Search results for: "Perception"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. The Languages of Right View
     … That’s when you’ve got to switch languages, with a different set of concepts, a different set of perceptions. Here we’re not talking about the person doing the meditation, we’re simply talking about acts of mindfulness, acts of mindlessness; alertness, lack of alertness; right effort, wrong effort: all impersonal things. In fact, this is one of the reasons why the four … 
  17. The Wisdom of Restraint
     … How you spread it around, how you’re aware of the whole body, aware of the breath energy seeping through the whole body, and how you can maintain that perception: Those are things you have to think about until everything is very calm. Then you can let your thoughts go. At that point, you just have that one perception of breath, breath, breath. Because … 
  18. Mindfulness Immersed in the Body
     … The problem is in our desires around it, and our desires are based on perceptions. You have to see what motivates the perceptions that say the body is worth holding on to, whether you see it is worth holding on to because it’s attractive or because it’s useful for other purposes. You want to make sure, at the very least, that the … 
  19. The Core of Experience
     … So we take the issues of “my long-term welfare and happiness” and translate them into the questions on the three characteristics, or, rather, the three perceptions. “Long-term” corresponds to the question about inconstancy. “Happiness” corresponds to the question on stress. And “my,” of course, corresponds to the question on self or not-self. So when you encounter things on the path of … 
  20. The Dhamma Wheel
     … When looking for food, if it sees something, the question is, “Is this food or is this not food?” That’s an issue of perception. Think of a child crawling across the floor. Anything the child runs into, it picks it up and puts into his mouth, to test whether it’s food or not. That’s our first level of perception, actually. Then … 
  21. Distractive Thoughts
     … If you see the perception in action—precisely the mental picture or whatever the label that the mind applies to the pain—when you see the label coming and going and then the mental suffering coming and going along with the perception, you’ve got your clue: This is something you need to focus on. You need to learn how to drop that perception … 
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