Search results for: "Perception"
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- Pleasant Practice, Painful Practice… But then there comes the question, “What makes you want to give rise to, say, a perception of the body as unattractive, and what makes you want to develop a perception of it as attractive? What’s the instigator? And what is this thing, this perception of attractive and not attractive?” You learn to turn around and look at that. Take that apart. In …
- Goodwill Plus… Then there are the perceptions you hold in mind. Hold in mind the perception that you need goodwill. One of the images the Buddha gives is of a monk who needs some cloth to make a robe. He’s found a piece of cloth, but part of it has been soiled, so he rips off the soiled part with his foot and takes just …
- A Strong Sense of Self… When is the perception of self conducive to true happiness, and when is perception of not-self conducive to true happiness? Right now, you’re going to take control of your acts of attention to focus in on the present moment—that’s yours for the time being—and focus on your ability to adjust the breath—that will be yours as well. As …
- The Buddha Meant What He Said… Then there’s the perception of a really still and solid energy—which also counts as breath even though it doesn’t move—that underlies all this. You have to perceive this and hold the perception in mind. That takes you to more and more subtle levels of concentration. Similarly with the formless levels of concentration. You find that one perception, when you put …
- Smoothing It… You can erase a lot of perceptions you have about the body and the mind and their relationship to each other. You learn a lot that way. Then when you have to deal with people, you put on the attitudes you need to develop when dealing with people. When you move around, you have to put on perceptions of where your body ends. You …
- Tranquility & Insight with the Breath… When the Buddha describes the steps of breath meditation, he says that you become sensitive to bodily fabrication—that’s the breath; and mental fabrication—that’s perceptions and feelings. And the instructions themselves are a kind of verbal fabrication, where you talk to yourself and tell yourself how you’re going to breathe, what you’re going to focus on. The fact that …
- When Things Seem Dark… Hold that perception in mind, because it gives you strength when things look dark. This is one of the ways you can develop patience and equanimity. These are two of the virtues that tend to be most lacking in our culture, because our culture, unlike most other cultures in the past, tends to foster impatience, even in little tiny kids—especially in little tiny …
- The Prison Break… What you’ve done is to learn about the power of perception, how it can affect your experience of the body. You’ve learned how to control your perceptions steadily, so that when you go to the perception of space, thinking of the space filling the areas between all the atoms in the body and going out beyond the skin, your ability to hold …
- Getting Your Head Around the Goal … But that’s actually the practice of pretending to be awakened because those qualities don’t come about simply through thinking about them, or perceiving ideas about them and trying to impose those perceptions on the mind—or to say, “Well, awakened beings have gone beyond duality, so I’ll just go beyond duality myself.” That’s just playing with the concepts. You have …
- Learning by Doing… Maintain a perception of the breath that’s open—in other words, open to seeing new things in terms of where the breath is felt, what kind of breathing might be comfortable right now. All those different factors—intention, attention, perception, feeling—come under what the Buddha calls “name”—as we chanted just now, Nāma-rūpam. Why do they call it “name”? It’s …
- Heightened Skillfulness… You try to understand what you’re doing, in terms of bodily fabrication—the way you breathe; verbal concentration—the way you talk to yourself; and mental fabrication—the perceptions and feelings you apply to the meditation, the perceptions that help you hold the breath in mind: how you picture the breath to yourself, the way it either originates outside and comes into the …
- Tranquility & Insight in Tandem… Then there are feelings and perceptions: feelings of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain, and the perceptions, the images you use to send messages in the mind. Those are mental fabrications. The difference between evaluating and directing thought, on the one hand, and perceptions on the other hand, is that the evaluation tends to be in sentences, whereas the perceptions are just words or …
- Head & Heart… your feelings and your perceptions. When you practice breath meditation, you’re learning ways of dealing with perceptions, ways of dealing with feelings, to breathe in a way that gives rise to ease, fullness, rapture. Learn to perceive the breath as a whole-body process. How do you perceive the breath energy in the body in such a way that you can calm down …
- Body Contemplation Is Compassionate… Where is the lust located? Where is the craving located? Is it in a particular perception of the other person? Is it in a perception about yourself, the fact that you’re attractive, and that you can seduce others? Try to be frank with yourself. Be honest with yourself—because in this particular issue, there’s so little honesty. Even between people who love …
- Off the Continuum… Here again, you watch the process of how these perceptions and feelings shape the mind and how they can be calmed down. What kind of perception allows the mind to calm down and settle into the body and feel really good? So here you’ve got concentration and insight, or tranquility and insight working together. You’re using your insight to bring tranquility to …
- The Skill of Letting Go… The appeal may have to do with your perceptions around these things, your perceptions of yourself as related to these things. Sometimes you just simply crave craving. So look into it—what is the allure? Then, in the next step, you compare the allure to the drawbacks: “When I cling to this, what happens? What are the negative results?” This is where the Buddha …
- Guardian Meditations… Mental fabrication consists of perceptions and feelings: If you fabricate these things out of ignorance, they’re going to lead to suffering as well. This is why a large part of the practice is focused on the issue of perception: the way you label things, how they fit into the larger picture of your thoughts. And this is why the Buddha didn’t just …
- Staying on Track… Then there are the perceptions. These are brain messages where you identify, “This must be that, that must be this, this must mean that, that doesn’t must mean this.” People can drive themselves crazy primarily with a verbal and mental fabrication. But even bodily fabrication: Some people when they meditate get strong feelings of energy suddenly surging through the body. Usually these are …
- For the Survival of True Happiness… Some brief perception strikes their fancy. I have a friend from childhood who encountered some wealthy people when he was young. He was always attracted to that wealthy lifestyle. Even though he never earned enough money to live that way, he tried living that way and ended up in a lot of debt, just because of this perception that took hold of his mind …
- Take the Buddha Seriously… After all, as you’re meditating here, you’ve got the breath, you’ve got yourself talking to yourself about the breath, you’ve got the perceptions that you have around the breath. What is the breath doing right now? Where is it going in the body? Then there are the feelings that arise from your directed thought and evaluation, and your perceptions. You …
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