Search results for: "Perception"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Is the Buddha’s Wisdom Selfish?… We feed off of form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. We feed off other people, too. And if we don’t learn how to get past this habit of feeding on other people, or our ideas of other people, it’s going to taint any efforts we make to help them. If you want your help to be totally free and totally pure, you …
- Treasure Island… The analogies he gives in the Canon are his advice about what perceptions to hold in mind: the perceptions that’ll give rise to thoughts of goodwill, perceptions to help give rise to thoughts of endurance—the ability to endure, how to talk to yourself when things are difficult. These are the Buddha’s gifts. And so as you take his gifts, you make …
- Concentration as a Skill… Sometimes you have to work through your perceptions of what’s going on in the body. There may be a pain in some part of the body, the mind pictures it to itself as a wall, and the breath will seem to stop there at the wall. Well, you’ve got to change that perception. The wall is porous. Pain is not a wall …
- Rebirth & Not-Self… Now, you’ll be helped by using a perception. Think of the breath not just as air coming in and out through the nose—because after all, the Buddha didn’t say that the in-and-out breath is a tactile sensation, he said it’s one of the elements in the body. In other words, it’s part of proprioception: how you sense …
- Hope… You’re using your perceptions. What is your perception of what’s necessary for the breath to come in? What’s necessary for the breath to go out? Do you have to push it out? Actually, you don’t really have to push it out. It’ll go out on its own. The question is simply: At what rate do you allow it to …
- Cleaning Out the Stables… And this is why he’d recommend that you develop the perception of not-self together with other perceptions: He also recommends the perception of no delight in any world, because the self and the world go together. If you still delight in a particular world, then no matter how many times you contemplate the drawbacks of the kind of self you’d acquire …
- True for What Purpose?… As the Buddha said, you could focus on how pleasant feelings and perceptions can be, or how much fun it is to engage in thought fabrication. As he admitted, these things do have their pleasures, but focusing on them in that way just gives rise to more passion, aversion, and delusion. Instead, you could focus on their drawbacks: that no matter how well you …
- Questioning Your Unconscious Actions… What’s going on? What’s resisting? If you find that you’re having trouble adjusting the breath because your perception is off, well, change your perceptions. This is where mental fabrication comes in and has an influence on bodily fabrication. When you breathe in, where do you think the breath is coming in? How does your mind picture the breathing process? Change the …
- A Blameless Happiness… What is your intention right now? Is your intention to hold onto the body? Or are you willing to let go of some things that you thought you couldn’t do without, but you might actually be better off if you could let go of some of that attachment? What is your perception of the body? What is your perception of the pain? How …
- Comprehending Clinging… So you apply those perceptions to things that would pull you away from the path until the path is really solid. Only then do you apply the same perceptions to the path itself: Who is this person doing the path? That, too, is a construct. Of course, this is the last step, as you leave the raft and step off onto the other shore …
- Instruct, Urge, Rouse, & Encourage Yourself… In the meantime, though, the perception of self and the perception of not-self are both strategies for happiness. You need them to get where you want to go. You try to figure out which desires you can identify as worth following, and which ones are not worth following. You establish a sense of priorities. That’s a healthy sense of self togther a …
- De-thinking… As you meditate, you start noticing the power of your perceptions. The labels you apply to things, the way you visualize things, really have a huge influence over what you see. You can see this clearly with the breath. We have certain preconceived notions of how the breath comes into the body, what we have to do in order to bring it into the …
- Brahmaviharas & the Breath… There’s mental fabrication where you think about things through your perceptions. You hold certain perceptions in mind, like the perception of goodwill, or that you would want to spread goodwill to others, or that you yourself would benefit from it. But there also has to be a feeling of well-being to have that impact on the mind. This is where physical fabrication …
- Lessons of Right Resolve… You begin to realize that the whole problem is with perception. And the perception, again, is used for a purpose—there’s something in the mind that wants to get lustful. Other times, there will be parts of the mind that’ll want to get away from lust, and they’ll use other perceptions in line with their wants. So you learn about the …
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