Artillery All Around
August 16, 2011
The mind is such an old hand at fabrication that it doesn’t really notice all the fabrication it’s doing all the time. You sit here watching the breath and you think it’s just awareness with the breath, pure and simple. But the type of awareness you bring is already fabricated, and the breath itself is already fabricated. The Buddha calls the breath bodily fabrication, and, from the side of the mind, you’re bringing in verbal fabrication and mental fabrication. There are the places where you direct your thinking and your evaluation of what’s actually going on: That’s the verbal fabrication. Then there are the feelings and perceptions you also bring: That’s mental fabrication. We’re doing this all the time. Every experience we have is taken from some raw materials from the past, which we then fabricate into a present experience.