Search results for: "Perception"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 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 …
- Learning from Sensual Desire… There’s just a random perception that you have, that you’ve associated with sensual desire. It feels as if it makes you attractive, makes you clever, makes you… whatever. That’s on the side simply of perception, or the heart side, the emotion side. In other words, there’s no clear reasoning there. There’s just an association and a feeling that goes …
- Events as Events… feelings, perceptions, intentions, acts of attention, and contact among these things. You want to learn how to be with these things just on their own terms, instead of thinking of this as “my body” or “my mind” or “my awareness.” It’s just awareness, mental events, and physical phenomena right here. When you look at them on those terms, it’s a lot easier …
- Desires Rightly Directed… You apply certain perceptions to help wean yourself away from unskillful desires and to see the joy in being skillful. Concentration, of course, is composed of all five aggregates. You’ve got the form of the body as you focus on the breath, the feelings of pleasure you create as you play with the breath, the perceptions you hold in mind as to where …
- The Power of Attention… He talks about bodily fabrication, which is the breath itself, and mental fabrication, your perceptions and feelings. This is where you apply the questions of appropriate attention. For instance, how does the breath feel right now? Could you breathe in a way that makes you feel better? What is your perception of breath? We talk of breath as the energy flow in the body …
- Not What You Are, What You Do… You use certain perceptions, and certain feelings get involved. These are all elements in the factor of fabrication, which comes right after ignorance. We breathe ignorantly. We perceive things through ignorance. Our thoughts about things, the way we evaluate things, and our use of language generally are done with ignorance. As a result, we suffer. But if you bring knowledge to these processes, they …
- Four Determinations in One… You realize you could take that equanimity and apply it to any of the perceptions that would lead you to the formless dimensions—infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness, neither perception nor non-perception—and you could stay there for a very long time. But then you realize that even those are fabricated. And anything that’s fabricated is unreliable. So here the emphasis is …
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