Search results for: "Form"

  1. Page 63
  2. A Handful of Leaves
     … They can hook you up to machines, read the brain waves, and learn to recognize, from your reporting, that certain brainwave patterns correspond to your reports of certain forms of suffering. But it depends on your reporting. You’re the one who actually experiences it. You experience the body from within, you experience your mind from within, in a way that nobody else can … 
  3. Standing Outside Your Thoughts
     … Or if you find that the meditation is not grabbing your interest today, replace it with some other skillful form of thinking. You can change the topic of your meditation. If you’ve been doing the breath, you can try analysis of the body into its parts, or you can think thoughts of goodwill. Something skillful. If that doesn’t work, the Buddha says … 
  4. Restraint
     … But remember that even measureless goodwill, measureless compassion, measureless empathetic joy, measureless equanimity are forms of restraint. You develop these measureless attitudes so as to be very careful about what you do. You realize if you really have goodwill for all beings, you don’t want to harm them. That means you have to say No to any random thoughts, any random words, acts … 
  5. The Buddha’s Buffet
     … Then he says what ties all these forms of suffering together is clinging to the five aggregates. That’s where the analysis gets radical, because we think suffering is something that we’re on the receiving end of. We don’t realize that, one, we do things that cause suffering, and two, the suffering itself is something we do. The clinging is the suffering … 
  6. Shaping Your Breath, Shaping Your Life
     … Play with your sense of the form of the body: Breathe in one way for a while; breathe in another way for a while. You’ll get a sense of how different perceptions and different ways of breathing have an impact on how you sense the body, on what’s going on in the mind. You’ll get more of a handle on things … 
  7. Creativity & Play
     … The path is something you fabricate, so learn how to play well with the path, within the strictures, the rules, formed by the laws of causality. As with any game, you’ve got to stay within the rules, but within the rules you find that there’s a lot of latitude. What kind of meditation object works best for you? That’s something you … 
  8. Examine Your Happiness
     … You focus instead on the fact that some aspects of form, feeling, perception, mental fabrication, and consciousness are actually pleasant, and you want to pursue them for that pleasure. There’s the pleasure of the precepts, the pleasure of generosity, both of which are conditioned things. There’s the pleasure in concentration, which is also conditioned, and you want to motivate yourself to develop … 
  9. The Real Thing
     … Now, that requires that the mind be really quiet, and that all the disturbances involved with the body be cleared away, so that you can look simply at events in the mind as they’re happening and can point to, “This is this and that’s that.” When the Buddha talks about the five khandhas, he says, “Such is form, such its origination, such … 
  10. The Breath All the Way
     … The Buddha teaches a form of happiness that doesn’t have boundaries. And as a step in that direction, you need to train your awareness to be more expansive until its boundaries dissolve. This is what you start doing in the third and fourth steps of the first set, where you train yourself to be aware of the whole body as you breathe in … 
  11. Truth Without Air Quotes
     … Seeing things in these terms requires stepping back from our usual worldview, stepping back from our usual views of the self, seeing how they’re formed, to induce that dispassion that can lead to what’s unformed, unfabricated. The steps leading there have to be the same, in principle, for everybody. That’s why the path is also objective. All four noble truths are … 
  12. Not What You Are, What You Do
     … The Buddha says instead that what you are — in the sense of how you identify yourself on a sensual level, on the level of form, or on a formless level — can be traced back to what you do. You can learn to do things in a more skillful way, which will lead to a change in your sense of what you are, and that … 
  13. Faith in the Buddha’s Awakening
     … There’s an element of intention in how you experience form, feeling, perception, the process of fabrication, and your sensory consciousness. So it’s not just that you’re experiencing a given that’s been provided by the past, you’re actually shaping it here and now. On top of that, it’s possible to shape it in such a way that there is … 
  14. Things Aren’t as They Should Be
     … As with every form of meditation where there’s a phrase that you repeat, there comes a point where, if you really want the mind to settle down, you have to drop the phrase and just be with the feeling tone. What you’re doing right now can make a difference if you understand, if you have a set of skills to handle whatever … 
  15. The Buddha’s Shoulds
    The Buddha’s Shoulds January 6, 2008 Right concentration forms the heart of the path. The other factors of the path serve two functions. One is to get you into concentration; the other is to make sure you don’t get stuck there. In other words, concentration on its own is a state of becoming that’s useful on the path. Even though you … 
  16. In Line with the Dhamma
     … What’s it made of? It’s made out of forms, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, and acts of consciousness. That’s it. We’ve cobbled our sense of self out of these things. When you actually look at them, you can see that there’s really not that much there. These things keep changing and changing and changing, so how could we find any … 
  17. Not-self, Not No Self
     … What kind of actions are your concepts of self? What kind of actions are your concepts of not-self? How can you train them so that they form the fourth noble truth and actually are conducive to true happiness? When you get the context straight, then the questions get straight as well. And the answers get useful. So remember this: Your ideas of who … 
  18. Top Priorities
     … Our eyes pick up all kinds of forms, our ear hears all kinds of sounds, all the way down through the senses. We pick up an awful lot of information in the course of the day, but we have to have a really clear sense of what’s really important and what’s not, what to focus on and what to let go. And … 
  19. On Deserving to Be Happy
     … You see them in their beginning form in the Buddha’s instructions to Rahula. You’re very conscious about what you’re going to do, and you’re trying to do your best. You think of the consequences of your intention. If you follow through with the intention, what would happen? If you foresee any harm, you don’t do it. If you don … 
  20. Conviction in Charge
     … He actually called this a form of discontent. He was not content with how skillful he had been so far. He wanted to see if there was something more, something more, until he reached the point where there was nothing more—in other words, nothing that could go further than what he had found. It’s when we develop these qualities that we’re … 
  21. Noble Treasures
     … He really did find the deathless happiness, and the qualities he had to develop in the course of perfecting his skills and using his own efforts were qualities that we all have in potential form. He took those potentials and developed them. That means that we can develop our potentials, too. That’s one of the implications of his awakening. The other implication, of … 
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