Search results for: "Impermanence"
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- Tranquility & Insight… We need both because you can know things are fashioned, and yet you can still say, “What the hell, I like what I’m fashioning, it’s worth it.” Even though you may know that it’s impermanent and stressful, you can say, “I still get that little bit of honey on the edge of the knife, and that’s enough for me.” At …
- Do, Maintain, Use… We also don’t like to hear that we have to maintain it—when it comes and it goes, we think that we’ve learned something about impermanence. As for using it, we get lost. We think that if you’re going to do insight practice, you have to drop the concentration and then start on square one and do insight—but actually, insight …
- Samsara… Once the mind has settled down, then you use the perception of inconstancy or impermanence, the perception of stress, the perception of not-self to pry away your attachments. In other words, notice the places where you tend to cling and analyze them to see that they really aren’t lasting, they’re really not as pleasurable as you thought they were. You don …
- Fears… And the clinging is threatened by impermanence, by stress and suffering, by the fact that these things are beyond your control. The purpose of our training here is to learn how not to let our happiness be based on things beyond our control, because as long as we entrust our happiness to them, we’re setting ourselves up for suffering, setting ourselves up for …
- Pissing on Palaces… As Ajaan Mun said, you see a leaf fall, and it teaches you the principle of inconstancy, impermanence. You hear a monkey call, and what you hear is its pain and suffering. It’s all around us. When the Buddha referred to his teaching of the Dhamma and the Vinaya, he’d use different words for how he taught. The Vinaya was something he …
- Take Time to Evaluate Your Life… Sometimes that’s translated as impermanence, but your direct experience of it is not whether something’s going to be permanent of not. The direct experience is: Is it a constant sensation? The level of stress, the level of pleasure in the body, you begin to realize, are not constant: They go up and they go down. And the up and the down have …
- Comprehending Pain… It’s not simply a matter of watching a concentrated mind state coming up and saying, “Oh, there’s concentration,” or watching it go and saying, “Ah, I’ve gained insight into inconstancy or impermanence. These things come and go.” It’s like trying to travel from one city to another. A bus that’s going to take you there comes by. If you …
- The Triple Training… Rahula asked him how to do breath meditation, but before the Buddha gave him his breath meditation instructions, he gave him some contemplations, including the contemplation of impermanence to get past the conceit, “I am”; the contemplation of the body to get past sensual desire; the contemplation of the body in terms of elements. Doing those contemplations, you can begin to get a sense …
- The Truth of Transcendence… that are going well are not going to go well forever and is that really satisfactory? There’s always going to be a hitch; there’s always going to be something impermanent. There’s always stress even in the pleasure. The second noble truth teaches that the cause for that stress comes from the craving that tends to go along with the pleasure. So …
- Respect for Emptiness… You’ve seen that it’s impermanent, so you don’t have to do it anymore. And that short-circuits the path. But if you contemplate the three characteristics in the context of a well-mastered state of concentration, it actually accomplishes something. It becomes liberating. You begin to realize that these disturbances in the mind that tend to wipe out the emptiness, create …
- A Path of Skills… You don’t say, “Well, I’ve learned the lesson that concentration is inconstant, impermanent. Leave it alone.” You have to build a state of concentration in the mind to understand it. Like the old principle that if you want to understand eggs, you don’t just sit and look at the eggs or think about eggs or come up with theories about eggs …
- Less is More… And the memory of what you do see is very impermanent. When you try to gather up that kind of wealth—the wealth of memories and experiences—you find that it doesn’t stay with you. It’s like buying a huge shipload of lettuce, thinking it’ll supply you with all the lettuce you’ll need for the rest of your life. And …
- Stop Squirming… Everything is impermanent. Well, that’s the end of that. Let’s go on to the next one.” That’s not the point of what we’re trying to do. You watch things come and go so that you can figure out when pain comes, when the pain increases, what did you just do? When the pain decreases, what did you just do? You …
- Intelligent about Change… 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 river by going from one dependence to another. In other words, you …
- Breath Meditation: The Fourth Tetrad… In gladdening the mind, what kind of obstruction is getting in the way of your feeling glad about the fact you’re here? Is doubt getting in the way? Is restlessness-and-anxiety getting in the way? Is sleepiness getting in the way? Okay, what do you do to counteract those mind states? First, you have to see them as impermanent, inconstant. As with …
- The Steps of Breath Meditation… Insight into inconstancy or impermanence has less to do with how you consume experiences than it does with how you produce them. You see all the effort that goes into producing a particular type of experience, and the question becomes, “Is it worth it? Isn’t this burdensome, having to keep making, making, making these experiences all the time?” Then the problem becomes, “What …
- Willing & Observing… We can’t just sit here and watch the mind as it wanders from this to that to the other thing, and say, “Okay, I’m learning, I’m gaining insight into impermanence and in practicing mindfulness.” That’s not what mindfulness is all about. Mindfulness means keeping certain things in mind. And some of the things you want to keep in mind are …
- Balancing the Bases for Concentration… Sometimes we hear that the Buddha’s insight means seeing that everything is impermanent or that there is no self in the world, so you force yourself to see things in that way. It’s as if someone told you that if you see everything as blue, you’re going to be happy. So you can play these tricks on your mind and force …
- Audacious & Undaunted… Sometimes he’d been in hell, sometimes he’d been up in the highest heavens, but wherever he went, it was impermanent. It wouldn’t last. You’d die and you’d be reborn again. Then the question was, “Why so many different levels? Was there a pattern?” So on the second watch of the night, he turned the power of his concentration to …
- Dimensions of Right Effort… That’s impermanent.” Sometimes the trouble comes from putting the wrong labels on things. So ask yourself, “Well what precisely is the perception I’m worked up about?” If you see, say, an object that you think is going to make you happy or a person who’s going to make you happy, just ask yourself, “Where did I get that label? Is that …
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