Search results for: "consciousness"
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- The Mind’s Eating Disorders… And then consciousness, of course, is the awareness of all these things. And it’s interesting that we feed not only off of food, but also off of these activities that go around feeding. There’s a double layer of feeding here. This applies not only to physical feeding but also to emotional feeding: certain feelings you want and then your perception of what …
- Caring Enough to Doubt… Craving fosters your consciousness that keeps going. The consciousness fosters the craving. They go around and around and around and around. They can feed each other forever until you decide you’ve had enough. The Buddha has you look at someone who’s extremely poor, sick, destitute. You have to remind yourself that you’ve been there, and you could be there again if …
- Disenchantment… We’ve been eating form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, and consciousness. This is a lot of what clinging means. It means feeding and taking our sustenance off these things. But if you look at the raw materials and you think of what kind of happiness you’re trying to build out of them, you realize you’ve set yourself up for a fall. The …
- Fire… You can consciously tell yourself, “Okay, now I’m going to lengthen the breath,” – or “shorten the breath” and see how the body reacts. See how the mind reacts. And how about the quality of how heavy or light the breath is, how fast, slow, deep, shallow? You can consciously experiment with these things, too. Or you can immediately go and start working with …
- Beyond Inter-eating… There’s also the food of sensory contact, the food of intention, and the food of consciousness. Our mind feeds on these things. The question, “What is one?” is the way the Buddha introduces the topic of causality—and it’s obvious that subsisting on food is not a positive image for causality. The Buddha’s not the sort of person to celebrate interconnectedness …
- At Home in Jhana… You can add the second jhana, the third jhāna, and the fourth jhana, so that it becomes a spacious home, especially when you take equanimity of the fourth jhana and apply it to the dimensions of infinite space or infinite consciousness. It’s an enormous home. But everything you need is right here. It’s simply a matter of taking the time and developing …
- Focus on What You’re Doing… Sometimes you’ve got to consciously change things, because the body can get into ruts. There can be some negative feedback loops in its breathing. So if you pose the question of what would feel really good right now and the body doesn’t seem to be feeling especially good, then you’ve consciously got to work at it. Try shorter breathing, longer breathing …
- Dealing with Pain… Then finally there’s consciousness—awareness of these things. The Buddha says we feed on these activities. And in fact, these activities are the activities that the mind usually uses in feeding as well. So there are two levels of feeding going on. For example, when you’re feeding on physical food, you’ve got the form of the body. Also, there’s the …
- Lessons from Jhana… You can even work up to where you let go of your sense of the oneness of your consciousness. That happens when you move from the dimension of the infinitude of consciousness to the dimension of nothingness. The sense of the oneness of the knower: You drop it. Now, that sense of oneness is what’s been holding you together in concentration all along …
- Three Parts of Right View… There’s form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness. He calls them clinging-aggregates. The word for clinging, upadana, can also mean taking food or taking sustenance. This is where it’s easy to see how the clinging-aggregates work together as a set, because they’re activities that we engage in as we feed. There’s the form of the body, which needs to …
- Cornered… You take it with a purpose and you make it into an actual experience of form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. You do that through the three fabrications we’ve talked about so much: bodily fabrication, the way you breathe; verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself; and mental fabrication, perceptions and feelings. These are our cooking techniques. Then we’ve got these …
- Broad, Tall, & Deep… This is one of the reasons why Ajaan Fuang would have his students chant The Divine Mantra, because it gets you used to thinking in terms of the properties of the body, along with the properties of space and consciousness. You get more and more familiar with these concepts and find it easier to stay with your perception of whatever sensations might correspond to …
- To Make Suffering Crumble… Then there’s awareness or consciousness of these things. If you find that you have trouble settling down, you might ask yourself, “Which of those five things is the problem? Is the problem with the breath? Is it with the feelings in the body around the breath? How about my perceptions? Can I change my mental image of the breath? How about the way …
- Questioning Your Conviction… May they not be thus’?” The same with perceptions, thought-fabrications, consciousness: In each case, the five brethren said No. **So which is it? Can you do things, or can you not do things with these aggregates? Well, you can do some things. And it’s the **some things **that are important. It’s in that area of **some things that you can actually …
- Lessons of Distraction… Materialism says that the real things in the world are material processes, physical processes, while your consciousness is just what they call an epiphenomenon, a by-product of the physical processes, but it’s not the real action. The real action is down there in your atoms. Well, the Buddha’s perspective is just the other way around. Look at the very first verse …
- A Good Buddhist Ego… But the fact that you’ve experienced a level of consciousness that has nothing to do with any of the aggregates, not even the aggregate of consciousness, means that when you come back, you’ll never think of identifying with the aggregates ever again. You never hold to the view that you are the aggregates or that you own the aggregates or that they …
- Noble Right Concentration… form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness. Where are you going to see those aggregates? You see them in the concentration. The breath is part of form. The feeling of pleasure that arises as you stay focused: That’s feeling. The mental image you have of the breath: That’s perception. Directed thought and evaluation as you try to adjust the breath, play with the breath …
- Ultimate Reality… One is that it is a kind of consciousness. You don’t blank out. Two, it’s pleasant, the ultimate pleasure. Three, it’s true, it doesn’t change. Four, it’s freedom. In fact, that’s what “nibbāna” means: unbinding, total freedom. We live in this sense of ourselves, inhabiting this body, inhabiting this mind. We’re trapped in our inner world here …
- In the Context of the Deathless… There’s consciousness, your awareness of these activities. Even though these concentration aggregates ultimately will show that they, too, are inconstant, stressful, and not-self, you’re trying to fight against those characteristics for the time being. Try to make your concentration as constant as you can. Make your mindfulness, your alertness, your ardency as constant as you can so that you can give …
- Overcoming Complacency… And so on with perception and consciousness as well. An act of creating that’s going on all the time. And then, on top of that, once we have those aggregates, once they’re present to our awareness, we can create our sense of self out of them: “I’m this. I’m that.” And our sense of self will change over time. But …
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