Search results for: "Perception"
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- The Broken Gong… Question your perceptions around the pain. Your inner commentary involves two levels of fabrication: what the Buddha called verbal fabrication, which is your conversation inside about the pain, and mental fabrication, the perceptions, the images you hold in mind and around the pain. One important perception to question concerns the relationship between your sensation of the body and the sensation of the pain. Are …
- Deconstruct Your Emotions… Then, the mental fabrication consists of your perceptions and feelings. If you’re dealing with the breath in a skillful way, you’ve got the feelings on your side right there. As for the perceptions, they’re very similar to directed thought and evaluation. Think of directed thought and evaluation as the full sentences that go through your mind, whereas the perceptions are just …
- Dwellings… Your inner senses get more sensitive, and particularly you begin to see how your perceptions shape things. As the Buddha said, perceptions and feelings shape the mind. So what are the feelings right now that are shaping your mind? What are the perceptions? Can you change them? When he talks about being mindful of feelings, he talks about feelings “not of the flesh” and …
- Skills Needed at Death… In particular, the perceptions: One of the points that the forest ajaans make again and again is that if you want to understand all five aggregates, get so that you know one really well. The one they all seem to focus on is perception. Seeing how arbitrary your perceptions are can help loosen up a lot of the firm assumptions you have about things …
- Not-self for the Sake of Happiness… You can change the perceptions you have around the breath and how you’re relating to the body. Whatever sense of “you” you have right now comes from control. We exert this control to find happiness, and it’s in this way that we develop the three main roles of our sense of self. There’s the sense of self as the producer that …
- Freedom, Conditioned & Not… The question, of course, is what kind of Oneness is that? It’s an idea; it’s a perception. And how reliable is that perception? You can apply the perception of Oneness to all kinds of things. But as the Buddha pointed out, even the highest state of Oneness of non-duality is fabricated. There’s a state where there’s the Oneness of …
- Eight Principles… You learn a lot of things about how you hold the body, how you breathe, how the breath has an impact on your perceptions, how your perceptions have an impact on the breath—because that’s another way of adjusting the breath: simply changing your perception of it. Visualizing the body as a sponge is one perception that can be helpful in opening up …
- Potentials for Rapture… Of course, the questions you ask are going to be determined by your perceptions. How do you perceive this body you’ve got here? There’s a tendency we mentioned this afternoon to have your sense of the body composed of all the different pains, and you’ve stitched them all together. That, of course, makes them worse. And it’s a totally arbitrary …
- Free from Buddha Nature… You try them on and see what seems to work best, and you’ll find that different perceptions will work best at different times. So it’s good to have a whole range of perceptions available. So what you’ve got here are all the elements of fabrication, all brought together in one place, with knowledge, rather than ignorance. As you work with them …
- Steering the Raft… One of the contemplations the Buddha recommends is called the perception of drawbacks, where you think of all the different diseases the body can have. Ajaan Funn has an interesting interpretation of that. He says there are parts of the body whose diseases are those parts of the body. The eye is a disease. The ear is a disease. There’s the potential for …
- Right Questions in the Right Order… I’ve gone through the Canon trying to find passages where people listen to the Buddha’s teachings on the three, well, actually, they’re perceptions. There’s only one case where a monk listens to the questionnaire on the three perceptions and gains stream-entry. You can assume that he had already heard the four noble truths. So we know the context in …
- One Point, Two Points, Many Points… You’ve got perception: whatever perceptions you have of the breath, whatever ways you have of conceiving the breath. That’s an effective way of getting the mind to settle down: simply by holding that perception in mind. You pay attention, which is another element of form. You’ve got the intention to stay. And then you’ve got the feeling that arises when …
- Feeding Frenzy: Dependent Co-arising… Form, feeling, perception, thought fabrications, and sensory consciousness: These are the things we feed on. When we’re meditating we’re trying to create a good bhava, a good place for the mind to stay in the present moment. If you create a world for yourself that maintains its reference to the present, then it’s a lot easier to see what that world …
- Serenity… This also has to do with your perceptions but it’s more a matter of your perceptions of how things are going in your life. Any perception that allows you to let things go at least for the time being: Hold on to that perception. Let go of concerns for your work, your family, the world at large. You can’t be responsible for …
- The Questions of Suffering… With perceptions, we tend to identify with our views about things. “This has to be this and that has to be that.” We can build all kinds of identities around this. This is where a lot of us go wrong. There’s that belief that if you believe something, if you see something in a particular way, then you’re better than other people …
- Endurance Through Discernment… Work with your perceptions around the breath. Work with your perceptions around the elements of the body: earth, water, wind, fire, space. That will give you some insight into exactly what you’re bringing to the present moment. Because you’re bringing a lot more to the present moment than you’re aware of, and you’re not going to find that out until …
- Focus on Your Intention… Form deforms, feelings feel, perceptions perceive, fabrications fabricate, and consciousness cognizes—the point being that these are activities. The word “aggregate” has an unfortunate connotation. It sounds like gravel, little bits and pieces of rock. The aggregates probably got that name in English from a convention in early modern European philosophy which said that groups of things were either systems or aggregates. Systems were …
- Preparing to Die Well… It’s one kind of perception you have to let go of, to calm things down inside. But there are also perceptions you have to develop about how the breathing process actually works in the body—especially if you find breathing laborious. If it takes a lot of effort to breathe in, much of that has to do with the perception of what you …
- Elemental Normalcy… He told me he learned how to see the perceptions coming up in his mind simply just as that, perceptions, and he learned how to recognize them when they were off and when they were not. A lot of it had to do with not identifying with the perceptions, having a sense of the observer who just watches. And even though this observer is …
- Pain… When you look at it directly, see what’s the actual sensation of the pain as opposed to your perceptions around it. Try to tease those out, because the perceptions are the troublemakers. They’re the bridge by which the physical pain comes into the mind and becomes a mental pain. As I’ve often recommended, think of the pain as going away from …
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