Search results for: "Form"

  1. Page 69
  2. Willing & Observing
     … Well, which one is actually more reliable? Which is a more solid and lasting form of happiness? A more worthwhile happiness to work for? Those are the areas where the choices are difficult, but you’ve got to learn how to make them. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you want to win at chess, you have to sacrifice … 
  3. Change Your Perceptions
     … Ask the questions of the four noble truths: “Where is the suffering right now? What am I doing that’s causing the suffering, and how can I stop? How can I abandon that cause?” When you ask those questions, you bring appropriate attention to the breath, because the breath is one of the forms of fabrication that is influenced by ignorance, but it can … 
  4. The Brightness of Life
     … There are the activities that form a path that would lead us to the end of suffering. Notice, the Buddha doesn’t talk about the “causes” of the end of suffering. He talks about a path going there. It’s an important distinction. You can’t cause the end of suffering, because the end of suffering is something totally unconditioned. But you can get … 
  5. Virtuous Beginnings
     … When we get taken by the desire to come back in another form, a better condition next time around, think of that first question the novice is supposed to answer: “What is one?” “All life depends on food”—food here being both physical food and mental food. Life is an activity of eating. Out Interbeing is Inter-eating. You have to ask yourself: Do … 
  6. Always Willing to Learn
     … But if you want to stick with the meditation, you need to see those processes right as they begin forming and to figure out ways of nipping them in the bud: questioning the perception, dispersing that little stirring of energy with the breath, getting more alert to what’s actually happening, and more mindful of what you really want to be doing with the … 
  7. Training for Dispassion
     … their iPad. But if you’re intelligent, you’d want to know: The ending of desire and passion for what? Sariputta provided the answer: “Desire and passion for the five aggregates: form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness.” Then the next question those people would ask would be, “Why? For what purpose?” The answer is that if you haven’t abandoned desire and passion for those … 
  8. Thinking Seriously about Happiness
     … This will involve giving up some things, because some forms of happiness are in conflict with one another. So you go for the greater happiness and let go of the lesser happiness. It’s all common sense, but how much common sense do we usually have around our desire for happiness? Give it some thought.
  9. Calm
     … Stay in your spot and, as the breath energy there gets good, think of it spreading through the pain so that the pain doesn’t form a wall. Then you can look at the perceptions you have around the pain. Ask yourself, “Is it one big solid pain, or is it made up of little moments of pain?” You’re trying to find a … 
  10. The World Is Swept Away
     … This is called focusing on the pleasure of form—the body as you feel it from within. When we talk about meditation, we usually don’t refer to the fact that this is a kind of renunciation, but that’s what it is. People don’t like the word renunciation, it sounds like you’re being deprived of something. But actually it means you … 
  11. The Karma that Ends Karma
     … In other words, after dealing with distractions, you’re able to focus on the one intention that forms your concentration and you begin to understand it. What’s the process of fabrication going on in here? If it weren’t consistent enough, you wouldn’t understand it, for you’d get nothing but fleeting glimpses. A lot of your insights are just that — little … 
  12. Customs of the Noble Ones
     … From our point of view, it’s a pure form of livelihood. We eat what people give. We don’t beg; we don’t ask; we don’t take what they haven’t given. Whatever they freely give: That kind of food is blameless. The other place in the text where they talk about the customs of the noble ones is in the Canon … 
  13. Bodywork for the Mind
     … Dukkha can mean “pain,” “suffering,” “stress.” You’re going to want to be able to study all these forms of dukkha. You get the mind into a good state of concentration to give yourself a good foundation, a good place to stand, so that you can look at pain when it arises and not run away. In other words, to find the right middle … 
  14. Being Right
     … That way, our being right is right all-around, and not just a form of clinging. You’re being right with discernment. And discernment, as we all know in the Buddha’s teachings, is strategic, realizing that even though things may seem very straightforward in the texts, in actual practice you have to learn how to think strategically, to deal with obstacles that come … 
  15. Broad, Tall, & Deep
     … the pleasure of form. Then you look at the pleasure of sensuality and see that it’s got lots and lots of drawbacks. You look at your everyday issues concerning this person or that project or whatever, and you see them in the context of the larger scheme of things. The vision the Buddha had of the whole cosmos on the night of his … 
  16. The Second Frame of Reference
     … There are even skillful forms of distress. The Buddha talks about household distress and renunciation distress. Household distress is when you’re not getting the physical feelings you want: You don’t see the sights you’d like to see or hear the sounds you’d like to hear, smell the smells, taste the tastes, get the physical contacts you’d like to feel … 
  17. Anapanasati Day
     … sensitize yourself to how this aspect of your awareness has an impact on other aspects of your awareness, as a form of fabrication; use it to energize yourself; and then use that knowledge to calm things down. There are similar principles in the other tetrads as well. In the second tetrad, you start out learning how to breathe in ways that give rise to … 
  18. A Sense of Yourself
     … He talks about the self as a healthy form of conceit, in which you think about how other people can follow the path. They’re human beings, you’re a human being. They can do it, why can’t you? That kind of conceit is something you actually need on the path to keep you going. There’s also the point where the Buddha … 
  19. Guardians at Death
     … His life is basically saying that the qualities that made him Buddha are things that everybody has in potential form. You have them within you someplace. It’s simply a question of developing them. So it’s not just a matter of being inspired by the Buddha. You have to be inspired by the fact that you want true happiness, and the Buddha says … 
  20. But Not Sick in Mind
     … But that, the Buddha said, is actually a form of suffering that’s to be developed, cultivated. It gives you the motivation to want to do this. You see this especially clearly when you’re dealing with hindrances, things coming up in the mind that would get in the way of the concentration. Sensual desire comes up, and if you decide that you like … 
  21. Do Jhana
     … And you’ll find that as you get quicker and quicker at recognizing this process by which a thought forms, you can see more clearly the stages by which you create and get entangled in a thought. With that knowledge, you can get more and more skillful at disbanding it. That’s what I mean by zapping it. As the energies get tangled in … 
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