Search results for: "Form"
- Page 65
- Treasure Island… You put aside all thoughts of sensuality and just focus on the form of the body. If you’re going to look for happiness, you look for happiness here. You explore the breath. What way of breathing is refreshing in the body, strengthening the body? Explore, trying to develop a sense of ease, a sense of coolness. If you’re feeling oppressed by the …
- Not-self as a Raft… So what is this teaching on not-self? Well, look back at those four noble truths. The first truth, suffering, is defined as clinging-aggregates. There are five of them altogether: form, which is your sense of the body; feelings of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain; perceptions, the labels that you put on things; thought fabrications, the way you put thoughts together; and …
- Rebirth & Not-Self… There are lots of things in the aggregate of form you could focus on right now, but focus on the breath. Breathe in a way that gives rise to a feeling of pleasure. Now, you’ll be helped by using a perception. Think of the breath not just as air coming in and out through the nose—because after all, the Buddha didn’t …
- Overwhelmed by Freedom… all the different kinds of animals, each with its own special little niche, its own coloring, its own peculiar tools and shapes and forms, its own ways of behavior. And yet the human mind is even more variegated than that. So we’ve got a lot to deal with here. It’s not an impossible task, but it does take time. Fortunately we have …
- Virtue Contains the Practice… After all, the mind is in a state of normalcy when it’s not killing, not stealing, not engaging in all these other unskillful forms of behavior. So why are you tense in refraining from these actions? Are you trying to make them unattractive to yourself? It’s only when you’re really true with yourself that you’re going to see the truth …
- Friends with the Breath… As the Buddha said, that’s the ultimate in skill, the highest form of kamma. It harms no one, and it’s beneficial for ourselves, not only in terms of developing happiness within the world, but also in taking us beyond the world. This path comes down to three things: virtue, concentration, discernment. At the moment we’re focusing on the concentration. But all …
- Common Sense… Certain forms of pleasure, if you really focus on them, are helpful in making the mind clear and still. A sense of ease and well-being that comes with the breath: That’s a helpful kind of pleasure. Be careful simply that you don’t wallow in the pleasure and lose track of the breath. It’s like building a scaffolding up to build …
- Fears… that you’re on the right path to the right goal. To do this you have to take apart the basic building blocks of experience, as you encounter them in concentration: form, feeling, perceptions, thought-fabrications, and consciousness. You look to see where these things are inconstant. Where they’re inconstant, you realize they’re stressful. There’s stress right there in the inconstancy …
- Strength in Humor… You’ve got a good form of well-being that you can tap into at anytime. It’s a lot more skillful than other ways of searching for happiness. Then, of course, there’s that ability to step back and drop the things that are causing you unnecessary suffering. That’s more discernment, and that’s what humor does. So we’ve got anticipation …
- A Good Place to Stay… You put these things together, and they form the path. As you stay with this, the path can grow. As I was saying earlier in the day, all too often, the mind—after a long while—finally settles down, and then you immediately want to know, “What’s the next stage?” Well, the next stage is staying here, maintaining this and letting it ripen …
- Love is Conditional, Goodwill Is Not… It’s a form of mindfulness, as the Buddha said. You have to keep it in mind. But you want to learn how to make it second nature, particularly as you meditate. Whoever you see in your meditation, whatever you sense in the meditation, just “Goodwill, goodwill.” And then you can get back to work, because there is work to be done: getting sensitive …
- The Skill of Letting Go… You see the allure of the path and what it’s done to get you past many forms of suffering. But you also see its drawbacks—it, too, is fabricated. At that point, you can let go safely. But in the meantime, learn how to let go step by step. As you let go of some things and hold on to others, you get …
- Motivation… With neurotic breakthroughs, though, you usually come to just another form of conditioning that, in contrast to where you were before, seems very bright and very light. It’s like going from a very dark room into one that’s extremely bright. Because you’re so blinded by the light, you don’t see any objects in the room. You think there’s nothing …
- Pissing on Palaces… Everyone looked kind of puzzled, because most people think of the idea of rebirth as the ultimate form of selfing: not only do you have a self in this life, but it also extends into the next. But the connection between rebirth and not-self comes in the sutta where Ven. Ratthapala’s talking to King Koravya. The king had asked him, “Why did …
- Hope… The sensations in your body come in but you create them into a form. The potentials for feeling come and you turn them into feelings. The same with perceptions, thought-constructs, even consciousness: All of these things have an element of fabrication. There’s an element of doing, an element of intention in all of these things. And we tend to miss that, which …
- Inner Refuge Through Inner Strength… As you’re doing this form of evaluation, you develop the final strength, which is discernment—you see what’s working, what’s not working. It’s not just on the basis of what you’ve heard, it’s on the basis of what you’re actually doing. As you learn to adjust things, you begin to see which ways of breathing are more …
- Step Back & Watch… None of these forms of water are good for looking at your face—and they’re not good for looking at anything at all, because they distort what you see through them. This is why we need concentration as a place to step back, so that we’re not caught up in what we thought we saw. We actually saw it, but then it …
- Moving Between Thought Worlds… Mindfulness, concentration, and discernment form the way out. And those aren’t just vague abstractions. Mindfulness is the ability to remember what you’re doing as you move from one state of mind to another. Alertness is the ability to see, “I’m doing something that’s causing suffering.” And discernment is what sees that it doesn’t have to be that way. There …
- A Pleasure Without Stories… One of the good things about the pleasure of inhabiting the body—what the Buddha calls the pleasure of form, i.e., how you feel the body from within, what we now call proprioception, your sense of the body as you feel it from inside—is that it’s a pleasure that doesn’t have many stories at all. How many stories can you …
- Maybe the Buddha Knew Something… It lists four qualities that the Buddha says are true from time immemorial and that form the customs of the noble ones. Ajaan Mun’s comment, when people accused him of not participating in modern ideals, was that the modern ideals have been worked out by people with defilements, but here are some customs left behind by people with no defilements. I was talking …
- Load next page...
