Search results for: "Perception"
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- The Forerunner of All Things… And finally there’s mental fabrication, which is composed of feelings and perceptions. Feelings are feelings of pleasure, pain, or neither-pleasure-nor-pain. Perceptions are the images or labels that you apply to things—the messages from your lizard brain, which has images that get you breathing in a certain way, which will create a certain feeling. If it’s a threatening image …
- Feeding on the Breath… You can’t put pressure on something unless you have a perception of something solid for it to put pressure against. So try to destroy any sense any perception you have of the solidity of the body. Think of the breath energy as being your sensation of the body. In other words, your awareness of the body right now is all breath, and that …
- A Thread into Awareness… Otherwise, if you focus on a perception, you suddenly find it drifting away and turning into something else. So you stay with the perception of the breath, and you stay with the sensation of the breath. Try to keep the two of them nailed together. And work with the breath to whatever extent is needed to get the mind to settle down, to feel …
- Right Effort… And then use your perceptions, the labels you have for things, to figure out how to get the most out of the comfort you’ve got and also how to analyze the defilement that was causing so much trouble. You can use your perceptions in lots of ways. If you find that you’re angry at somebody, remember the Buddha’s famous image of …
- A Thread Out of the Maze… Even though you’re looking in the same place, you start seeing things you didn’t see before, not because they weren’t there before, but simply because your powers of perception were not yet that strong, not that subtle. But if you look again and again and again, you become more familiar with the territory, your powers of perception grow, and you see …
- Safety in Awareness… As you’re walking down the street or at work dealing with people, you can hold in mind that perception: just space permeating everything. Think of the atoms in all the solid objects as being just tiny, tiny bits of matter surrounded by huge gobs of space. And the space is all connected; there’s no boundary to it. From that perception, you can …
- All Four Tetrads at Once… The next step is to be sensitive to mental fabrications, which are feelings and perceptions. The step after that is to calm mental fabrications. This is where perceptions play a big role. You want to find perceptions that will create calmer feelings, because you’re going to go from rapture down to pleasure and then ultimately to equanimity. What kind of perceptions help with …
- Not Getting What You Want… Then there’s mental fabrication—perceptions and feelings. Perceptions here are the images and labels you apply to things, identifying this as this, and that as that. Feelings are not emotions so much, they’re more feeling tones: feeling tones of pleasure, pain, or neither-pleasure-nor-pain. There’s an intentional element in all of these things, which is why the Buddha calls …
- Sensitive to Fabrication… Then there are mental fabrications, which are feelings of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain, together with perceptions: the labels you apply to things. Sometimes these labels are conscious and sometimes they’re very unconscious. As we focus on the breath, we’re dealing directly with all three types of fabrication. You’ve got the in-and-out breath as your object. You’ve …
- Dethinking Thinking… Just tell yourself that your first perception of these things is energy. Then, from that, the perception goes into the sense of being solid or warm or cold. So it’s not like you’re trying to push the breath through the solid parts. You’re just allowing the breath to come first. Give it priority. And let those other things fall into the …
- Finding Extra Energy… Then there are the perceptions. How do you represent the situation to yourself in your mind? What are the images that underlie your thinking? Are you perceiving yourself as the victim? Maybe you might want to drop that perception and replace it with another one. Instead of being the victim, you can see yourself as the person who’s resourceful and has extra sources …
- Self-Correct… When you hold that perception in mind, it helps you to stop focusing on the perceptions that make things tighter and more solid, more tense. So you take the perception you’ve got and you turn it inside out. You turn it around. See how that works. Or if there’s a noise disturbing you as you meditate, how can you let the noise …
- Working with Fabrication… feelings and perceptions. Feelings are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, or neither pleasure nor pain. Perceptions are the labels we apply to things—the words or images we hold in mind. When you compare perception with directed thought and evaluation, a perception is like an individual word, whereas the directed thought and evaluation deals in whole sentences. These have a huge impact on how …
- A Trained Observer… Then mental fabrication would fall away when you move from the dimension of neither perception nor non-perception to the cessation of perception and feeling. That’s way up there. That’s another way in which insight can arise. You see how the mind constructs things, and how you can move from one construction to another. You begin to see how each is fabricated …
- Treasures from the East… Be very conscious of how your perceptions and feelings shape your mind. And try to use your knowledge of how the body is affected by the breath to calm the body down. Use your knowledge about how the mind is affected by perceptions and feelings to calm the mind down. What kind of perception of the breath makes it comfortable right now? What kind …
- Ugly Body, Happy Mind… All the contemplations ultimately get down to understanding perceptions. When the ajaans talk about contemplating feelings, especially feelings of pain, the issue comes down to: What’s creating a bridge between the physical pain and the pain that you’re suffering from in the mind? It’s a perception. What kind of perception? Why do you think in those terms? The same with the …
- The Meaning of Insight… But then the three characteristics or, more properly, the three perceptions: What are they good for? If you simply say, “Well, everything is impermanent,” what does that tell you about what to do? You could take that observation and do all kinds of things with it. You could decide that nothing is worth striving for at all, so you might as well give up …
- Patience & Sensitivity… What exactly is the alluring perception or the alluring thought that is the focal point of your craving? Once you see that, then you look for the drawbacks. That’s what the path is for. This is where you bring in the three perceptions. Whatever it is you crave, whatever the allure is, you want to see that it’s inconstant, it’s stressful …
- Delusion… Learn how to compare different ways of breathing with other ways of breathing, different perceptions with other perceptions. Learn how to compare what it’s like when you keep your mind focused on one spot as opposed to another spot. Learn how to ask questions like this, using what you’ve learned, what you’ve thought about, and the ingenuity that you’ve had …
- Emotion… And then there’s mental fabrication, which comes down to feeling and perceptions. When you learn how to breathe in a way that feels good, feels comfortable inside, it’s harder to hold on to a negative emotion. At the same time, you don’t feel so hungry. Often lust or anger comes out of a hunger for immediate gratification. But when you’ve …
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