Search results for: "Perception"
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- Merit: Goodness of the Heart… the form of your body as you feel it from within; your feelings; your perceptions; your fabrications, the way you put thoughts together; and your consciousness. All of these things are activities. Even the way you keep reaffirming to yourself where your body is right now: That’s an activity, your sense of form, i.e., how you feel the body from within. The …
- Pull Yourself Up by Your Fetters… The dimensions of the infinitude of space, the infinitude of consciousness, the dimension of nothingness, the dimension of neither perception or non-perception are levels of concentration you can get into because you enjoy them. There’s delight there—passion, desire, delight. Granted, these are fetters. Think of them as chains. Some chains you can actually use to pull yourself up. Say you’re …
- Breath Meditation: The Fourth Tetrad… As Ajaan Lee would recommend, try to develop concentration in spite of the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self. In other words, you’re trying to make this state of mind as constant as possible, as easeful as possible, and as much under your control as possible. That puts you in a better position to fight off a lot of your grosser obstacles …
- The Tools of the Path… Of course, there are perceptions and thought constructs, consciousness of these things—it’s all there. You have to learn how to use these aggregates to get rid of unskillful thoughts. This is going to be a lesson for concentration, because once the mind gets into concentration, you don’t just stay there. The whole point of getting into concentration is that, in the …
- Discernment Through Ardency & Evaluation… See what’s connected to what and then decide, “Okay, is it satisfactory?” When he came up with the teaching on what they call the three characteristics or the three perceptions, those were tools for evaluation in this process. In other words, if something seemed pleasant or good, he asked himself, “Okay, is it constant?” If there’s any inconstancy in here, it can …
- The Arrows of Emotion… Your internal speech, your feelings, and your perceptions are flashing in the mind. We stitch these things together and we forget what the raw materials are. We just look for the finished product. We have a real talent for just keeping on stitching and stitching and stitching. And what is the stitching? The Buddha says the stitching is craving. This is all happening all …
- Just One Person… You’re doing your perceptions, your thought fabrications, your consciousness. You’ve even been doing your sense of the body. This is why the Buddha said that all of the aggregates depend on the fourth one—fabrications. That’s what takes the potentials coming from your past actions and turns them into your present experiences. So you’re playing a huge role right here …
- The Thinking Cure… As the Buddha said, every state of concentration depends on a perception, a mental label you create, a little message you can carry from one moment to the next, one that you can remember, that you can be mindful of. Here that message is: “breath.” So what is your concept of the breath? How do you relate to it? We talk about forcing the …
- Willing & Observing… The sensation of breathing at the nose becomes weaker, less perceptible. The rise and fall of the abdomen gets weaker and less perceptible, and suddenly find yourself hanging in space. If you haven’t already worked on developing a sense of the body as a whole, it’s very easy to lose your focus, lose your foundation. So you want to develop both sides …
- The Skill of Happiness… Mental action gets boiled down to your perceptions—in other words, the labels you apply to things. Like right now, you have an image of the breath in your mind. You can ask yourself, “What kind of image would be helpful right now?” Especially, what kind of image of the breath would help make the breath more comfortable? You can think of the breath …
- The Energy to Be Generous… Then there are feelings and perceptions. These are mental fabrications. Try to cultivate feelings of well-being in the body. Learn to have an attitude of gratitude for the people who have been helping you, so that you can show that the help they gave you was well-given, wisely given. You’re going to make good use of it. And then the perceptions …
- Ven. Ananda’s Awakening… The mind will begin to settle down with a sense of ease with that perception—whatever the perception is that allows you to stay with the breath and that allows the breath to spread comfortably through the body. So we’re here with the desire for awakening, but we learn how to channel that desire into our efforts to stay with the breath, to …
- Goodwill Is Respect… There are thoughts about the breath, perceptions about the breath. There’s a sutta where the Buddha talks about how Ven. Sariputta—his foremost student in discernment—could see all kinds of mental activities going on even as the mind settled into very deep stages of absorption. So there are things to observe here. You want to see how you’re putting this state …
- Food for Endurance… And then in terms of *mental fabrication—*the perceptions and feeling we focus on—we’re totally free to perceive a situation in lots of different ways, all of which are true. Then we can ask ourselves: “Which of these ways is the most conducive to keeping the mind happy, keeping the mind acting in skillful ways?” Choose that perception; choose those feelings. Then …
- Recollecting the Buddha… Breath is, of course, the bodily fabrication kaya-sankhara, but his instructions also tell you to be sensitive to citta-sankhara or mental fabrication, which are your perceptions and feelings. And the instructions themselves are things you tell yourself: That’s vaci-sankhara, verbal fabrication. These are precisely the things you really have to watch out for as you die: what the mind tells …
- A Goal Without Limits… It’s based on a perception, the perception infinite consciousness, and it’s maintained by acts of attention and intention. So when the Buddha says that there’s no name or form in anidassana consciousness, he’s talking about nibbāna, because that’s where there’s no experience of name and form. Consciousness without surface is a type of consciousness but it’s not …
- Perfect Breathing Isn’t the Goal… You try to create that well-being by focusing on the breath, by adjusting the way you breathe, by adjusting your perceptions of the breath, and adjusting the ways you talk to yourself about the breath. You can try different rhythms of breathing. You can try different images in the mind of how the breath comes into the body, how it goes out, and …
- At Home in Jhana… And you’ve got feelings and labels or perceptions, which are mental fabrications. So instead of fabricating worlds outside, thought worlds that can go who knows where, you fix up what you’ve got here. It’s as if you have a little shack that you haven’t been paying attention to, but you can fix it up. You can turn it into a …
- Taming the Elephant… So, I said, “You’ve got to change your perceptions. Remind yourself that you’re surrounded by air. You can breathe whenever you want.” If you learn how to adjust your expectations, adjust your ideas about what you want out of the body, you find that the body can provide you with a sense of well-being that you wouldn’t have expected: a …
- Murderers, Vipers, & Floods, Oh My!… He did say that you have to test things for yourself, but you also have to take into consideration the counsel of the wise—because after all, your perceptions can really be skewed, especially around the area of sensuality. There’s that great passage where he talks about the leper. The leper sits there and takes a stick, heats it in the fire and …
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