Search results for: "Perception"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Practice All Day… just the perception knowing, or space, or breath. As soon as you find yourself leaving that one perception, you want to know why. If you have good reasons, if there are things to think about, okay. Things you have to deal with, okay. But if the mind is just spinning stories on its own, you say, “Look: You’ve got better work to do …
- At Play… So, as you’re sitting here meditating, think of yourself being at play—at play with the four elements of the body; at play with feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness, your awareness—on those basic, building-block terms. You begin to see even how not only are your perceptions somewhat arbitrary, but even the Buddha’s perceptions are conventions. You see this in some …
- Into the Cave with the Tiger… As for the three fabrications as you experience in meditation—breath, directed thought and evaluation, perceptions and feelings: This is the level of fabrication from which those other fabrications grow. You can’t move the body without the breath. You can’t speak without having engaged in some directed thought and evaluation in the mind first. You can’t think without feelings and perceptions …
- A Concentration Checklist… Hold in mind the perception that breath can go anywhere, can permeate anything. See if holding that perception helps you overcome your doubt. As for sloth and torpor, the way to deal with that, of course, is in line with the traditional list that the Buddha gives: Change your meditation object; rub your limbs; if you have any chants that you’ve memorized, run …
- Countercultural Conditioning… That’s where the perceptions come in. How do you picture the breath to yourself? We have so many perceptions, so many labels we’ve picked up from our time in whatever society we’ve grown up in. We have some cartoon ideas about how the breath works. We have to examine them, because some of them are helpful, and some of them are …
- Adult Education… We think of life as starting out with the first twenty years or so as the time for education, and then it’s time to work—but that, again, is somebody else’s perception. It doesn’t have to be the perception that you apply to your own life. What kind of education is important for you? What skills do you really want to …
- Discernment in Concentration… There’s the perception that holds you with the breath, the image of the breath that you have in mind that helps you stay with the breath: That’s perception. You’re thinking about the breath and adjusting the breath, evaluating how to make the breath comfortable and, once it’s comfortable, evaluating how to keep it comfortable, and then when you have a …
- Concentration Develops Right View… very precise, seeing the different factors in the mind that go into getting the mind focused on a certain perception, on a certain feeling, and then in trying to maintain that perception, to repeat it again and again and again, and to repeat that feeling again and again. A lot of the factors around that process are the factors of “name” in name-and …
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