Search results for: "Perception"
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- A Becoming Critic… You do it through the way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself, the perceptions you use—the images you hold in mind or the words by which you label things—along with the feelings you focus on. Notice how you put these things together to make a state of becoming. It’s like learning to be a film critic. You don’t …
- Attachment to the Body… The Buddha goes on to have you meditate, focused on the breath, inducing a sense of rapture, a sense of pleasure, getting sensitive to mental fabrication, in other words, your feelings and perceptions: the perceptions you hold in mind as you visualize the breath to yourself, as you visualize the breath moving through the body, and then the feelings of ease that you’re …
- Your Tranquility & Your Insight… As the breath gets more gentle, more subtle, you hold in mind the perception that the breath originates from inside, so that you don’t feel so much the need to pull it in from outside. You let it radiate from within. As good breath energy fills the body, the need to breathe in and out gets less. Of course, as the mind settles …
- Discernment on the Path… Can you develop a more refined perception of the breath? But if you find that asking these questions is beginning to destroy the concentration, drop them for the time being. An important principle in practicing is having a sense of time and place. When are you ready for a particular stage? This requires trial and error. You try analyzing things a little bit, and …
- Being Somebody, Going Somewhere… His teachers taught him the dimension of nothingness and the dimension of neither perception or non-perception—very refined attainments. But he had a clear idea of where he wanted to go. He wanted the deathless, and he could see that neither of these were deathless. When he saw that these weren’t what he wanted, he moved on. If he hadn’t been …
- Meaningful Freedom… You’ve noticed that holding certain perceptions in the mind will have an immediate impact on the breath. With other perceptions, you hold them in mind, and it takes a while for the effect of the perception to take hold. So you’re working with causes of both kinds. And that’s a lot of the skill of the meditation right there: figuring out …
- Desire… He tells you when there’s a perception in mind that allows for stillness, you try to settle the mind and make it stable, make it confident in that perception. The more solidly you can develop concentration, the easier it is to let go of other things. If the concentration is still wobbly, you’re half holding on to the concentration, and half holding …
- The Stakes Are High… Even though you’re right here, you begin to realize the extent to which you create your sense of the body through your perceptions. The perceptions are the ones that tell you where your hands are right now, so if you need to do something with your hands, you know which muscles to activate. But as you’re sitting very still, you don’t …
- Strong-hearted… Sometimes you hear it expressed as the three characteristics—seeing things as being inconstant, stressful, not-self—but those the Buddha calls perceptions. And those perceptions have meaning within the context of the framework provided by the four noble truths, which is that you’re trying to comprehend suffering and abandon its cause. So anything that would give rise to the desire to cling …
- The Power of Your Actions… They may be true about some things, but our views are made out of perceptions, and as the Buddha said, perceptions are like mirages. They contain a little bit of reality and a lot of unreality—but that’s what our views are made out of. The same with our ideas about habits and practices that we should and shouldn’t do. Even our …
- Making an Effort… The kind of happiness that comes through ordinary effort in terms of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, ideas, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness: There’s effort in all of these things. The basic building blocks of our experience, the five aggregates, require fabrication. Even before we sense things, there’s an element of fabrication going on in the mind. If the mind weren …
- A Multilingual Mind… What kind of breathing is skillful breathing? What kind of breathing is unskillful breathing? What kinds of perceptions are skillful, what kinds are unskillful? The breath and the questions about the breath are all elements in the process of fabrication. When you’re talking to yourself as you meditate, what kind of talking is skillful, what kind of talking is not? The meditation points …
- Discernment Is in the Details… Does the breath feel comfortable? Where does it feel comfortable? If it doesn’t feel comfortable, what can you do to change? Do you change the rhythm of the breathing, the depth, the heaviness of the breath? Do you change your concept or perception of the breath? If you feel that you have to pull the breath in through some tiny nasal passages that …
- Oneness… It’s simply a matter of the perception you hold in mind. After the fourth jhana, you drop the perception of the form of the body — the still breath allows you to do this — and you can focus on the sense of space permeating the mist of sensations that remains. After that perception of space is unwavering, you turn to focus on what’s …
- Concentration & Renunciation… the discernment to see what kind of perceptions you’re applying to the pain, in your relationship to the pain, that are aggravating it, that are actually forming a bridge from the physical pain into the mind, where they turn it into a mental pain and make it more than it has to be. So the meditation is here to help you not be …
- The Path Is in the Details… There’s a potential for form, for feeling, perception, fabrication, consciousness, but with your present intention you choose how to put those things together and turn them into actual forms, feelings, perceptions, and so on. This is something very quick. We’re very adept at it. Because it’s so quick, it’s hard for us to catch sight of it. And because we …
- Admit Your Stupidity… Then you have mental fabrications, which are perceptions and feelings. The perceptions are the images you hold in mind; feelings are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. So you can ask yourself what kind of perceptions would be useful to get the mind to settle down. In fact, this is one of the ways in which you can develop tranquility and …
- To Discern Suffering… The perceptions, the labels you give to things: saying, “This is pleasure, this is pain, this pleasure I can handle, this pleasure I can’t handle.” Thought-fabrications add even more complex layers of likes and dislikes and analysis on top of things. And then there’s consciousness, your awareness of these things. We hold on to these things. This is how we suffer …
- Lust… feelings and perceptions. Again, this can relate to the breath. You create a sense of ease and wellbeing in the body; that feeling makes it a lot easier to let go of the need for immediate gratification through your defilement. You can say, “Look, I’ve got this pleasure here. Why not focus on the pleasure that’s already here, rather than on the …
- The World of the Noble Truths… What are you clinging to? What are you feeding on? Why? What’s the allure? And what are the drawbacks? It’s in this context of trying to comprehend suffering and abandon its cause that the Buddha teaches those three characteristics or three perceptions—the perceptions of inconstancy, suffering, not-self. That’s where they fit into this larger framework. All too often you …
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