Search results for: "Form"
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- An Island above the Flood… Where do your actions come from? They come from the mind, and when you’re dealing with the mind you want to look at things simply on the level of name and form: mental events and physical properties. So you’ve got ardency, alertness, mindfulness; then you’ve got the property of the breath, and you bring all those together. That forms your island …
- Deconstruction… You work on the aggregates in their best form, i.e., the form of the mind in solid concentration, which you’ve observed carefully to see how you put things together. Then you start taking it apart. And you can take it apart precisely because you’ve been the one who put it together. When you see that even the best aggregates have their …
- Two Kinds of Middle… It’s a pleasure that comes simply from inhabiting the form of your body, being with the breath, the breath energy all around the body, all through the body, experiencing it from the inside. That’s form. It’s also a pleasure that can come as you learn how to direct the energies in the body—finding out where they’re flowing well, where …
- Samsara… You work with the body, you work with form, you work with feelings, perceptions, constructs, consciousness. And all of them have a potential for becoming a path. With form: The word has many meanings, but one of them is your internal sense of the body, the shape you feel sitting here. Focus in on that as your object of meditation. There’s a breath …
- How Much Concentration Is Enough?… Even form, the Buddha says, is a type of activity: It’s constantly de-forming. All of these things are present right here. The form, of course, is the breath. The feeling is the sense of ease you try to create with the breath—and you learn a lot about creating feelings. Feelings don’t just come and go on their own. There’s …
- Not-self for the Sake of Happiness… the five aggregates—form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. Your sense of self as the producer, for instance, lays claim to the body and all your mental functions to do the actions that need to be done. Then you notice how much pain is involved in doing whatever needs to be done. The self as a reflector is going to take note of this …
- Taking Stock… We had that chant just now about how form—one of the forms in our life, of course, is the form of the body—feelings, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness: All these things are not-self. They don’t really lie totally under your control. But it’s not as if you don’t have any control over them at all. You do have some. So …
- Pushing the Three Characteristics… the pleasure that comes from getting the mind into the level of form, i.e., the form of the body as we feel it from within while we’re sitting here. How much pleasure can you develop by inhabiting your whole body, as you allow the breath to come in and go out in a comfortable way? That pleasure forms the nourishment for the …
- Analyzing Suffering… We think we’ve got something when we’ve formed a new aggregate, but then it turns into a process of change, so we have to keep at it, again and again and again. This obsession with trying to get happiness out of the aggregates: That’s basically what the clinging is all about. We try to control them and set them up in …
- Free Sources of Energy… You’ve got those three forms of fabrication. There’s the breath: Ask yourself, “What kind of breathing would be energizing right now?” And explore. Experiment. Then there’s verbal fabrication: How are you talking to yourself? If all you can say to yourself is, “I’m tired, I’m tired, I’m tired,” it’s going to wear you down. You’ve got …
- The Heightened Mind… You’re going to have this, well, no, how about that, how about adding this, or taking away that? Now you just drop all that kind of thinking and you’re here with what’s called form: the sense of the body as you feel it from within. And the most prominent aspect of form is the breath. So when you’re with the …
- Faith in Awakening… Generosity, of course, is a form of wealth. The texts talk quite a bit about the wealth that will eventually come from being generous but also about the wealth that comes to the mind right now by being generous. There’s a spaciousness of the mind. When the Buddha described mundane right view, one of the first things he said was, “There is giving …
- Training Your Minds… You can’t say, “Well, I’m just going to deal with greed as one big defilement and take care of all forms of greed all at once.” Greed comes in many different guises. Anger comes in many different guises. Delusion comes in many different forms. And you’re going to have to learn how to deal with them all. After a while, in …
- Inner Wealth… That’s a form of wealth because it can prevent you from doing all kinds of things that you’re later going to regret. Years back, I heard a radio broadcast where an old veteran of the Vietnam War was talking about a young girl he had killed years back during the war. He said every day the picture of that girl’s face …
- Sensitive to Fabrication… The first aggregate is the form of the body. Okay, you’ve got the form of the body sitting right here. Feelings: You’ve got the feelings of ease or dis-ease right here. Perceptions: the labels you’re applying as you keep the breath in mind, they’re right here. Fabrication, the directed thought and evaluation: That’s right here. And consciousness: It …
- Indecision… That’s actually a form of renunciation. We’re putting aside all thoughts about the food we might eat tomorrow or fix tomorrow or the other pleasures we might get when we leave the monastery. We put those aside and we’re just here with the breath coming in, going out. This is called the pleasure of form, as you work with the breath …
- Samatha, Vipassanā, Jhāna… You’re dealing with form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrications, consciousness. If the mind is willing to settle down, you don’t have to think about those things. Just give it one thing to think about, and your perceptions and thought fabrications will center on that, revolve around that, without your having to identify what they are. After all, we’re not here to think …
- The Path Converges Right Here… Now, one of the ways of doing that is by being with the breath, so that you can get fully into the sense of inhabiting the form of your body, finding pleasure just being in the form, along with the different energies of the form flowing together. All these factors come together right here. If the mind is tempted to wander out, you’ve …
- The Right to Repair Your Mind… There are certain forms of craving that are not going to make it easy for you to abandon them, certain forms of clinging that are not going to be easy for you to comprehend. And nobody can stand there in your mind and say, “Look! Right here, right here, right here!” This is one of the reasons that when you get the mind concentrated …
- Wise Endurance… All the forms of suffering that are listed there boil down to the five clinging-aggregates: clinging to form, feeling, perception, thought fabrications, or consciousness. In particular, what are your perceptions, what are your thought fabrications about a particular issue? Remember that even with the aggregates, there’s an element that comes in from the past and an element of fabrication in the present …
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