Search results for: "Perception"
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- The Regularity of the Dhamma… Mental fabrication is feeling and perception. There’s an intentional element there as well. So the intention is what’s important, and it plays itself out in feeling, perception, and form. Prior to fabrication comes ignorance. Ignorance means not seeing things in terms of the four noble truths — in other words, applying inappropriate attention. When you look at things in an inappropriate way, you …
- The Right Place to Look… And then there are the perceptions you hold in mind that help you stay with the breath. You’re supposed to get sensitive to those perceptions; get sensitive to the feelings that come from staying with the breath. Those perceptions and feelings are called mental fabrication. Then, when you’re sensitive to them, you notice which ones, when you focus on them, allow the …
- A Simple Path Through a Complex Map… Feeling appears at least four times; in some formulations, perception appears twice; sometimes it appears three times. Feeling appears first in fabrications, which come right after ignorance, as part of mental fabrication, along with perception. It appears again in name and form. There it has different company. It’s accompanied by perception again, but also by intention, attention, contact. It appears again right after …
- Your Main Foundation… What you’re learning about here is the power of perception, the labels you place on things, and how perception can have a huge impact on your feeling tone. So right there you’re playing with feelings and mind states. At the same time, you’re gaining a sense of what’s skillful and not, which equates with analysis of qualities, one of the …
- Well-armed Efforts… And then finally you look at your perceptions around the issue: What kind of monster do you see this person is? You see the person as a devious snake? Or as a spider who’s poisonous? What’s the perception holding that ill will in your mind? Usually you’ll find that there’s a feeling of pain—sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle …
- Directed Thoughts, Random Thoughts… What does it actually feel like? You begin to notice that certain perceptions of the breath have an impact on how you actually feel the breath. Try to choose a perception that opens your awareness to breath coming in from all directions—not just through the nose, but also through the eyes, the ears, in from the back of the head, down from the …
- Forest Bathing… feelings and perceptions. Perceptions are the labels you put on things. You identify this as this and that as that. Sometimes your perceptions are accurate; sometimes they’re not. Sometimes even when they’re accurate, they lead to more greed, aversion, and delusion. What we’re trying to find are perceptions that are actually accurate and conducive to getting the mind past suffering, to …
- Heedfulness All the Way Through… You can just be with the perception of breath filling the body. Be very careful not to let go of that perception. Otherwise, you start wallowing in the sense of ease. You lose your focus, and nothing gets developed. But if you stay with your one object, you begin to see the movements of the mind around that. This is where insight comes in …
- In Alignment… So you’ve got to get everything ready, because if you’re staying in the formless states, it’s simply the perception that keeps you there. And until you can maintain a perception so that it’s totally seamless and totally constant, you’re not ready. Now, while you’re working with the breath, you’ve got the breath here. When it comes in …
- Cooking the Present Moment… Then mental fabrications are perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the mental labels you apply to things, telling you what they are, what they mean, how important they are. Like with a red light: You know that red is red. You know what it means. It means stop. And you know in this case it’s important. You’d better stop. Feelings are feeling tones …
- Body Contemplation… What to do now? He came to see that the issue was with the perception of attractive and the perception of unattractive, and the desires behind those perceptions: the fact that we want to lie to ourselves. Look into that desire, right there, because that’s the key to why we keep on suffering. We cling to the things that make us suffer, and …
- Cutting Roads… When you keep that perception in mind—an energy center with energy flowing from that center in a way that feels good, feels nourishing—then you just learn how to maintain that perception. Over time, that perception will gain more and more staying power, because the breath gets infused with that association. You tend to associate that level of energy, that type of energy …
- Mindful & Grateful for Lessons in Freedom… Then there’s mental fabrication, your perceptions and your feelings. You have more room for creating feelings in the body and in the mind than you might have thought. The present moment is not just a given. The way you breathe and the way you perceive the breath will have an effect on how you feel it. So what kind of perceptions can you …
- Body & Mind from Within… You have perceptions about how the breath moves in the body. You have perceptions about where you are in your body right now. Are you in your head? Are you in your chest? Are you inhabiting the whole body? These are activities that the Buddha says are usually done in ignorance. When you look inside, that’s the big factor in dependent co-arising …
- Building a Home for the Mind… If there’s a pain in one part of the body and the more you focus on it, the more it seems to get worse, then ask yourself, “What is my perception adding to the pain? Can I think about the pain using other perceptions?” So the evaluation here evaluates both the breath and the other physical aspects of the body, and it evaluates …
- How We Cling… They’re actually just activities—perceptions, thought constructs, or feelings—and they’re pretty ephemeral. The purpose of meditation is to get you more directly acquainted with these activities in a hand-on way. As you’re focusing here on the breath, the breath is form. You’re trying to create a feeling of pleasure. You do that by holding certain perceptions in mind …
- Inconstancy… You’ve found something that doesn’t have to push against the perceptions of inconstancy, because it’s constant by nature. This is what those three perceptions are for, as a measuring stick. When you arrive at something in the meditation that seems really good, you can ask yourself, “Is this really constant?” You have to watch it carefully because sometimes the higher levels …
- Question Your Actions… This relates to the next of the aggregates, which is perception. What are the perceptions you’re carrying around, the images you have in the back of your mind? When someone does something, and you ask them, “Why do you always do that?” actually, they’re not always doing it. It comes and goes and comes and goes, but there’s a perception in …
- Right View: Feeding Instructions… Then you’ve got feeling and perception. Feeling means feeling tone, like pleasure and pain, or neutral feelings of neither pleasure nor pain. Perceptions are the labels you place on things, saying this is this and that is that. Then there’s fabrication – the way the mind puts together ideas out of its perceptions, comments on things, asks questions about things, and gives answers …
- Living Forward, Understanding Backward… In other words, when pain arises, you’re aware of the pain, but you don’t have to identify with the pain, or with the perception that says, “my pain.” You can cut right through it and you find that letting it drop makes a huge difference. Or even just the perception of “pain”: You learn how to question that. You learn to see …
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