Search results for: "Perception"
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- Doing Aggregates… You can see that when the mind slips off, it’s engaging in perceptions and thought fabrication. There’s usually a feeling. When you’re here with the concentration, you’re adding the form of the body as an anchor. But still, there’s also feeling and perception, fabrication, and consciousness. So everything you need to understand is right here. You’re getting practice …
- The Carrot & the Stick… Think of the breath in different ways, what we call de-perception. Take apart your perceptions. Sometimes you don’t even know you have any particular perception. The way to deal with that is to just tell yourself, “You can breathe in and out through every pore. It’s possible.” Now, what would that be like? What would it feel like if you were …
- Tranquility & Insight… Our whole experience of the form of the body, our feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, even our consciousness, has an element of intention in it. We’re doing it for a particular purpose. We want happiness out of these things, in line with whatever we conceive the happiness to be. And we shape these things because of our passion for the happiness. It’s a …
- Kamma & Rebirth—A Handful of Leaves… You can also ask yourself if you’ve picked up a perception from your childhood that when pain comes it has an intention to hurt you: That might be lurking someplace in your mind. Learn how to take these perceptions apart. In the Buddha’s instructions on breath mindfulness, this is called calming mental fabrication—in other words, the perceptions by which you shape …
- The Karma of Not-self… In other words, given that there are actions, what kind of action is the perception of not-self? What kind of action is the perception of self? These are things that you do. The question then is: Given that these are forms of karma, when are they skillful and when are they not? The karma of self the Buddha calls “I-making” and “my …
- An Exercise in Freedom… your feelings and perceptions. Perceptions here are the labels that the mind applies to things. For example, there may be sensations in the body that you’ve assumed to be solid sensations but when you look at them more carefully, you realize there’s breath energy flowing in there. That means you have to change your perception. Or look at the mental picture you …
- Big Things in Little Things… There’s bodily fabrication, which is the in-and-out breath; verbal fabrication, directed thought and evaluation, the way you talk to yourself; and then mental fabrication—feelings and perceptions. These are things you experience directly as you meditate. You’re focused on the breath, you direct your thoughts to the breath, you evaluate the breath, you use perceptions in order to maintain your …
- Protecting Yourself Against Yourself… Bodily fabrication is the factor that fabricates the body, which is the breath; the factors that fabricate speech are directed thought and evaluation; and the factors that fabricate the mind are perceptions and feelings—perceptions being the labels you put on things, and feelings being the feeling-tones of pleasure, pain, and neither pleasure nor pain. You notice, as you focus on the breath …
- More than Just Letting Go… Mental fabrications are feelings and perceptions. Feelings are feeling-tones of pleasure, pain, neither-pleasure-nor-pain. Perceptions are the images you have in your mind, either individual words or visual images, that the mind uses to communicate to itself with. These are the processes that usually get shaped in ignorance, but now we’re bringing some knowledge to them. We’re trying to …
- Insight Is Seeing What’s Worth Doing… These mind-states will be related to the way you breathe, they’ll be related to the way you think to yourself about things, the way you talk to yourself about things, and the perceptions and feelings you focus on. All these things are what the Buddha calls fabrication. He says we engage in fabrication in ignorance, which is why we suffer. But when …
- Verbal Fabrication… And then mental fabrication—your perceptions and feelings. As Ajaan Lee would point out, the verbal fabrications are real troublemakers. The way we talk to ourselves can create a lot of problems in the present moment, depending on the kind of commentary we’re making. So an important part of meditation is learning to talk to yourself in a new way. This, of course …
- Step Back & Watch… to keep in mind the possibility that sometimes our perceptions are off. The concentration gives us a place to step back, so that we can examine things, to watch the perception as it comes, to watch it as it goes, and to ask ourselves: Which of our different sets of colored glasses have we been wearing? The greed glasses? The ill will glasses? The …
- For a Routine That Isn’t Routine… But take, for instance, the fact that you have a perception of the shape of the body: That perception is an activity. You have a perception about how the breath comes in, how the breath goes out. You have a perception of where you are in the body in relationship to the breath. So you can ask questions: “How about changing that?” Last night …
- Accepting the Way Out… That’s tied in with mental fabrication, your feelings and your perceptions of what’s going on. And one of the big perceptions that keeps you in a bad mood is, “Why me? Why am I the victim when everybody else is happy, free from suffering?” This is because you’re not looking. Look around you. There’s injustice all over the place. This …
- A Sense of Space Inside… And hold in mind the perception that the whole body is breathing: all the nerves, all the blood vessels, all the cells. That creates a nice spacious sense here in the present. See how long you can maintain that perception—and what happens to your sense of the body, your sense of yourself sitting here as you keep that perception in mind. Read the …
- The Quality of Your Awareness… You also try to quiet down the feelings and perceptions in the mind. In other words, figure out how you might conceive of the breath, how you might picture the breath to yourself, to allow it to become more quiet and to allow the mind to become quieter too. As things grow more quiet, then you begin to see that, at least in the …
- Immersed in the Body… If your sense of self is flitting all around — first with a feeling, then with a perception, then back to a feeling again, then to perception and feeling, like those weird amoeba-like shapes that flit across the surface of water — it’s hard to observe, to get a sense of, “What is this self? Why does the mind need a sense of self …
- Jhāna & Discernment… Then, three, there’s mental fabrication, which are your perceptions and feelings. Perceptions, here, would be the images you hold in mind—like thinking of the breath as a quality of energy flowing through the body, rather than air coming in and out the nose. Those are two separate pictures you could have about what happens when you breathe, and you can ask yourself …
- Determined on Awakening… Can you let go of those activities? Usually they’re different perceptions you’re holding on to. You get the breath very refined, very refined, and then you can ask yourself about the perception you have that you have to breathe in and breathe out: To what extent can you let go of that perception? See what happens when the body is really, really …
- A Sense of Humor… These feelings are your feelings, your perceptions are your perceptions, and so on down the line. But you can suddenly shift around and see, “No. They’re not.” They’re the same things—the same feelings, the same perceptions—but you put them in an entirely different context and they’re entirely different things. That’s the nature of a lot of insight. So …
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