Search results for: "Form"
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- Right Action… And unlike right speech, all three forms of wrong action find a place in the five precepts. In other words, they’re a basic practice for everybody. You don’t kill anybody, any animal that’s big enough for you to see. You don’t steal anything. You don’t engage in illicit sex. Period. These are vows that you take for yourself. They …
- Skillful Fear… It’s because some forms of fear are unskillful, but others are skillful. The most unskillful form of fear is the one that the Buddha lists in the four biases, when you treat people unfairly out of fear. Someone has power over you or you fear their power, so you give in to them in ways that you shouldn’t. There’s also fear …
- The Buddha’s Filters… So the path helps you get sensitive to this process of becoming, giving you a better becoming here with a state of concentration, so that you can see the processes of becoming as they form in the mind, as these attractions form. You want to get quicker and quicker at seeing them and stopping them. As you get quicker at stopping them, you begin …
- Sensual Passion… This is why the Buddha talks about abandoning not only passion for sensuality, but also passion for form, passion for formless. But before you try to let go of those, make sure that you’ve gotten really good at the sense of the pleasure of form here in the body, so that you can pull yourself away from your hunger for sensual pleasures, your …
- Stay Principled… The third form of bias is the bias that comes from delusion. And one of the major forms of delusion is when you’re afraid that somebody else is going to harm you, so you figure out “How can I harm them first or stop them?” Of course, what that means is now the karma is yours. Often it’s unskillful karma. It happens …
- The Power of Present Kamma… So you’re engaged with all these forms of fabrication right here. And as you’re doing them with knowledge, you turn them from a cause of suffering into a path to the end of suffering. That’s quite a shift. And the more knowledge you can bring, the more effective they are. As you get more hands-on experience with these aspects of …
- Gladden, Steady, Release… You need the forms in order for the concrete to set properly. As long as it’s still liquid, you can’t take the forms away. But as the concrete hardens, then you can take the forms away and the concrete will stay in place. It’s the same with the concentration. In the beginning you have to think about the breath, think about …
- The Path of Adventure… And with the meditation, the Buddha encourages you to develop states of concentration that have a sense of ease, a sense of rapture, so you that can tap in those forms of pleasure, those forms of rapture, when you need them, when you feel tempted to go off the path. This is why we have to practice of meditation again and again, so that …
- Straightening Out the World… When anger forms, how does it form? What are its subterfuges? What are the stages it goes through before you’re aware of it? The same with greed and lust. These things have their stages. If you can’t see them as they’re forming, you’re usually aware of them only after they’ve come out in your thoughts and your words and …
- Me, Me, Me… As a Buddha said of the various forms of clinging, this is the big one. Other teachers, he said, recognized that there was sensual clinging, view clinging, and habit-and-practice clinging, but because they didn’t recognize doctrine-of-the-self clinging, the people in that particular teaching would not gain awakening. So this is the crucial issue. The problem with the doctrine …
- Start with Goodwill… You may not have to do much adjusting of the breath, but you will have to keep an eye on where thoughts are going to form in the range of your awareness—because they will form, even when the mind is very still, very quiet. You’ve got thoughts coming in from your past karma that’ll start appearing as little knots of tension …
- Clinging & Feeding… We convert our form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness into a state of concentration. We use the fabrication of thoughts to develop wisdom, the perceptions that the Buddha recommends to develop wisdom—the purpose of that wisdom being to develop dispassion and disenchantment. Then we feed the mind with conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, all of which are good food for the mind …
- Four Noble Truths to One… These are all forms of suffering that we recognize. But then he gives a summary as to what they all have in common, and that’s where his analysis gets unfamiliar, at least in the terminology: the five clinging-aggregates of form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness. The aggregates don’t cling. We cling to them, and the clinging is the actual suffering …
- Passion, Dispassion, Compassion… Then there’s dispassion for form and for formlessness. In other words, once you’ve mastered jhana, then you develop dispassion for it. It sounds kind of sad, doesn’t it? You master it and then you’re no longer obsessed with it. You have to go beyond it. People don’t like to hear that, or think about the implications of dispassion. It …
- Twigs & Branches… Form is the sense of the body as you feel it from within—in other words, your experience of the body that no one else can share. “Form” also refers to how the body looks. That’s something you do share with other people. But the Buddha wants you to be more interested in how you feel it from within. That’s the part …
- Wearing the Breath… You’re going to miss an important step in the meditation, which is to see thoughts as they arise and catch them when they’re still in the process of forming. At that point, they haven’t turned into becomings yet. A becoming is a world in the mind. You have a desire, and then a world forms around it—the world where that …
- Construction Techniques… But it’s pretty much one note: “It’s like this, like this, like this.” All the other forms of fabrication go underground. The problem is, they’re already done in ignorance, which is why we suffer. And denying that you’re doing them just adds more ignorance and more suffering on top. So you need a technique that allows you to be more …
- Meaning & Importance… As the Buddha says, we take the potentials for form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness, and we fabricate them into actual forms, feelings, etc., for the sake of something. Usually for the sake of happiness, which means that every present moment has a for-the-sake-of in it. It’s moving in a direction. It’s a means to an end. That’s …
- The Path is Fabricated… It’s had enough of a particular type of activity; enough of fabrication - so it lets it go, in whatever form. And that includes even the highest form of fabricated Dhamma, which is the path. But in the meantime, before we let go of the path, we have to develop it—to fabricate it well. It’s important to keep this in mind as …
- Tuning Your Lute… One of them is that on the days when you don’t have much time to practice, you put a lot of emphasis on at least getting your form right. It’s the same when you’re sitting and meditating and you only have a short period of time. You want to be really careful about the posture of your body. And think about …
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