Search results for: "Perception"

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  2. Breath, Tranquility, & Insight
     … The third type of fabrication is mental fabrication, which is composed of feelings of pleasure, pain or neither pleasure nor pain, and then your perceptions. Those things—feelings and perceptions—have an impact on the mind. Perception is different from directed thought and evaluation in that perceptions are not really sentences. They’re more like images or single words—like “breath,” or “big,” or … 
  3. A Cure for the Sluggish Mind
     … That’s where the evaluation comes in: “How can I think about things in a way that will energize me, energize the mind, give it more determination to want to see things through?” So you apply directed thought and evaluation, and then you look at the perceptions. What are the perceptions lying in the back of the mind? Again, if it’s a perception … 
  4. Fixing the Present
     … You want to calm both the feelings and the perceptions. And a first step in that direction is simply to see what perception’s operating there in the background. One of the ways you do that is by consciously trying to change the perception, bringing a new perception into the mind, one that’s less likely to stir up those emotions. Then you can … 
  5. Second Wind
     … What does that perception do? Or you can ask yourself about perceptions of front and back. Sometimes a pain will come up and you locate it in your stomach, say, or in your chest, in the front. But you can ask yourself: What if that’s actually a pain that’s in the back? And how would that relate to your sensations of the … 
  6. Concentration Food
    One of the reasons why we focus on the breath is because it’s so responsive to your thoughts and perceptions. You tell yourself to breathe in long, and it goes long. Tell it to be shorter, it becomes shorter. Deeper, more shallow, heavier, lighter: The breath responds. You can tell it to go to different parts of the body. Here, of course, we … 
  7. The Desire for Things to Be Different
     … And try to use a perception that helps me stay.” Think of the breath as a whole-body process: Your shoulders are breathing, your arms are breathing, your ears are breathing, your forehead is breathing, every part is breathin. See what that perception does. It makes the breath—and the sense of ease when you breathe comfortably—easy to spread around. So you look … 
  8. Five Reflections
     … This has a lot to do with your perceptions, such as the perception that the pain is taking control of a part of your body, or that the pain is a big solid block. You’ve got to get through that perception by perceiving the pain as individual moments, and then perceive the individual moments as going away from you when they appear, rather … 
  9. The Primacy of the Mind (2)
     … You breathe in and out sensitive to mental fabrication—in other words, feelings and perceptions. So, what perceptions do you apply to the breath? How do you visualize the breath to yourself, how do you depict it to yourself as you breathe in, as you breathe out, where it’s coming in, where it’s going out, how it comes in, how it goes … 
  10. Delight in Stillness
     … So just stay with that perception. Then appreciate that you’re free from a lot of the disturbances that were there before. But as you stay, you find that there’s still some disturbance there—you’ll want to go to the perception of space, which is even less disturbed than the perception of earth. You can follow this process all the way through … 
  11. Damming & Diverting
     … What kind of breathing would feel good? Once it feels good, how do you spread that goodness around? How do you maintain that sense of goodness when you’re spreading it? And then in the background, there are the feelings and perceptions: the feeling of ease that comes when the breath feels good and also the perceptions that hold you in place—perceptions of … 
  12. The Not-Self Discourse
     … feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness. That dealt with the aggregates in the present moment. Then he continued by saying you can extrapolate from the present moment and think back to the past. Those who are able to remember past lives, what are they remembering? They’re remembering form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness. And wherever you could go in the future in the universe … 
  13. The Power of Present Kamma
     … Now, perceptions will come in, but don’t let the unskillful perceptions lay claim to all the forms of fabrication going on. At the very least, have the breath calm. That enables you to think more calmly and to be able to choose your perceptions with more awareness. So the fact that our experience of past karma is filtered through our present karma is … 
  14. Patience
     … In other words, make use of the power of your perception, because a lot of how you experience the body right here, right now, is going to depend on how you perceive things, how you envision things to yourself, how you talk to yourself. So use the power of your perceptions to give yourself some strength. If nothing in the body right now feels … 
  15. Training Your Inner Critic
     … Mental is perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the mental labels you apply to things. Feelings are feeling-tones: pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. It’s important to see the connection between these two levels. Every intentional bodily action is going to involve the breath. If you couldn’t breathe, you couldn’t move the body. Every verbal act is going to require that … 
  16. Rehab Work
     … how we fabricate feelings and perceptions, and how those feelings and perceptions shape the state of the mind. We’re taking a proactive stance. Sometimes this means just watching for a while and not doing anything so that you can see things more clearly. But once you see things clearly, then when you see you’re doing something uncomfortable or harmful, you can change … 
  17. Anger
     … That then sloughs over into the mental fabrication of what perceptions you’re holding about that person. Is the person a beast? Really? And then there’s your perception about what you can stand and cannot stand. You’ve got to change that perception. If you can’t stand it when people say things about you that are insulting and that seem to be … 
  18. Learning by Doing
     … You can try different perceptions; you can try different ways of breathing. This element of experimentation is important because we’re not here just to force ourselves to see things the way the Buddha saw them. We’re here to develop our own sensitivity, because it’s through our sensitivity that we develop discernment. We see things as they are actually happening and then … 
  19. Teachings to Rahula
     … You can’t say, “Well, I held this particular object in mind for a few breaths and then I noted something else and then I noted something else.” If you practice that way, you’ll never know what happens if you really do hold one perception in mind. You don’t know the power of that perception until you’ve pushed it and tested … 
  20. Standing Where the Buddha Stood
     … feelings and perceptions. As you move the mind through the levels of jhana, directed thought and evaluation get abandoned on the second level. That’s where they grow still. Then bodily fabrication, the in-and-out breath, grows still in the fourth. What you’ve got left at that point are feelings and perceptions. These are the big issues, because as the Buddha pointed … 
  21. Random Word Generators
     … You’ve learned about fabrication—the tendency we have to churn things out—together with perception. Perception is the act of the mind that gives meanings to things. This is the real instigator. The process of fabrication just churns up stuff. It’s the generator of these random sentences, while perception is what gives them meaning. Once you’ve given them meaning, as Ajahn … 
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