Search results for: "Form"

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  2. Permission to Play
     … When you don’t really understand the role of intention in forming the present moment, you never get to the point where you can drop every element of intention that’s creating the present. And only when you drop the last shred of intention can there be an opening to something outside of the present, beyond space and time, to that happiness we’re … 
  3. Protection Through Mindfulness Practice
     … As the Buddha said, you can know all the drawbacks of sensuality but if you don’t have an alternative form of pleasure, all that knowledge is worthless. So ardency here also has to develop concentration, a sense of non-sensual well-being, working with the breath. We’ve talked for the last couple of days in the Q & A about different ways of … 
  4. The Taste Is Release
     … You see that you can form a skillful intention. Then, to maintain that intention, you spread thoughts of goodwill: goodwill for yourself, goodwill for the people you’ve wronged, goodwill for everybody. But as for new things as you’re going through life day to day, you want to make sure you stick with the precepts. Otherwise, you start thinking about new things you … 
  5. For Your Benefit Here & Now
     … When you’re analyzing the body parts, the questions are, “What are the perceptions I’m forming right now, what are they doing to the mind?”—the perceptions that you’re using in your analysis. You want to learn how to see which kinds of perceptions are there for the sake of saying, “I want this to be beautiful,” and the ones that say … 
  6. The Dead Snake Around Your Neck
     … There are lots of ways that you can think to yourself, talk to yourself, or bring to mind images to counteract the ones you’ve been hanging around with all along—because these forms of fabrication are all kamma. That was another weird point in that scholar’s article: He talked about how fabrication in the five aggregates—which he claimed was something different … 
  7. You Are Not Powerless
     … Try to find some form of right livelihood and engage in it. The second quality is that once you’ve gained your livelihood in a good way, you try to maintain what you’ve earned from it. You’re not wasteful. You look after your belongings. This is one of the reasons why in the forest tradition there’s such a strong tradition of … 
  8. The Karma of Pain
     … They can take lots of different shapes, lots of different forms. Just notice that, because those are the categories you’re going to use in order to take apart any pain that’s weighing down the mind. One of the first lines of defense against physical pain as you’re sitting here is your breath, and the breath is affected by your perceptions. How … 
  9. Accepting the Way Things Function
     … Remember that goodwill is a form of mindfulness. You have to be mindful that any time you come up with any thoughts of wanting to see so-and-so suffer, or how much they really are just a so-and-so, you have to ask yourself, “If I think that way about that person, can I act skillfully around that person? Can I trust … 
  10. Appropriate Attention
     … One way is when the mind gets really still and you’re really good at keeping it still, and you can begin to see, “What am I doing to keep the concentration together?” You’ve got the form of the body. You’ve got the feeling of ease. You’ve got the perception, say, of the breath that holds you here. You’ve got … 
  11. The Shape of Goodwill
     … Those forms of loss are not important. You don’t go to hell because you lose those things. The serious loss is loss of your right view and loss of your virtue, because you can go to hell if you lose those things. The fortunate thing, though, is that you don’t have to lose those things. Eventually you will lose your health, you … 
  12. The Kamma of Concentration
     … As you get more and more sensitive to the impact of your actions, you keep looking for subtler and subtler forms of harm that they might be causing. But it’s important to understand what “harm” means here. As the Buddha said, if you break the precepts, you’re harming yourself. It’s interesting. If you kill other people, kill other animals, he said … 
  13. Emotion
     … It’s called verbal fabrication because that’s how language gets formed in the mind. You direct your thoughts, you have a subject or a particular sentence; and then you have your comment on the subject: That’s the evaluation. That means you want to look at the mental chatter in your mind around that particular object, around that particular issue. When there’s … 
  14. The Duties of Happiness
     … the Buddha said it’s going to be craving in one form or another. Either sensual craving, the idea that you’re fascinated with thinking about sensual pleasures; or what’s called craving for becoming, in which you want to take on a particular identity in a particular world of experience; or craving for non-becoming, in which you don’t like the identity … 
  15. The Third Noble Truth
     … the act of really abandoning these forms of craving, once and for all, with the added duty of realizing the act of abandoning while you’re doing it, and appreciating that it does lead to the ending of stress. The wording of the truth mentions six different aspects of abandoning. It gives a list of six words, and at first glance they look very … 
  16. Doing the Right Thing
     … Try to develop the thought that “If they can do it, I can do it.” That’s a skillful form of pride. Eventually, you won’t have any need for it when you’ve reached the end of the path, but you use whatever you can to keep yourself on the path. There’s a story in the book Arctic Dreams about an Eskimo … 
  17. Skillful Judgment
     … At least it’s there in a potential form, and it’s up to us to develop that. So there’s a tradition that from the full moon in July to the full moon in October, we have three months to try to do something special with these potentials that we have—more special than normal—partly as a way of testing things. If … 
  18. Ingenuity
     … Either it’ll light up the whole body or it’ll form a little kernel someplace in the body and give you some energy. As for other lights, other colors, just leave them alone. As for energies that come up in the body: Any energy that comes up into your head, you have to be very careful about it, because often it can get … 
  19. The Buddha’s Eight Principles
     … We’re tied down by our passion for sensuality, passion for form and formlessness, which we’ll get into as we study this list more in detail. The important thing about passion is that you have a lack, and you’re aiming at something to fill the lack. But when you find total freedom, there’s no lack at all, so you don’t … 
  20. Dhamma Warrior
     … The next form of knowledge is having a sense of time: This also means time and place. What’s the right time to be a warrior, what’s the right time to take on a battle? What’s the right time to stay away from the battle? A lot of us who decide we’re going to become Dhamma warriors make the mistake of … 
  21. Wide-open Awareness
     … That energy forms the potential for allowing the breath to come in and go out. It counts as breath energy as well. Even though it’s still, it’s a kind of energy. When we’re meditating we want to keep our attention focused just on that one level, no matter what else is happening. The pattern of light from the candle flame shining … 
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