Search results for: "Perception"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. Breath Meditation: The Third Tetrad
     … In the second tetrad, you’re sensitizing yourself to that sense of rapture and the sense of well-being, and to the perceptions that maintain them. Then you notice how those feelings and perceptions have an impact on the mind. Then you try to calm that impact so that the mind grows more solid and still. Those two tetrads give you the background for … 
  8. Seeing Distinctions
     … A feeling arises, then a perception arises on top of that. They’re two separate things. We tend to glom them together. But if you want to free yourself from suffering, you’ve got to see that they are distinct. Then there may be an intention that builds on top of the perception. Again, you want to see that as something distinct. And there … 
  9. Gather ’Round the Breath
     … What you want to do is bring all of you here, all of your thoughts, all of your feelings, perceptions. Concentrate right around here. Ajaan Lee talks about two types of aggregates. There are those that basically head outside, interested in forms outside, feelings and perceptions of those forms, thoughts about those forms, and your awareness of those forms. Then there are those that … 
  10. A Touchstone at the Breath
     … But to do that, you need to have practice in maintaining that perception of space, space, space, all the time. So right here in your experience of the body is when you learn about the other aggregates as well: the feeling aggregate, the perception aggregate, fabrication, and consciousness. It’s when your attention is rooted in this awareness of the body from the inside … 
  11. Focus on the Precepts
     … Then you apply the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and non-self to those actions and their results, because the duty with regard to those five clinging-aggregates is to comprehend them. To comprehend them means to understand them to the point where you have no passion, aversion, or delusion around them, and you comprehend them through applying these perceptions. The perceptions are actions—they … 
  12. Free Sources of Energy
     … And of course, when you’re focusing on the breath, you have to have certain perceptions in mind and you’re developing certain feelings. That’s mental fabrication. In this case, what kind of breathing would feel energizing? What kind of perception of your abilities right now would be helpful? Your freedom to search for potentials that may not be obvious is something you … 
  13. What You Bring to the Moment
     … Relate to it in that way, bring that perception to the breathing, and that’ll help open things up. Or think of the breath as surrounding you—you’re totally bathed in the breath all around. Bring that perception to the breath and see what that does. This will give you some insight into the simple process of conditioning. On the one hand, it … 
  14. Many Desires, Many Selves
     … We tell ourselves that we lust for a particular body, but is it just the body? Is it your perception of the body? A lot of it has to do with your perceptions—because our perceptions are like sketches. There’s no perception of the world or even of yourself, your own body, that could encompass all the details. So we live with cartoons … 
  15. Realizing Cessation
     … And it’s because of that unchanging dimension that the three perceptions actually work. In other words, you believe that they lead you to something unchanging, which is why you apply those perceptions to all the things you could crave, all the things you could cling to, to reinforce the perception that they don’t measure up to what you really want. So it … 
  16. In Charge of Your Moods
     … basically, your perceptions and your feelings. Perceptions are the images or individual words that function as labels in the mind, saying that this is this, or that is that. With verbal fabrication, you’re thinking in full sentences; with mental fabrication, the perceptions are just single words or images. And then there are feelings: Here, we’re trying to develop a feeling of ease … 
  17. Tending the Flame
     … Then try to steady that perception. You’re peeling away mental activities, one by one by one, until you finally can drop the perception of space, and you’re with just, “awareness.” Maintain that perception. And then Ajaan Fuang would say, “Drop the oneness.” It seems like nothing’s happening at all. You get the mind very, very still. When things are balanced like … 
  18. Breath Meditation When It’s Hard to Breathe
     … You can hold a perception of space in mind when the body gets tight. When it seems like there’s no comfortable spot in the body to focus at all, think of space. Space surrounds the body and can permeate through the body in between all the atoms. Even inside the atoms there’s space. That perception helps to cut through the shells of … 
  19. The Missing Fabrication
     … It responds very quickly to these processes of intention, attention, and perception: how you pay attention to things, how you perceive things, the labels you put on things, the images you have in the mind. The Buddha talks about perception being a mental fabrication, but it also has an impact on the way you breathe and how you experience the breath—and you don … 
  20. The Perception of Inconstancy
    Someone asked a question the other day about the perception of inconstancy, aniccaṃ. She was saying that many of her friends talked about how it was a very comforting contemplation, but she didn’t find any comfort in it at all. And that’s the whole point: It’s not supposed to be comforting. But it is meant bring you to your senses. “All … 
  21. Can Do
     … How do you breathe in a way that gives rise to a sense of refreshment? Remember, there are lots of different ways you can conceive of the breath, and already you’re beginning to use mental fabrication, i.e., perceptions, as you focus on the breath, because these will be the big issues: your perceptions around the pain. They start with your perceptions of … 
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