Search results for: "Perception"
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- 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 …
- The Psychology of Virtue… One of the important lessons of meditation is learning to see an impulse coming up in the mind in earlier, earlier stages of the impulse, until you get to the point where it’s just a stirring of energy, halfway between what’s physical and what’s mental, and then you slap a perception on it, saying, “This is a thought about x,” and …
- Truth Is Where You’re True… They basically come down to looking at what disturbance you’re causing, given whatever perception you’re holding on to, and seeing if you can replace it with a more refined perception that causes less disturbance. Settle there, and then look again to see which parts of the mind are empty of the disturbances you had before, and which ones are still disturbed. Then …
- True, Beneficial, Timely… Hold that perception in mind, that what you feel the body right now starts with breath energy. Then ask yourself, if this were breath energy, would it qualify as good or bad? Sometimes there are patterns of tension, patterns of blockage, that we accept in the body because we think it’s solid. There’s nothing that can be done about it. But if …
- No-Tech Meditation… A major part of the monks’ Vinaya consists of precepts or rules that can be broken only if they’re broken intentionally and with an accurate perception of the situation. This keeps directing your attention back on your intentions and your perceptions. In other words, the focus is always on training the mind. The rules are not extraneous. The training of discipline is not …
- How Much Concentration Is Enough?… When you’re dealing with lust and developing perceptions of the unattractiveness of the body, it’s not the case that you’re finally going to come to that golden perception that’s going to totally eradicate all lust or attachment or pride in the body. The important issue is that you want to observe the mind as you’re trying to fight your …
- The Brightness of Life… Is the mind sitting in the body? Is the body sitting in the mind? What’s going on? In the same way, from the Buddha’s point of view, he says that concentration is a perception attainment. So, what perception are you bringing to the breath? One of the things that I found especially illuminating in Ajaan Lee’s teachings was his take on …
- The Wheel of Dhamma… form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness. He says that we suffer because we cling to these things. Form is any physical form. It can be the form of your own body or the form of things you’re attached to, items that you like, people you like. Feeling is just registering the sensation of pleasure, pain, or neither pleasure nor pain. These feelings can …
- How & Why We Meditate… That gives you another perception. It’s going to change the way you actually experience the breath. You can start to think of all those little tiny nerve endings going all the way out to the pores of your skin. They’ve got breath energy, too. If you hold that perception in mind, how does that change the way you breathe? How does it …
- Rites of Passage… The same principle also applies to feelings of pleasure and pain as they come and go, to perceptions, to thought-constructs, even to our consciousness of things. Meditation gives us a place where we can step back from these things and watch them to see the influence they have over the mind, to decide whether that’s an influence we’d like them to …
- Mindfulness as Refuge… And to stay with the breath requires a perception. This is a label you use to identify things. When the Thais took over the word sañña, which is the Pali word for perception, they added other shades of meaning to it as well, which are also relevant: an agreement, a contract, a promise. In this case, you can agree with yourself to look at …
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