Search results for: "Form"
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- Watching Over Time… Rahula was about seven years old at the time, and the Buddha pared the teaching down to its simplest form. He said, before you act, to look at your intention. What kind of results do you expect from that kind of intention? If you expect harmful results, then stop, don’t follow through with it. If you expect harmless results, you can go ahead …
- Factors for Awakening… Whereas it’s a lot easier if you begin to notice the little pieces as they form and you can breathe right through them to make them dissolve away. That’s the function of what the Buddha calls mindfulness as a governing principle: As you’re anchored with the breath in the present moment, you make good things come and stay, and you make …
- Advice for a New Monk… When you’ve opened yourself up easily to the possibilities of some idle chatter to slip out, or some slight exaggerations, or any other forms of wrong speech that may not be quite as blatant as the ones that you’re more commonly aware of but they are there, they can eat away at your meditation if you’re not careful. So keep your …
- Nuts & Bolts… We’re always forming our intentions, our desires, right here. If we’re not present for them, they go on automatic pilot, and we basically lose control of the big factor that’s shaping our life, which is the question, “Which intentions do you want to act on?” There are some things you’d like to do but you know will give bad results …
- Forest Bathing… The six senses come from name and form. The list chases things down through the processes of fabrication –* sankhara.* There basically are three types. There’s bodily fabrication, which is your in-and-out breath; verbal fabrication, directed thought and evaluation, the way you focus your mind on a topic and then make comments about it, ask questions about it—basically, the way you …
- May I Look After Myself with Ease… It’s a very subtle form of in-and-out energy that’s coordinated with the in-and-out breathing. There’s also a very still kind of bright breath that, if you pay very close attention, fills the body. It doesn’t move at all. It’s just very still. The important level to focus on is the one that flows through the …
- Intent… So the skills you develop here in the present moment are a form of wealth. This is why you have to be intent on mastering them well. The Buddha mentions skills five altogether that, when you apply them in the present moment, can keep you from suffering from the results of past kamma. The first is training the mind so that it’s not …
- The Language of the Heart (1)… In my particular case, I remember reading a passage where he talked about how thoughts begin to form in the mind with a little bit of a stirring, a perception is slapped onto them, and then they turn into full-blown thoughts. I had noticed that in my own meditation; I had never seen it explained anywhere. And so my immediate reaction was, “Finally …
- Dedicating Goodness, Spreading Goodwill… As for meditation, when the Buddha’s talking about meditation as a form of puñña, or goodness, he’s talking primarily about the meditation of developing goodwill for all beings. They have chants for this, but it’s not so much a matter of the chant. It’s the actual wish in your mind, that you’re looking for a happiness that’s not …
- Mindful Judgment… The Buddha defines this suffering as the five clinging-aggregates, which is the technical term for the fact that we try to feed on the form of the body, on our feelings, on our perceptions, on the way the mind fabricates its thoughts, and on acts of consciousness, in our attempt to find happiness. It’s like feeding on potato chips thinking that you …
- A Tradition of Ingenuity… Feeling also appears in name and form. There it’s associated with attention, intention, perception, and contact. What are you paying attention to when you’re suffering from a physical pain? Could you change that? Pay attention to something else? Pay attention in a different way? What are your intentions around the pain, and what intentions do you think the pain has toward you …
- Fabricated Path, Unfabricated Goal… So we’re here to catch the animals that are greed, aversion, and delusion in their many forms. You can’t get them to make appointments as to who will come when. You deal with whatever is coming up and disturbing your concentration. And if you can deal with it, undercut it, understand it, drop the cause, then that amount of concentration was enough …
- Elemental Normalcy… So how do you take them apart? Well, one, you try to notice how they form. All too often, we’re with the breath and suddenly, before we realize it, we’re someplace else, as if a curtain had gone down in the mind. As it goes up again, we suddenly find ourselves in a new scene, like a new scene in a play …
- Fabrication at the Breath… It’s your internal sense of the body, what the texts call your sense of form. And how do you create pleasure there? The Buddha gives you ways of analyzing. He says there are warm sensations, liquid sensations, breath sensations, solid sensations. When things seem out of balance, what’s wrong? Is it too warm? Is there too much breath energy? Is there too …
- The Power to Transcend Suffering… Whether it’s blatant suffering or more subtle forms of stress, these are the sore points in our heart. And for many of us, we don’t like to have them touched, we don’t like to hear about them. We think that somehow if we ignore them or cover them up, they’ll go away. But it just doesn’t work. They tend …
- Equanimity Isn’t Nibbana… We’re hungry for form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness. We suffer because we cling to these things. The word for “clinging”— upadana—also means to take sustenance from something. You feed on things, and it’s because you feed that you suffer. The Buddha’s solution is not simply to say, “Well, just stop feeding because there’s no really good food …
- Focus on the Doing… What is this process of creating thoughts in the present moment? How does it happen? What are the steps? At what point, does a thought world become compelling? At what point do you decide to go with the thought world? And how does that thought world form to begin with? These are things you can observe only if you’re not totally sucked into …
- A Strong Sense of Self… He simply noted that we have lots of different perceptions of self, lots of different ways of perceiving not-self, and then went on to answer the question, What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness? That question forms the framework for developing discernment. Applied to the question of self and not-self, it becomes: When is the …
- Worlds… The more quickly you notice this process of fabrication — before it starts forming a world, when it’s just a little stirring in the mind — the better. Here the first step is learning simply how to notice it and dissolve it away, notice it and dissolve it away. Make it your sport. As soon as there’s any stirring that could turn in to …
- On the Path of the Breath… The Buddha responded, “Well, that is a form of breath meditation. I don’t say that it’s not, but that’s not how you get the most benefit out of the breath.” So he proceeded to teach breath meditation in a much fuller way. And it’s important to look carefully at how the Buddha taught breath meditation, because you begin to realize …
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