Insight does not depend only on effort or on strong concentration

If we concentrate on the pain to suppress the pain, this kind of mindfulness is the object of craving, rather than just observing the object.

This means that the proper mental factor for the middle path of mental balance is missing because our consciousness is turned toward our feelings of like and dislike. When we want pain to disappear, it is attachment, and when we dislike it if pain has not yet disappeared, it is aversion.

Should the pain disappear as we desired, there follows further attachment. Such practice is not the correct application of mindfulness, and the awareness is not seeing clearly the 'present' object because we wish it to be different in the future.

If it is not the 'present' object which we are aware of, then the practice is off the middle path. We can see that establishing the balance of the middle path is not easy.

For this reason, it is of extreme importance to have right understanding first. We must see that insight does not depend only on effort or on strong concentration.

Nor does it depend upon our wish to know or realize, but rather, it depends upon right awareness. If we do not achieve keen awareness, although we try to use much effort and concentration, wisdom still will not result.

- Ajahn Naeb "The Development of Insight"

Your next sense contact can only happen at 1 of 6 doors

One should dwell like the snake, which sees the mouse hide in an ant-hill with six openings! By lying rolled up on the anthill - constantly watching - the snake remains on the thought: Out of which hole may this mouse appear ?!

Even so one thinks: Through which sense door may the next contact appear ?!

- Unknown

Self, empty

You are a ramshackle collection of coincidences held together by a desperate and irrational clinging, there is no center at all, everything depends on everything else, your body depends on the environment, your thoughts depend on whatever junk floats in from the environment, your emotions are largely from the reptillian end of your DNA, your intellect is a chemical computer that can't add up a zillionth as fast as a pocket calculator and even your best side is a superficial piece of social engineering that will fall apart as soon as your spouse leaves with the kids and the money in the joint account or the economy starts to fail and you get the sack, or you get conscripted into some idiot's war, or they give you news about your brain tumor, to name this amorphous morass of self-pity, vanity, and despair SELF is not only the height of hubris but it is also proof (as if we needed any) that we are above all a deluded species (we are in a trance from birth to death). Prick the balloon and what do you get? Emptiness.

-- John Burdette "Bangkok Tattoo"

Removing enchantment

When seeing these types of kamma simply as events - rather than as raw material for delight - one is struck by how inconstant and evanescent they are, totally dependent on causes and conditions that are also inconstant and evanescent. This gives rise to a sense of disenchantment for them, thus making it easier to abandon progressively subtler levels of passion and delight for new kamma and the process of becoming, until ultimately the moisture for becoming is all gone.

- Thanissaro Bhikku - "The Paradox of Becoming"

Heap

To provide a practical illustration of the five aggregates: during the present act of reading, for example, consciousness is aware of each word through the physical sense door of the eye. Cognition understands the meaning of each word, while feelings are responsible for the affective mood: whether one feels positive, negative, or neutral about this particular piece of information. Because of volition one either reads on, or stops to consider a passage in more depth, or even refers to a footnote.

Ven. Analayo "Satipatthana: The Direct Path to Realization"

My kind of run-on sentence

"[Satipatthana] has the depth and the breadth, the simplicity and the profundity for providing the foundation and the framework of a living dhamma for all, or at least, for the vast, and still growing, section of humanity that is no longer susceptible to religious or pseudo-religious sedatives, and yet feel, in their lives and minds, the urgency of fundamental problems of a non-material kind calling for solution that neither science nor the religions of faith can give."

Nyanaponika Thera "The Heart of Buddhist Meditation"

In Touch With Ourselves

When we are well with ourselves, then whatever happens, it really doesn't matter, because we have equilibrium and stability. We don't feel any lack of confidence. If not, we're always on edge, waiting to see how someone reacts to us, what people say to us or think about us. Our confidence hangs on what people tell us about how we are, how we look, how we behave. When we are really in touch with ourselves, we know ourselves beyond what others may tell us. So these three qualities - a good heart, stability, and spaciousness - these are really what you could call basic human virtues.

-Sogyal Rinpoche Tricycle Summer 2008