Search results for: "Perception"

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  2. Control
     … And then your perceptions: You ignore the flashing red lights. Stay with the perceptions of the breath as something that can permeate everything, that can flow anywhere you want. And use your directed thought and evaluation to improve things. The way the breath is going, the way the mind is relating to the breath, you can make these adjustments. Then you can direct your … 
  3. Wisdom for Dummies
     … You can learn how to breathe in a comfortable way, to think in a comfortable way, to fashion your thoughts and your perceptions so as to shape a greater sense of wellbeing. You don’t have to invest any money. Just take time and use your powers of observation. That’s what it all comes down to. These are very simple things, very simple … 
  4. Meditation as Play
     … And what’s the best way to know the mind? By trying different things, using different perceptions, focusing on different parts of the body. Try to get a sense of what it means to focus. Can you focus without tensing up around the focal point? And when you focus, are your eyes involved in the process? Can you do it without** involving the eyes … 
  5. Issues of Control
     … In the same way, as we deal with our aggregates—form, feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, consciousness—there are unskillful ways of trying to control them and there are skillful ways. You can actually turn them into the path. All five aggregates, for instance, are involved in concentration. Form, of course, would be the breath. Think of the breath going through the whole body. Feeling … 
  6. Oppressed by Old Kamma
     … You can start playing with your perceptions of the moment, playing with your perceptions of your distractions. If the sound of somebody breathing is bothering you, well, you can think of it as the sound of an animal. If an animal were breathing that way, would it bother you? No. Well, then, what’s the difference? “Well, an animal can’t help itself, but … 
  7. New Feeding Habits
     … We were talking earlier about how unskillful qualities come from the way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself, the perceptions you hold in your mind, but skillful qualities can come from the same things—the way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself, the perceptions you hold in mind. The difference lies in whether you do these things in ignorance or … 
  8. The Desire for Things to Be Different
     … You’ll find that the use of your perceptions will make a big difference: how you visualize the breath to yourself, how you pay attention to the different parts of the body, how you react to the parts of the body where there are patterns of tension. Can you focus on them in a way that begins to disperse the tension? Can you spread … 
  9. To Disturb Your Complacency
     … What’s this? What’s happening here in your mind right now? What’s your experience of form right now? What kind of feelings do you have right now? What are your perceptions right now? What are your thought constructs, your intentions? How about your consciousness right now? How do you experience these things? Are you suffering from them? If you are, what are … 
  10. Four Determinations
     … You desire a certain perception around the person. Or you desire a certain status: Like that old commercial about the BMW chill. A guy comes up to the top of a parking garage, he steps out the door of the elevator, sees his BMW in the midst of all these other old jalopies, and he just shivers, because it’s his BMW. In that … 
  11. Protection Through the Practice
     … You have unskillful attitudes, unskillful perceptions, and they don’t want to be questioned. So they try to discourage you, they try to look bigger than they are, like those frogs that puff themselves up or like the lizards that do pushups to look bigger. But if you’re bigger than they are, then you begin to see how puny their pushups are. You … 
  12. Standards for Thinking
     … What’s the breath doing right now? What impact does it have on the way you feel your body? And how are you perceiving things right now? Because our perception of the breath, the way we imagine the breath to ourselves, is going to have a huge impact on how we breathe, how we experience the breath in the body and what we can … 
  13. The Big Picture
     … And there’s mental fabrication, perceptions—the labels you put on things—and then feelings: feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. Pay careful attention to that. These are the things you use to take the raw material provided by your past karma and turn it into your experience of the present moment. And they’re all right here. The breath is … 
  14. The Buddha’s Program
     … What anticipations, what ideas, what perceptions, what assumptions are we bringing? You see this clearly in the breath: The way you picture the breath to yourself will have an influence on how the breath actually goes right now. How you tell yourself to focus on the breath will influence how the breath goes right now. This is why we try out different assumptions about … 
  15. Disenchantment
     … You look for the origination of whatever desire you have—for forms, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, and consciousness—and you see that it originates in the mind. What is it in the mind that wants these things? What wants to take the raw materials, the potentials in the present moment for these things, and turn them into actual aggregates? And then from the aggregates … 
  16. Reflect on What You’re Doing
     … The perception would be the mental image you have of how the breath comes in and out of the body. Fabrication would be your intention to stay here. It starts out with directed thought and evaluation as you talk to yourself to get the mind to settle down, but even as you drop those activities, you’ve still got the fabrication of intention to … 
  17. Unchanged by Loss
     … They’re perceptions you can use to start shaping your mind in a new way. He says to make your mind like earth. People throw nice things on the earth, people throw disgusting things on the earth, but the earth doesn’t react. Hold that image in mind, and remind yourself that whatever comes your way, you can stand it. Aging comes, you can … 
  18. Your Inner Mob
     … It’s just that, at the time, your perceptions were skewed. The Buddha compares each of the hindrances to a different kind of water. Sensual desire is water with dye in it. Say there’s red dye in the water: The things in the water look red, but when you take them out, they’re not. It was just the dye in the water … 
  19. Staying in Position
     … Hold that perception in mind. If there are parts of the body where the breath energy feels blocked, think of it as getting untangled. Think of that blockage dissolving. Or you can breathe around it, breathe through it—whatever way you find helps keep the breath flowing, keep the blood flowing. And let this perception cover the whole body. Sometimes a pain in one … 
  20. Potentials
     … You probably know the passage where the Buddha says that you look at form, feeling, perception, fabrication and consciousness, and you ask yourself: “Are they under your control? Can you have them be the way you want them to be?” The answer is “partially.” Most people tend to think that there’s nothing you can do about them at all. You’ve just got … 
  21. A Path of Skills
     … You’re focusing on the process of fabrication—how the mind puts its experience together—through the way it breathes, through the way it talks to itself, the perceptions and feelings it holds in mind. Even when the breath leaves you, that knowledge of the other types of fabrication will be there to sustain you, because you’ll need to know how the way … 
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