Search results for: "Perception"
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- Four Mountains Moving In… They can skew our perceptions, and our perceptions can skew our actions, distorting things so that even when we think we’re acting rightly, we’re actually following the wrong course and creating more trouble for ourselves, more trouble for others. So we have to watch out for these dangers. The dangers that can come from outside are real, but we can’t let …
- Not Getting What You Want… You grow confident, steadfast, and your mind gets released into its perception of just being with breath. The whole body: Think of every sensation you have in the body as being related to the breath somehow. Make a survey through the body: When you breathe in, where do you feel it inside? When you breathe out, where do you feel it? Is there a …
- Calm in the Storm… verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself—what he calls directed thought and evaluation; and then mental fabrication, your perceptions and feelings—feeling tones, here, of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. As I said, if you do these things in ignorance, they lead to suffering, but if you do them with knowledge, they can actually become part of the path to the …
- Standing Outside Your Thoughts… He also gives you analogies, perceptions to hold in mind to remind you of the different ways you can relate to distractive thinking so that it doesn’t have to take over. Instead of going into the thought, you stay out of the thought. And as you’re staying out, you can stay out in various ways. In terms of the first method, the …
- Shaping Your Breath, Shaping Your Life… So, play with your perceptions. Adjust them. Perceive things in one way for a while; perceive them in another way for a while. Play with your sense of the form of the body: Breathe in one way for a while; breathe in another way for a while. You’ll get a sense of how different perceptions and different ways of breathing have an impact …
- Perfection in an Imperfect World… A lot of that has to do with your perception of what resources you have. There was that time when Ajaan Fuang announced out of nowhere one day that we were going to be sitting up all night. We’d been working pretty hard that day, so I said to him, “I don’t think I’ll be able to do that.” He looked …
- Trust in Heedfulness… The oneness itself is a disturbance; it’s an intention based on a particular perception. So what do you do? If you let go of the oneness, if you go back to having your mind scattered all over the place, that’s not skillful. The skillful thing is to go forward to more subtle states of oneness, based on more subtle perceptions. In other …
- Mindfulness as a Goad… When it applies a perception to something, you see precisely the moment when the perception gets applied. When you start thinking about something, talking to yourself about something, you begin to realize how many different voices there are in there. That’s because you’ve gotten very quiet but alert at the same time. And the mindfulness is what tries to keep you alert …
- Occupy Your Body… Because you’ve learned how to maintain one perception in mind—the perception of the breath, the perception of the whole body—and then allow your awareness to expand at the same time. This skill is what allows you to go solidly into the formless states, where the sense of the body disappears. You are sitting here. You haven’t gone anywhere else. If …
- Dhamma Medicine for Free… Then there’s mental fabrication, feeling and perception. Feeling would be the feelings of ease or dis-ease associated with breath. Perception includes the mental labels, the images you have in your mind about the breath. When you breathe in, where do you think the breath comes in? When you breathe out, where does it go out? Is there one spot where comes in …
- A Mind Like Earth… The little tiny mind that says, “I can’t take it, I can’t take it,” that’s a perception that’s getting in your way. What is it as you’re sitting here that you’re asked to take? Well, the results of the meditation may not come as quickly as you want. You may have to figure things out. The Buddha doesn …
- Inner Worlds… Notice the feelings you’re focusing on and the perceptions you’re holding in mind. Try to bring these things together in a good way: Breathe in a way that’s nourishing. Talk to yourself in a way that’s nourishing. If the chatter in the mind weighs you down, pulls you down, blames everything on things outside, you’ve got to counteract it …
- Patience Is a Skill… But you can speed up the process a little bit by being as skillful as you can in your breathing, in how you talk to yourself, and the perceptions you hold in mind: those three fabrications. Keeping the image of farming in mind, of plants growing, is one useful perception to help with the process. As for skillful qualities that are actually getting in …
- Talking to Yourself… It’s called mental fabrication, *saññā *or perception: the words you use to label things, the images you use to present things to yourself. What kind of image is good to hold of the breath energy in the body? Do you want to be aware of the breath energy along the skin? Or do you want to have it go deeper into the different …
- The Courage to Set Yourself Free… Can you learn how to take apart the perceptions that would tell you otherwise? And make sure you don’t view yourself as being victimized by the pain. This is why I like that perception of the pain as being discrete moments of pain and, as each moment arises, it’s not coming at you. It’s going away. That way, you’re not …
- The Role of the Observer… Then there are perceptions and feelings—the labels we put on things and the feeling tones we focus on—pleasant, unpleasant, neither-pleasant-nor-unpleasant: Those are mental fabrications. Those are our tools, our weapons in our internal battle over those thoughts that come into the mind and just seem to hang on because there’s part of the mind hanging on to them …
- Noble Wealth… Then he goes on to talking about breathing in a way to give rise to rapture, breathing in a way that gives rise to pleasure, breathing in and out sensitive to mental fabrication—feelings and perceptions—and then calming them. There again, you’re working with potentials you have, and you’re learning how to put them together in the right way so that …
- Quiet in Every Way… When you can stay on these topics, they’re called perception-attainments. At that point your thinking isn’t called directed thought and evaluation. It’s simply perception , the labels you put on things, which hardly qualify as verbal sankharas. They’re mental sankharas. Verbal sankharas are sentences; these are simply words. But still they count as a kind of disturbance. Stay with that …
- Thinking About Rebirth… Actually, the perception of not-self is the shadow side of any perception of self. When you have a definition of who you are, there’s going to be something that you are not. The two go together. And the question is, where are you going to draw the line? We’re drawing these lines all the time. The Buddha simply wants you to …
- A Sense of Yourself… After all, the way we shape our experience in the present moment uses images, perceptions, and the Buddha’s giving you some good perceptions to play with. You can take what he’s got. Then you can think about other ways in which people try to get what they want in the wrong way. You might ask yourself, “To what extent am I doing …
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