Search results for: "Perception"
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- The Energy in the Body… feelings and perceptions—feelings of comfort or discomfort, and your perception of how those relate to the breath. These are all the raw materials for insight. So you’re right here where they’re all present. It’s simply a matter of learning how to read what’s happening. The instructions that Ajaan Lee gives are suggestions for exploration. You try them out. Experiment …
- Clinging… You’re constantly telling yourself, “Where is the body right now?” Just sitting here still, there’s an activity that goes around maintaining that sense of form, one that’s primarily an activity of perception. As for feelings, they feel; perceptions perceive, fabrications fabricate things, consciousness cognizes. These aggregates are defined by verbs. So you’re putting yourself together out of verbs, and you …
- Self-Reliance… Exactly what would be doing the pulling and where would it be pulling from? This is called de-perception—playing with your perceptions, trying to question them. You learn a lot of interesting lessons in this way about the impact of your thoughts on your physical processes, at the same time learning what kind of perception results in a sense of breathing that feels …
- Peace vs. Clinging… your perception of the pleasure, why you want to go for it. This is why we have that contemplation of the 32 parts of the body. A lot of our desires for pleasure have to do with the body, either our own body, or somebody else’s—our own body in the case of keeping it well fed, keeping it comfortable, at ease. You …
- Framing the Body… So, what was he going to do now? He decided to test that perception. Why is it that you can look at a body one way and it’s attractive, and you look at it another way and it’s not attractive? What causes the mind to go for the attraction? Of course, it’s the desire. You’re using these perceptions to lure …
- Outside the Box… He goes on to point out that when you’re practicing concentration, you’re taking these inconstant aggregates—body, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness—and you’re trying to make them as constant as possible. You see that they do have their constant side. These things that are stressful do have their pleasant side. You can create a sense of ease in concentration, a …
- Trustworthy Judgment… He was able to tell when the mind was sending him weird perceptions, skewed perceptions. As he said, that thing he got from his meditation, that didn’t change; but he began to notice that his brain wasn’t working properly. What saved him from falling for those perceptions was the mindfulness and concentration he had developed in his meditation. Even in his last …
- You Are Not a Textbook… Because if you can’t divest yourself even of these unskillful things, how are you going to learn how to apply the perception of not-self to things that are more and more skillful? And how are you going to even see the perception of self as an action? We tend to think of ourselves as a solid thing. There’s the “me” in …
- Normalcy… You get your mind into all kinds of weird situations, weird perceptions, extreme perceptions. Then you’ve got to get yourself out, because that’s not where you’re going—at least not where you’re going if you’re going anywhere sane, anywhere safe. So when you catch the mind trying to push itself into an unusual state, pull back. Remind yourself that …
- For the Sake of the Deathless… If you hold this perception in mind, the breath will be one way. If you hold another perception in mind, the breath will be another way. Then you can judge which perception helps you settle down, which intention helps you settle down, and you can use that knowledge to develop concentration and to develop discernment. You start seeing the mind, you start seeing the …
- Consciousness, Name, & Form… feelings, perceptions, intentions, acts of attention, and contact among these things. Learn to be with these things on their own terms. Instead of thinking of these things as “my body” or “my mind” or “my awareness,” it’s just: “There’s awareness. There are mental events. Physical phenomena.” Just right here. When you look at them on these terms, it’s a lot easier …
- Disenchantment & Dispassion… Often they seem to be extended by your perception of them. You have an idea of pleasure that picks up on a feeling of pleasure. That perception then lasts, even though the feeling is gone. The Buddha compares perception to a mirage: There is water someplace maybe, but even so, it’s not where you see it. Sometimes there isn’t even water at …
- Useful Thinking… Then there’s the perception that holds you with the breath, your idea of what the breath is, what sensations count as breath sensations. All this fabrication is going on here in the present moment. On top of that, the Buddha says that your experience of the five aggregates contains an intentional element. Your experience of form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness itself has …
- Exploring the Basics… See what that perception does to your experience of the breath. At the very least, working with these different forms of fabrication—the in-and-out breath, directed thought and evaluation, feelings and perceptions—gives you something interesting to do. That helps with the staying power of the meditation because after all, the mind is a very complex organ. Training the mind is not …
- Skills for Living & Dying… You realize that the perception of “space” is what holds you there. When you’ve learned how to stay solidly with that perception, you can shift the perception to just the “knowing.” What is it that knows the space? And you’re looking right at awareness. Now this awareness is conditioned but it’s the closest you’re going to get to seeing the …
- Licking Yourself Clean… Now’s the time to back up and get more sensitive to this area of your awareness again, to see how it feels, to see how your perceptions of what the breath does are going to affect how the breath actually flows through the body. Experiment to see how you can work both with the breath and with the perceptions of the breath to …
- A Slave to Craving… Okay, when it moves in this way, it’s because there’s this perception in the mind. When the perception gets dropped, that particular pain gets dropped as well. Even though there may be a physical cause for the pain, it moves around a lot. And your perceptions try to keep up with it. And they form a bridge, from the physical pain into …
- Two Kinds of Defilements… What are the perceptions you have around this issue? The perceptions here are the mental images, the labels you apply to things. To make a comparison: Perceptions are like words; directed thought and evaluation are like sentences. What are the basic words? What are the basic images? What is your lizard brain telling you about this? Can you believe these things? In other words …
- Non-Verbal Discernment… When does the stress go up, when does it go down? When it goes up, what did you do? What perception came, what feeling came in? When the stress level goes down, what perception did you let go of? Those are things that you feel your way into. As Ajaan Maha Boowa points out, when you see something that’s not worth holding on …
- Four Noble Truths to One… the five clinging-aggregates of form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness. The aggregates don’t cling. We cling to them, and the clinging is the actual suffering. Once we learn how to be with these things, to engage in these things without clinging, then there’s no suffering around them. So you have to comprehend: How is that clinging suffering? We have to …
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