Search results for: "Perception"
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- Right View about Right View… He calls them perceptions. In a couple of cases, they’re also called contemplations, which means that they’re ways of looking at things. When you try to map these perceptions or contemplations onto the four noble truths, it’s best to think of them as tools for furthering the duties appropriate to the truths: to develop dispassion for suffering, to abandon its cause …
- Good Fences… Learn to hold other perceptions in mind. Again, it’s not that you’re replacing true perceptions with false ones. You’re replacing one perception that’s unskillful with another perception that should be equally true, but is more skillful. There are more skillful ways of looking at things. In this way, you defang and declaw your tigers so there’s no danger to …
- Accepting the Way Things Function… Here, again, you use your perceptions. We have that chant on the unattractiveness of the body. Use that. And you can use other perceptions as well. The perception of other people when they’re lustful, when they’re greedy; they’ve got to get this that and the other thing: What kind of people are those? Just big stomachs. Do you want to be …
- Antidotes… You have to have a perception of how empty everything is, you have to understand emptiness, or you have to have an understanding of not-self. Or to learn how to see things in terms of ultimate realities. Then, once you get the correct perception, that’s going to take care of everything.” Fortunately, the Buddha wasn’t as one-eyed as that. He …
- Analyzing Anger… Third is mental fabrication – perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are labels: the images you hold in mind, the names you give to things, the meanings you give to things. Feelings are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. It’s all very simple. But he wants you to see these things because, as he points out elsewhere, when we engage in these activities …
- Insight from Jhana… There are feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness, and these are all related to how you eat. Each of these is actually an activity. Even form is something that you create through having the perception that there is a form here; there is a body here—and it keeps changing. Yet you maintain this belief that this one form goes through time. So you …
- The Committee of the Mind… That’s a perception you’re holding in mind and it may not be the best perception for right now. You want to find a perception that allows the breath energy to flow smoothly throughout the body so that the body feels nourished, the nerves feel nourished, the blood vessels feel nourished—everything. So try different perceptions to see what helps. One that I …
- Constructing & Deconstructing… Into the future, it sends us warnings: “Watch out, there’s a pain here.” That perception shapes your next moment of consciousness, and your next moment, and then your next moment. It drags them down, fastens them to the pain. You want to watch out for that. Learn how to take that process apart, because it’s the perception that makes the pain invade …
- Prevention… It was an issue of perception, the images we have that we hold in the mind. And why does the mind go for these perceptions? What makes it create perceptions that it knows deep down inside are going to create trouble? It was by doing this process over and over again that he was able to see very clearly the process of how the …
- Becoming… That’s when you experience the infinitude of that space — and at that point you begin to realize that even the perception of form or the experience of form contains an element of intention. You then begin to see this process in relation to the formless realms as well: When you drop the perception of space, you’re left with a perception of “knowing …
- Parsing Out Suffering… He tested it for a while, and finally realized it had to do with the perception, that something in the mind likes the perception of beauty, and then likes to take that perception and apply it to things around you. That was what he was attached to, not so much the bodies out there, but his perceptions about them. You could say the same …
- Holding on Strategically… Take care of your perceptions, the perceptions that keep you with the breath because, as you get more sensitive to the process of how your labels affect things, you can use that discernment to cut through all kinds of problems. So when you let go, let go strategically. When you hang on, hang on strategically. You know Ajaan Chah’s image. You’ve bought …
- Learning from Labor… What perceptions of the breath, what perceptions of the body, what perceptions of where you are in the body right now in relationship to the breath, are most conducive to getting the mind to settle down? We talk about watching the breath, and sometimes that’s an unfortunate image. It’s as if you’re up here in your head looking down at the …
- Concentration Isn’t Dumb… Breath going out into the world in all directions.” Then notice how much more peaceful that perception is than the perception of wilderness. Then you get into deeper and deeper states of concentration where the perceptions are less and less disturbing. You learn how to appreciate the fact that the mind is not being disturbed. It’s still, but it’s alert. Learn how …
- Dependent Co-arising in Fifteen Minutes… And thirdly, there are perceptions and feelings: the feeling of ease or dis-ease you have around the breath. Then there are the perceptions, the mental images you have about what’s happening as the breath comes in and goes out: What are you focusing on? Are you focusing on the air? Are you focusing on the contact at the nose? Are you focusing …
- Guardian Meditations… And then three, by the perceptions you hold in mind and the feelings you focus on. Perceptions are the mind’s labels for things: what they are, what they mean, what their value is. Feelings here are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, or neither pleasure nor pain. That’s mental fabrication. You’re doing this all the time, whether you’re sitting here meditating …
- Four Bases of Success… It’s a perception, a useful perception to develop to help you see the anger as something you don’t want to hold onto. Look for any other perceptions that are aggravating the mind, making it want to wander off into unskillful territory, and see if you can replace them with perceptions that are more conducive to wanting to stay. You could sit here …
- The Message of Mindfulness… At that stage, mindfulness becomes a perception. It simply uses perceptions as its means to remind you of what to do. You may have a mental image of the breath. Or a mental image of the spot where you want to stay focused. Or just the word, “breath.” At that point it’s not a full sentence, it’s just a word. It doesn …
- Fear of Mistakes… As you do this, you’re engaging in perceptions—your images of what the breath is, what the breath can do. It’s not just air coming in and out through the nose; it’s the flow of energy in the body. Once you’ve established that perception, then the question is: What can you do with that perception? How can you use it …
- Truth Without Air Quotes… Do you want the breath to flow through the pain from above? Through it from below? Or do you want it to go straight into the pain itself without having any other part of the body involved? That’s an issue of perception. As the instructions to breath meditation say, you try to sensitize yourself to these kinds of mental fabrications: perceptions and feelings …
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