Search results for: "Perception"

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  2. Habits of Perception
    Habits of Perception November 27, 2004 What have you got here in the present moment? You’ve got the body, you’ve got the breath, you’ve got thoughts, and you’ve got your awareness. But you’re also carrying a lot of habits. In fact, this is the main issue in the meditation. If you didn’t have certain habits of perception, you … 
  3. Dispassion & Delight
     … He calls them “perceptions.” And we know the nature of perceptions. As he says, they’re like mirages. A mirage gives, at best, only a partial view of what’s over the horizon—and a lot of wrong information, too, if you take it too literally. Perceptions are representations—sketches of something. We use them for purposes. We say that a perception is true … 
  4. What Are You Doing?
     … Ajaan Maha Boowa has a lot of good ways of questioning your relationship to the pain, questioning your understanding of the pain, your perception of the pain. Perception seems to be the big issue for a lot of the forest ajaans. In dealing with pain, perception is the issue. In dealing with the issue of the unattractiveness of the body, why is it that … 
  5. Calm & Insight into Pain
     … And the perceptions: in particular, the perception that lets you stay with the breath as you’re trying to make it more and more comfortable. You have to figure out what kind of perception of the breathing is helpful in that regard. I was talking the other day with someone who felt that as he breathed in it was like pumping air into a … 
  6. Chewed Up by Your Food
     … There’s a very close connection between mindfulness and perception. You have to keep remembering, you have to stay with body, body, body, or breath, breath, breath. As it turns out, perception is related not just to mindfulness, but also to concentration. You hold one perception in mind. Here again, it’s the perception of breath. At the same time, you’re conscious of … 
  7. The Six Properties
     … And the actual sensation of what you’ve got here will change depending on your perceptions. That’s a lesson worth taking to heart: how much your perceptions change things; how much your perceptions come before your sensations of these things, as is explained in the dependent co-arising. Name-and-form comes before contact. Perceptions are part of name-and-form. And there … 
  8. The Three Perceptions & Their Opposites
    The Three Perceptions & Their Opposites May 12, 2020 The teaching on the three characteristics or the three perceptions—inconstancy, stress, not-self—occupies a peculiar place in the Buddha’s teachings. It’s always true, but it’s not always beneficial. That means it’s not categorical. The Buddha doesn’t apply it all the time. In fact, there are a couple of cases … 
  9. The Perception of Space
     … reflections or perceptions to keep in mind as you get the mind in shape to be with the breath. These reflections and perceptions can be useful in all kinds of situations. One of the perceptions he taught to Rahula was make your mind like space. Nothing can be written on space. This is an image that keeps reappearing throughout the Canon. When the Buddha … 
  10. The Challenge of Right View
     … When he talked about inconstancy, stress, and not-self—anicca, dukkha, anattā—he called them perceptions. You apply the perception of inconstancy. You apply the perception of stress. You apply the perception of not-self, first to any of the distractions that would pull you away from concentration and ultimately to the state of concentration itself. And in applying those perceptions, you find that … 
  11. Understanding Pain
     … Asking questions here is important because you’re going to be trying to uproot your underlying perceptions around the pain. Sometimes those are hard to track down because they’re very strange. Many of these perceptions you picked up when you were a child. Even before you knew how to talk, you were already dealing with pain. The perceptions coming from that time are … 
  12. Looking after Yourself with Ease
     … Then finally there’s mental fabrication, which consists of perceptions and feelings. Feelings here are feeling tones of pleasure and pain; neither pleasure nor pain. And perceptions are the images or words you use to identify things. You see the flame of a candle and you think “candle flame.” You see the Buddha image and something inside you says “Buddha image.” Those are perceptions … 
  13. Sensitive to Fabrication
     … You have to learn how to hold on to a perception that you find congenial, that helps you to settle down. Then these perceptions get more and more refined. When you’ve learned how to hold a perception in mind for a long time, then you get a lot more sensitive to the little whispers of perception that come in and want to change … 
  14. The Truth of Desires
     … Because we’re ignorant of them, they can influence us, skewing our perception of reality or the perceptions that we want to adopt. Things may seem true because they fit in with a particular desire, and if we don’t know the desire, we can’t be sure about how true those things are. So we’re here to learn about our desires. When … 
  15. Wilderness Lessons
     … One that the Buddha noted was that when you go into the forest and hold the perception of wilderness in your mind, your mind is very different from when it has the perception of being in society. He contrasts the “village” perception and “human being” perception with the “wilderness” perception. The village and human being perceptions carry with them all the affairs of the … 
  16. Agreements to Perceive
    The Pali word we translate as perception or mental label, sañña, has another meaning as well: an agreement. In part, it’s an agreement between one part of the mind and the other. This is how the mind communicates with itself, how it makes notes, how it interprets and remembers things. It interprets this particular experience in this particular way and there’s an … 
  17. How to Think about Death
     … We’re not trying to let ourselves be under the power of perceptions. We’re trying to liberate ourselves from our perceptions, especially the perceptions that create suffering. So instead of being in denial and allowing your perceptions to manipulate you, you want to be able to stand apart from them. After all, I’ve noticed that monks tend to age more slowly than … 
  18. Part II : Common Problems
     … Or whatever perceptions you have that the pain is permanent, that it’s there lodged in you, that it’s not changing: You have to learn how to undo these perceptions. After all, perception is the primary factor that fashions your mind. The Buddha identifies perception and feeling as mental fabrications, i.e., the things that create your sense of well-being or not … 
  19. Don’t Believe Everything You Think
     … One is feelings and the other is perceptions. Perceptions, here, are the images you hold in mind, be it a word or a mental picture—the words here being just basic concepts before they even turn into sentences. These are the things that shape our state of mind. Sometimes you find yourself in a good mood and you can trace it back to a … 
  20. Dhamma in Vinaya
     … Then you look at the perception: the different ways you perceive the breath. If the mind is unwilling to settle down with one perception, what other perceptions can you try? Is the breath what you want to focus on right now? That’s the third question, which is the object. Maybe the mind needs some contemplation of the parts of the body to settle … 
  21. Strengthening Discernment
     … Then you hold in mind certain perceptions of the breath, and try to develop a perception that allows the mind to settle down with a sense of ease and refreshment filling the body. The feelings of ease and refreshment count as mental fabrication. The perceptions that you hold in mind of the breath, count as mental fabrication as well. This means that you’ve … 
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