Search results for: "Perception"
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- Clinging-Aggregates in Context… Right view involves perceptions and fabrications and consciousness. Right resolve: again, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness. Right speech and right action involve your body, along with your intentions—which, again, are fabrications—and perceptions. You could go down, making a list for all the different factors of the path, and you’d see that they all make use of aggregates. But now the relation is different …
- Friends with The Breath… Then when you feel up to it, you can focus on the pain directly, and start asking questions about your perceptions around it. The Buddha talks about how we fabricate our present experience out of a combination of past karma and present intentions. Among those present intentions are your perceptions, the images you hold in mind. These have a huge impact on how you …
- 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 …
- Lessons in Happiness… Then you sensitize yourself not only to the feeling, but also to the other member of what is called mental sankhara, mental fabrication, which is perception: the perceptions you hold in mind that induce pleasure, the perceptions that induce a sense of fullness. Which ways of visualizing the body, labeling the breath, understanding the breath, are helpful? Which ones are not? Which ones are …
- Tranquility & Insight… There’s form, feeling, perception, fabrication itself, and consciousness. Or there’s another list called the three fabrications: bodily fabrication—which is the breath; verbal fabrication—directed thought and evaluation; and mental fabrication—perceptions and feelings. These things are all involved in doing the concentration. In terms of the five aggregates: You’ve got the body here that you’re focused on: That’s …
- Don’t Objectify… Notice that the perception that would work for you, the perception that would feel best for you at any particular time, will differ from time to time. You can’t just hold one perception in mind all the time. You need to have a whole range of them available. This is how you become skilled. Breathing becomes more comfortable, and it’s easier to …
- The Brahmaviharas Are Not a Complete Practice … feelings and perceptions. These are the activities by which we put things together in the present moment. The Buddha teaches breath meditation in a way to get you sensitive to the fact that you’re putting these things together. First, you develop good bodily fabrications and mental fabrications, and then you calm them down. And the instructions for breath meditation themselves are a kind …
- Appreciating Dispassion… There are perceptions of the breath that allow you to visualize the breath going through the different parts of the body to create a sense of the well-being. You can maintain it and you can spread it around. If you find a blockage in the body, you need to have a perception that the breath can go through the blockage. If there are …
- See Yourself as Active Verbs… The aggregates are form, feeling, perception, mental fabrications, and consciousness—all of which the Buddha defines with verbs. Form, he says, deforms. In other words, in the form of your body there’s nothing static. Feelings feel: pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. Perceptions perceive. Thought fabrications fabricate, and consciousness cognizes. These are all verbs, and we cling to them. The act of clinging …
- Understanding Aggregates… Then there’s perception: how you label things in the world. Your first act of perception is to figure out what’s edible and what’s not. Think of a little child crawling across the room. When it encounters something. what does it do? The first thing it does is to put it in its mouth. So, our first perceptions revolve around edible/not …
- Cooking the Present Moment… And finally, there’s perception and feeling. These are called mental fabrication. The perceptions are images you hold in mind—for example, the way you visualize the breath to yourself, or the way you visualize where you are in your body right now. Exactly where are you? Most of us seem to be living right behind our eyes. But as you get more sensitive …
- Matters of Life & Death… As you grow old, there will be the perception of your getting old. As you’re sick, there’s the perception of illness. And you begin to realize that just carrying those perceptions around is a real burden. If you have practice in meditation, you learn you can put aside those perceptions, any perception that comes up that’s going to burden the mind …
- The Breath All the Way… If you find that the sponge perception is more calming, you hold on to that. If it’s more easeful to think of the breath coming down from the top of the head, or in and out of the palms of your hands, the soles of your feet, then hold those perceptions in mind. There are lots of different perceptions you can play with …
- In & of Themselves… Then you look at what kind of perceptions help you settle down: perceptions about the breath, perceptions about where you are in your body right now as you try to get everything to fit together. You’re going to be trying things out. This is where the patience comes in—your willingness to keep trying things out. You try something, you sit with it …
- Complaining Rights… Maybe there’s a connection.” In particular, you want to look for perceptions, the little messages that the mind sends to itself, either visual images or words or a simple tone of voice. These are often the things that cause the stress—because you cling to a particular type of perception. A perception comes up, you grab hold of it, there’s stress. You …
- Acceptance… The three characteristics or the three perceptions played a role in fulfilling the duties for the four noble truths, which means that they’re meant to be approached as strategies, as perceptions you apply for the purpose of completing the duties. The Buddha never called them characteristics. They’re perceptions that you can apply in your quest to abandon craving and to comprehend suffering …
- In the Elephant’s Footprint… You’ve got the perception of the breath that helps you hold it in mind. It helps to use the perception of the breath as a whole-body process. That allows the sense of ease and well-being to spread through the body. It’s a useful perception. Directed thought and evaluation are your fabrications. The intentions that hold you in the higher levels …
- The Buddha’s Standards or Yours?… As for feelings and perceptions, the feeling of pleasure that you’re trying to create with the breath and the perceptions you have around the feelings, the perceptions you have around the breath, are all going to have an impact on shaping your mind. So what you’ve got here is a microcosm. These are the forces that are going to shape the rest …
- Clinging & Feeding… This is what the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, not-self are intended for: to develop that sense of no longer wanting to eat these things, seeing that they have their dangers and that they don’t provide the satisfaction that you thought that they would. But those aren’t the only perceptions he has you apply. Sometimes there’s the perception of seeing these …
- Fear of Missing Out… Finally, mental fabrications are perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the labels you apply to things, the words or mental pictures you use to identify things—such as whatever mental pictures you have of the breath as it goes through the body, where it starts, how the breath is actually happening in the body, what way you can picture the breath to yourself so that …
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