Search results for: "Fabrication"

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  2. The Four Noble Truths from Within
     … The Buddha calls that fabrication. One of his important insights is that if you do this fabrication in ignorance, you’re going to suffer. But if you learn how to do it with knowledge, specifically knowledge of the four noble truths, you can take that process of fabrication and turn it into a path that leads to an experience totally unfabricated. That’s the … 
  3. Training Your Intentions
    One of the features of the Buddha’s teachings on the aggregates that makes you stop and think is the role of fabrication. On the one hand, fabrication—which the Buddha defines as intention—is one of the aggregates: basically, your intention is to fabricate thoughts. You start with perceptions of things, feelings about things, and then you make comments on them. Of course … 
  4. Generosity of Spirit
     … It comes down to those three fabrications that the Buddha talks about so much. Right after ignorance in dependent co-arising, there are the three fabrications. You’ve got the breath, that’s your bodily fabrication; you’ve got directed thought and evaluation, verbal fabrication, and your feelings and perceptions are mental fabrication. For the most part, as we go through life—especially if … 
  5. Endurance & Contentment
     … As you know, the Buddha’s analysis is that through ignorance we fabricate bodily, verbal, and mental fabrications in ways that cause suffering. So we have to bring some knowledge to the process, so that we can turn these fabrications into the path to the end of suffering. And the “knowledge” here is the knowledge of a skill: knowing how to breathe, knowing how … 
  6. Sensitive to Fabrication
     … In his explanations for the steps that lead up to craving and then from craving into suffering, there’s something called fabrication. What’s interesting about fabrication is that it comes before your consciousness. It’s how you prime yourself to sense things. If you’re ignorant of this fabrication, your consciousness can lead to all the other links in the process leading to … 
  7. Rehab Work
     … In the Buddha’s analysis of causation, he talks about how ignorance has an impact on the process of fabrication, and the three types of fabrication—bodily, verbal, and mental—then have an impact on how we receive input through the senses. One of the ways we fabricate our experience is through the way we breathe. That’s called bodily fabrication. When we breathe … 
  8. The Reality of Emotions
     … What you are going to do with them? What use can you get out of them? What’s the wisest thing to do with them? In this way, instead of getting waylaid by the fact that feelings are fabricated and questionable, you focus on the fact that you can fabricate them with discernment, with knowledge. As the Buddha points out, fabricated feelings are often … 
  9. Fabricating against Defilement
     … If they keep coming back it means you have to actually apply serious effort, what he calls “exerting a fabrication.” It’s a technical term. Fabrication is of three kinds: bodily, verbal, and mental. Bodily fabrication is the breath. Exerting the breath against an unskillful mental state means checking to see how that mental state has had an effect on the body, and how … 
  10. Mud Houses
     … No matter how good it gets, you never really arrive anywhere with the aggregates, because they’re all fabricated processes. The nature of fabrication is that it’s done for the sake of something. It’s moving toward something. When it arrives, it arrives at something that falls apart, so it keeps on moving toward something else and then toward something else. It never … 
  11. Therapy for the Mind
     … After all, it is possible to find in the mind something that’s not fabricated, where there’s no bodily fabrication, no verbal fabrication, no mental fabrication. But to see that, you’ve got to clear the fabrications away. And what do you use to clear them away? You use fabrication, the fabrications of the path. As you clear fabrications away, you find something … 
  12. Sensitive to Stress
     … And usually what you did has to do with a perception or some little fabrication in the mind, so you want to be sensitive to that. It’s in this way that learning the different levels of concentration can be really useful for seeing how the mind fabricates things. Sensual thoughts fall away in the first jhana. Verbal fabrication falls away in the second … 
  13. Appreciating Dispassion
    Our minds are so used to the process of fabrication that to encounter something unfabricated sounds kind of scary, because we don’t know what to do with it. We know how to breathe, we know how to talk to ourselves, we know how to develop perceptions and feelings to adjust the world we live in, to adjust our experience of the world we … 
  14. Meaningful Choices
     … You have to learn how to see how you’re fabricating things, which is why we get the mind into concentration. We fabricate a state of concentration so that we can see: This is what fabrication is like. You fabricate the present moment by the way you breathe, by the way you talk to yourself, by the perceptions and feelings you focus on. You … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. The Power of Human Effort
     … How can you maximize the pleasure by the way you focus on the breath, by the way you breathe? All of these things are issues of fabrication. As the Buddha said, we suffer because we fabricate our experience—but not out of whole cloth. We fabricate it out of potentials that come from our past karma, yet our present actions play a huge role … 
  17. The Use of the Present
     … And we can fabricate those thoughts into all kinds of worlds. So the solution is to take these things apart and then learn how to fabricate them in good ways. Fabricate the breath. Fabricate your feelings into a state of concentration. Fabricate your thoughts into questions you might ask about where the stress is: What can you do to understand it? What can you … 
  18. Investing Your Happiness
     … As the Buddha said, the noble path is fabricated. It’s the highest fabrication of all. So when we know it’s fabricated, we should do it mindfully, with a sense of alertness to what we’re doing and to the results we’re getting. This is what makes it a skill. And we see the results not only in the immediate present, but … 
  19. Perceptions for Training the Mind
    In the Buddha’s analysis of the causes of suffering and stress, fabrication comes right after ignorance, the message being that if you fabricate in ignorance, you’re going to suffer. But if you fabricate with knowledge, it becomes the path—and that’s what we’re doing as we sit here and meditate. We’re learning how to fabricate with knowledge. We reflect … 
  20. Calm & Insight into Pain
     … That’s verbal fabrication—in technical terms, directed thought and evaluation. You direct your thoughts to the breath and your perceptions, and you evaluate how well they’re calming things down. So you’ve got three kinds of fabrication—bodily, verbal, and mental—and in each case you’re trying to calm them down. To see things in terms of fabrication, that’s insight … 
  21. How Much Concentration Is Enough?
     … Feeling feels, perception perceives, fabrications fabricate, and consciousness cognizes. 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 … 
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