Search results for: "consciousness"

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  2. Succeeding at Happiness
     … There was a book that came out years back called Cosmic Consciousness, where the author talked about how a sense of unity, a sense of oneness, and a sense of rightness of the world were something common to all religions. He talked about how people would spontaneously gain these insights, gain a sense of this consciousness. The part he didn’t like that was … 
  3. Scribe Knowledge, Warrior Knowledge
     … He realized that you couldn’t just stop feeding off of form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. If you forced yourself to stop, parts of the mind would come sneaking out for a midnight snack. You’ve got to give the mind a good source of food inside. And when the Buddha’s talking about food in terms of the practice, concentration is the … 
  4. Concentration & Insight
     … The third approach is that you consciously ignore that thought. In other words, you know it’s there, but you’re just not going to pay it any attention. It’s like something in the background. You keep the breath in the foreground and just make sure you don’t get involved in that other thought. You don’t pay attention to it, because … 
  5. The First Noble Truth
     … Are you clinging to a form or a feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness? He puts these in terms that allow you to step outside of the suffering. Because the big problem of the suffering is that you’re often in it, in what the Buddha calls becoming. You’ve taken on an identity in a particular world and it’s causing you suffering. As long … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. Rewriting the Mind’s Song
    What we would call this stream of consciousness—all the words and sentences, the bits and snatches of songs or whatever that go through the mind—Ajaan Mun called the mind’s song. The mind is singing to itself all the time. In technical terms, this is verbal fabrication. It’s one of the things that you notice as you try to get the … 
  8. Eyes in the Back of Your Head
     … Why do the muscles feel tightened there? Can you consciously loosen them so that you can connect things up? Do this throughout the whole body, so that there’s a sense of connection. Once you’ve got that sense of connection, you can try settling down in one spot and see if you can maintain that one spot and feel connected throughout the whole … 
  9. The Wheel of Dhamma
     … Find some part of the body that you can consciously keep relaxed and stay there. And practice just staying there. Whatever ideas come up that will pull you back into the stress or suffering, learn to say No to them. Actually, the stress doesn’t suck you in. You’re the one that goes sucking yourself into the stress. So just learn how to … 
  10. The Languages of the Mind
     … Even stream-of-consciousness novels, with all their strange wanderings around, can’t even begin to replicate what actually is going on in this conversation inside the mind. But they do point out something important: that the conversation moves from level to level, language to language, jargon the jargon, from one way of looking at things to another way of looking at things, all … 
  11. Rites of Passage
     … The same principle also applies to feelings of pleasure and pain as they come and go, to perceptions, to thought-constructs, even to our consciousness of things. Meditation gives us a place where we can step back from these things and watch them to see the influence they have over the mind, to decide whether that’s an influence we’d like them to … 
  12. Why the Breath
     … And there’s the question of being consciously in touch with it, being consciously open with it, or not. When you’re more in touch with the background, you begin to notice the point, or the focus of the mind: here, there, wherever it moves. You’re less likely to get knocked off by changes in the focal point. If your concentration is totally … 
  13. Testing Karma
     … So we consciously assume the teachings on karma. We consciously assume the principle that we do have choice, and that not all of what we’ve been doing so far in our lives has been worthwhile. Then we put those assumptions to the test. The Buddha was an amazing teacher. He never tried to intimidate anyone into believing what he taught. He wasn’t … 
  14. Right View
     … The seed is your consciousness. The ground is your kamma, past and present, as it’s manifesting right now. Then there’s the delight in doing something with these things, either creating something out of them or destroying them. All of that counts as a cause of suffering. It may sound pretty abstract, but as you get to know the mind, you begin to … 
  15. Insight from Jhana
     … There are feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness, and these are all related to how you eat. Each of these is actually an activity. Even form is something that you create through having the perception that there is a form here; there is a body here—and it keeps changing. Yet you maintain this belief that this one form goes through time. So you … 
  16. Fabricating the Present
     … From fabrication comes consciousness, and consciousness leads to name and form: physical and mental phenomena. It’s worth thinking about: Fabrication, this process of making, comes before phenomena themselves. We hear so often how people shape their reality, how our perceptions tend to filter the ways we see reality, and yet we don’t see it as it’s actually happening, even though it … 
  17. A Haven for Inner Wealth
     … So where does that well-being come from? As the Buddha said, there are three kinds of food for consciousness. There’s consciousness itself, and then there’s contact—contact at the senses, contact in the mind itself. And then there are our intentions. Of those three, the last is the most important, because our intentions are what drive what we do and say … 
  18. Varieties of Mindfulness
     … I found that after a while I could just listen to the sound, word by word by word, consciously forgetting the last word to be present only with the sound of the current word. It worked fairly easily because Thai wasn’t my native language, but you might want to try the skill out yourself. If you don’t like the Dhamma talks you … 
  19. Dwelling in Emptiness
     … The perception of space is more gross than the perception of consciousness. The perception of consciousness is more gross than the perception of nothingness. If you can see them separate out one by one like that, that’s how this dwelling in emptiness leads both to calm and insight at the same time: and then beyond the calm and insight to release. That’s … 
  20. The Dhamma Wheel
     … We cling to these things—form, feeling, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness—because we think they’re going to provide happiness for us. Now, they do provide some pleasures. If they didn’t provide any pleasures at all, we wouldn’t have any passion for them. But the point the Buddha’s trying to make is that compared to the third noble truth—the ending … 
  21. Respect for Concentration
     … We’re taking the khandhas — these aggregates of body, feeling, perception, thought-fabrications, and consciousness — and instead of identifying with them, we use them as tools. And as part of the process of mastering them as tools, there will have to be a sense of identification. You identify with the state of concentration, whatever sense of the body is present in the concentration, whatever … 
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