Search results for: "Fabrication"
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- 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 …
- Breathing Easy… He says once you’re aware of the way the long breath feels the body, the short breath feels in the body, and you’ve become aware of the whole body as you breathe in, the whole body as you breathe out, the next step is to calm bodily fabrication. Or to put it in simple English, learn how to breathe easy throughout the …
- The Buddha’s Questions… true happiness there, it’s going to be stressful.” “If it’s inconstant and stressful, is it worthy of being called your self?” He asked the same questions of feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. The asking of the questions is meant to open up your attention to an area where there’s been a gap, where there has been something missing in your knowledge …
- Unskillful Habits… You realize that what you’ve got here is a fabrication, something made out of physical elements, something you’ve moved into and about which you’ve assumed a lot of things—about how much it’s going to cooperate, how much it’s going to do this for you, how much it’s going to do that for you—even though it hasn …
- Selves with Skills… We use these processes, what he calls fabrications, to put together the raw material that comes from our past kamma. We’re doing it all the time but, as the Buddha explains, we do it in ignorance, so we’re barely aware of it. That’s why we don’t get the best results out of it. One of the reasons why we meditate …
- A Refuge from Death… But once you’ve practiced to the point where you’ve gained insight into the mind’s process of fabrication, learning to take it apart to the point where there’s no intention in the mind, what’s left is the deathless. It’s there. When you see it, you realize, one, the Buddha knew what he was talking about. And two, he also …
- The Fourth Noble Truth… But ultimately, you use that ability to step back to take apart the concentration itself—when you see that even in these really nice states of stillness, there’s still some fabrication going on. There’s still some inconstancy in the feelings and perceptions. Things go up and down. The level of pleasure goes up and down. The level of stress goes up and …
- Path & Raft… You’re identifying with form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness—all the five aggregates—building a sense of self around them. Either you identify with a particular aggregate or group of aggregates, or you feel that they belong to you. You have a self that owns these things, or your self is in these things, or these things are in yourself. Any of these …
- Sending Happiness… What could you do to make them work out better? Think about the different kinds of fabrication that go into meditation: the way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself in directed thought and evaluation, the feelings you focus on, the perceptions you focus on. What needs to be changed? You can change the way you breathe. How do you direct your thoughts …
- Adjusting the Flame… When the Buddha explains the causes of suffering in dependent co-arising, the most interesting ones are those that come prior to sensory contact—in the factors of fabrication, and the factors of name and form. There’s perception, there are feelings, there’s directed thought and evaluation, there are intentions, there are acts of attention, where you frame questions, look into things. Where …
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