful qualities that are not yet there, it’s okay to want them to come. And if it looks like they’re falling away, it’s okay to try to figure out how …
- To Strengthen the Path… So you hold onto these principles as a form of conviction. You don’t have any proof yet, but these are good things to believe. They’re an assumption, a working hypothesis you need in order to get the mind to settle down and feel that settling the mind down where it can watch closely over its actions is a good thing to do …
- Inner Wealth Management… Right concentration is a very strong form of pleasure. It’s going to require a lot of work to get it. But if you’re not willing to enjoy pleasure and then you see other people enjoying it and you decide it’s a bad thing, it’s hard to develop empathetic joy, it’s hard to have the right attitude toward happiness. So …
- Teachings to Rahula… The way you act every day is going to have an impact on what happens when you’re acting here with the breath, because meditation is a form of action. You hear about people recommending “choiceless awareness,” saying that an awareness in which there is no choice is an awakened awareness. But it’s not something you just do. Even with the decision that …
- Part V : Finding a Teacher… It’s thinking about the implications of that fact as they apply to you, one of which is that the Buddha was able to find true happiness through his own efforts, through developing qualities in his mind that we have, in a potential form, in our minds as well. In other words, we have the potential for finding true happiness if we develop the …
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