Search results for: "Perception"
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- 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 …
- Honest & Observant… You need to have a perception that it’s something worthwhile. The same with virtue: You need to talk yourself into being virtuous. You need to see that it’s worthwhile. As you develop perceptions around your precepts to value them, that makes them stronger. The same principle holds you try to develop goodwill: You realize that it’s not going to come naturally …
- Use Your Imagination… The feeling is connected with perceptions, and it’s connected with thought constructs. What kind of thoughts are you constructing around the pain? What kind of perceptions are you applying to the pain? What exactly is the feeling? And how does the feeling differ from the body—the physical part? The body is the four elements; the feeling is something else. The perception is …
- The Right Piece in the Right Puzzle… We have a perception of self, an assumption of self, and the question then becomes, *When is that a skillful action, and when is it an unskillful action? * There are stages in the path where the perception of self is skillful. There are versions of your self that are skillful. There’s the self that’s the governing principle. When you’ve been practicing …
- Reading & Meditating… How is it related to these other aspects of what’s going on in the mind? Sometimes a pain might be bothering you because of a perception. Well, feeling and perception are together in the factor for fabrication, and they’re together in the factor for name and form. Sometimes the feeling is invading your mind because of the way you talk to yourself …
- The Power of Intention… As the Buddha said, our past karma gives us the potential for different experiences of form, feeling, perception, thought fabrications, and consciousness. Then with our present fabrications—our present intentions—we turn these potentials into something actual for the sake of having an actual experience, and then, of course, for the sake of whatever activities we want to do with those forms and feelings …
- Your Higher Power… We cling to our feelings, our perceptions, our thought constructs, and our consciousness. And when these things turn on us, we’re stuck with what we’ve clung to. But if you learn how to let go—and letting go means first fashioning more skillful versions of these things, more skillful perceptions and thoughts to give rise to feelings in the body that are …
- Generosity of Spirit… You’ve got the breath, that’s your bodily fabrication; you’ve got directed thought and evaluation, verbal fabrication, and your feelings and perceptions are mental fabrication. For the most part, as we go through life—especially if we have little training in meditation—we wound ourselves by the way we fabricate the present moment. We breathe in ways that are uncomfortable. We talk …
- Worldly Equanimity & Its Uses… I think I’ve said other times that of the four brahmaviharas, equanimity is one that requires some discernment, so you can figure out, “What things are beyond my control? There are people I’d like to see happy, but they’re not going to be happy.” This gets into another perception that the Buddha taught Rahula, which is the perception of not-self …
- Using Your Many Minds… And the question gives you a context for employing those perceptions. The Buddha never talks about three characteristics. The actual term does not appear in the Pali Canon. It’s there in the commentaries, it’s all over Buddhist writings, but the Buddha himself never mentioned it. He talks about these things as three perceptions. And basically there are three questions you ask about …
- The Limits of Control… What use is that perception? If you’re feeling one with things, can you change them to be better? Can you exert control over them? And even though there may be a sense of wellbeing that comes with that oneness, how lasting is it? The Buddha himself pointed out that the highest sense of oneness is the sense of consciousness being totally one and …
- Delight in Striving… And then there’s mental fabrication, which is perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the labels you’ve put on things—that identify what they are, what they mean, how important they are. Feelings are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. These are things that we *do *fabricate. We may think that our feelings just come at us ready-made, but they …
- Equanimity Isn’t Nibbana… Does it need to be gladdened? Does it need to be steadied? Does it need to be released from anything it’s holding on to? How do you breathe in a way that helps accomplish that? How do you play with your perception of the breath, your perception of your feelings, in order to accomplish that? What other topics—like the Buddha, Dhamma, and …
- The Power of the Mind… It’s just a perception, so you’ve got to change your perceptions. The mind comes before the breath; the breath comes before all the other elements in the body. Think in those terms. So, as Ajaan Suwat would say every time we would meditate as a group, “Okay, dress your mind.” Or: “fix your mind.” The word in Thai is taeng, which is …
- Understanding Through Developing… Once it does feel good, then how can you maintain it? How can you spread it around? To do this, you’re going to have to use some perceptions, the images you hold in mind about where the breath goes in the body, your perception of what feels good and what doesn’t feel good. As you engage in these fabrications, you get to …
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