Search results for: "Form"
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- Dealing with Pain… For example, when you’re feeding on physical food, you’ve got the form of the body. Also, there’s the form of the food out there. Then there’s the feeling of hunger, the pain that goes with the hunger, and then there’s the desire to find something that will give rise to a feeling of pleasure once that hunger is satisfied …
- Unlimited Mind, Limited Resources… The first three form a set. You have goodwill for all. When you see that beings are suffering or are doing things that are going to lead to suffering, your goodwill leads you to have compassion for them. If you see that they’re happy or doing things that lead to happiness, your goodwill leads you to feel empathetic joy. But then the fourth …
- To Know the Noble Truths… But then he says what all those forms of suffering have in common is the five clinging-aggregates: form, feeling, perceptions, thought constructs, and consciousness. That’s something less familiar. You can say, “How can I know about suffering if it’s something I’m not familiar with?” Well, the Buddha says the clinging is the real problem, and he says we cling in …
- The Buddha’s Tools… When you’re getting the mind into concentration, you find that you’re dealing with form, the form of the body, of the breath; feelings of pleasure and pain, neither pleasure nor pain; your perceptions: the images you hold in mind as you try to get the mind to settle down. What way of perceiving the breath, or imaging the breath to yourself, is …
- Undividing the Mind… It’s not a matter of how many hours you put into swimming, but more a matter of maintaining proper form all the way throughout the time you do swim. If you put in lots of hours but your form is bad, it’s actually going to be bad for your swimming. Sometimes it’s better to put in just a few laps but …
- Work & Play… It’s called the pleasure of form, which comes from fully inhabiting your body from within—having a sense of being in the body and finding it pleasant. This more refined sense of pleasure enables you not only to withstand pain and not go running off into sensual pleasure, but also to see more refined forms of stress that you wouldn’t have seen …
- Good Eating… Recollection of generosity, recollection of the gifts you’ve given in the past, is actually a form of meditation. It’s useful for the days when the meditation seems dry and you begin to wonder if you’re ever going to get anywhere with the breath. You can think back, “Well, I do have these good things in my background, these good actions that …
- 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 …
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