Search results for: "Form"
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- Safety… The Buddha calls this practice not only right mindfulness, but also a form of concentration. There’s a passage where one of the nuns of the Buddha’s time identified the themes of right concentration as the four establishings of mindfulness. They’re very closely connected. There’s another passage where the Buddha himself talks about focusing on the body in and of itself …
- Antidotes for Narcissism… I’ve got a worse mind than other people.” These are forms of conceit that the Buddha says are unhelpful ways of comparing that make you either proud or discouraged, neither of which are useful emotions to bring to the path. As you reflect on the different ways the Buddha has you think about other beings and compare their bodies and feelings and minds …
- Deconstruct Your Emotions… I’m not going to give the other person the satisfaction of seeing me do myself in.” That attitude may be a defilement—it’s a form of spite—but if it’s what you need to think, okay, that’s what you’ve got to think: anything to get past the anger. The Buddha was once asked, “Who does the Buddha condone the …
- Dwellings… This house is built out of very flimsy materials—the form of your body, which is constantly changing; your feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness—things that are falling apart all the time. So we can’t let ourselves get nostalgic about the body. We look after it so that we can use it to practice, but we have to find a better dwelling inside …
- How to Use the Teaching on Kamma… There your present karma comes first, under the factor of intention in name and form, and then the results of past karma, under contact at the senses, are shaped by your present karma. So what you’re doing right now is really important. That’s what I said. As I was giving this talk, though, I was getting a lot of blank looks. It …
- Truths That Are Noble… Suffering is the clinging-aggregates—the passion and desire you have for form, feeling, perceptions, thought-constructs, consciousness. It’s like an addiction. We lay claim to these things. We construct our idea of who we are out of those things. We search for food using these activities. So we think they’re really good, that we can’t do without them. But the …
- Faith in the Practice… They’re basically teaching a very subtle form of samatha or tranquility. Anything the mind does where it’s told to do something and do it repeatedly: That’s tranquility. It’s not insight. Insight isn’t something you do. It’s something you discover while you’re doing concentration. There’s no one guaranteed scientific or whatever vipassana method that’s going to …
- Intelligent about Change… Even though that’s a form of conceit, it’s useful conceit. What you’re doing here, as you’re developing these strengths, is that you're taking things that are impermanent, but you’re turning them into the path. In Ven. Ananda’s image, when he was once talking to the Buddha, he praised the Buddha for teaching how to go across a …
- Free from Buddha Nature… The Buddha said that part of comprehending suffering is to see that we cling to these five aggregates of form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness. Each of the aggregates is defined by a verb; it’s an activity. We build a sense of who we are around the activities, and that gets in the way of seeing which activities are skillful, which ones are …
- The Fourth Frame of Reference… In particular, you want to learn how to identify each of the clinging-aggregates—form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness—as events, activities, to see what spurs them into action and how they stop. Then you try to notice how you’re clinging to them: how you keep compulsively repeating them. Then you take your clinging apart. If something’s disturbing your concentration, take …
- Experimental Intelligence… The larger context is formed by the four noble truths: the fact that there is suffering, that there’s a cause for suffering, that suffering can cease, and that there’s a path of practice leading to its cessation. These truths in turn relate to a more basic issue: that the whole purpose of the Buddha’s teachings is for the sake of finding …
- Learning from What You Do… And learning to see the distinction between these two forms of stress requires that you use your own powers of observation. At the same time, it’s also helpful to hear this from other people to get their perspective. In the training of the mind, you have to do the training, but it’s useful to talk things over with someone who has been …
- The Choice Not to Suffer… Realize you don’t have to suffer form this stress. This is why the Buddha puts the cessation of stress third there in the four noble truths. Some people wonder: Why didn’t the Buddha put the path as the third truth, and then the cessation of stress as the fourth truth? Well, to have energy to follow the path, you have to be …
- The Fourth Noble Truth… When the defilements are clamoring for instant gratification, you see you’ve got this alternative form of pleasure, the pleasure of concentration, right here, to feed them. You’ve got this comfortable way of breathing. It’s free. It’s immediate. It’s visceral. Just that fact can help peel away a lot of the appeal of things you were attached to before. But …
- 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 …
- Fire Escapes… If you can drop that perception of the form and stay right here—you don’t go anywhere else—you begin to sense the body as a mist, as a cloud of little sensation drops. Then you see that it’s easier to focus, or more quiet to focus, on the space between the drops. And then you sense that there’s no limit …
- Looking at Your Life… As you get quicker and quicker at this, you begin to see more clearly the stages in how a thought world forms and how you decide to go into it and what happens as a result. That’s an important skill right there in learning how to understand how the mind functions, how intentions get involved in creating your sense of the present moment …
- The Reality of Your Thoughts… Sometimes he says grief is worth pursuing, and other forms of grief are not, to remind you that you do play an active role in the present in fabricating these things. So, when you express your grief so that you can understand it, that’s actually serving a purpose; but there comes a point when it becomes just self-indulgent, and it’s useful …
- The Tools of the Path… Because with the concentration, what do you have? You’ve got the breath, which is form; you’ve got the feeling of pleasure you’ve created here by the way you breathe; you’ve got perceptions—the images you hold in mind about the breath; thought fabrications—your intention to stay with the breath; and consciousness, which is aware of all these things. As …
- A Good Foundation… And of course, they’re going to shape the way we understand what we should do and shouldn’t do, and where we can look for our pleasure, all of which are the different forms of clinging: sensuality—clinging to the places where we look for pleasure, views—views about the nature of the world, habits and practices—our ideas about how things have …
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