Search results for: "Perception"
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- The Six Properties… Just think that: “infinite space.” Stay with the sensation of infinite space that comes along with the perception. The potential for it is always there; it’s simply that the perception arouses it. It’s a very pleasant state to get in. Things seem a lot less solid, a lot less oppressive. You don’t feel so trapped in the body. Ajaan Fuang once …
- Dependent Co-arising Right Now… directed thought and evaluation, and there are perceptions that hold identify the breath, and then the feelings that come as you stay with the breath or don’t stay with the breath: feelings of pleasure or feelings of dis-ease. But you can convert them to more feelings of pleasure if you use the right perceptions. So here’s an immediate way of dealing …
- To the Far Shore… your thoughts, your feelings, your perceptions, the things that you cling to. Yet you find that if you put them together in the right way, as you are when you’re getting the mind in concentration—you focus on the breath to create a feeling of ease, you use the perception of the breath filling the body, the ease filling the body, you think …
- Breath Energies… How does that feel? Just hold that perception in mind, because a lot of this does have to do with perception. If your perceptions say that this is impossible, then they’re going to block your ability to sense these things. If you allow yourself to perceive them as possible, then you open up all kinds of possibilities. The more you get to know …
- Karma for Freedom… You can hold different perceptions in your mind and see what effect the act of holding those perceptions can have on your experience of the body. Start with the images you have of what’s happening with the breath, where it comes in the body when you breathe in, where it goes out, how it runs through the body as you’re breathing in …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
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