Search results for: "Perception"
- Page 49
- What Makes Concentration Right… All your thoughts, all your feelings, perceptions—everything is right here. We try to bring all these things together right here so that you can observe them, to see what it is in the present moment that leads to suffering or stress. And you can watch this either when you leave concentration and pick up other objects, other topics, and see there’s going …
- Defilements Are Real… So you have to question the perceptions you apply to these things. When something gets you angry, take the perception apart. Is what that person has said or done really all that bad? And even if it is all that bad, is anger justified? Or rather: Is it helpful? If it’s something you really have to deal with, anger’s going to get …
- Persistence… And finally, what perceptions are you holding in mind? One perception that’s all too common is that someone does something repeatedly and you just tally up, tally up, tally up, add it on, add it on. You say, “Why is this person always doing that?” Well, the person isn’t always doing that. They may do it repeatedly, but they’re not doing …
- Control… Forms arise, but they have to pass away; the same for feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness. You can’t always say, “I want my body to be like this. I want my feelings to be like that,” and expect them to be that way. Simply telling them to do things doesn’t necessarily make them do it. You can tell the body not to …
- Groundwork… You can also evaluate your perception of the breath. If you think of it having to come through those two little holes in your nostrils, there tends to be a fair amount of pressure pulling the breath in, pushing it out. So hold a different perception in mind. Think of the breath coming in and out through every pore in the body. The body …
- Here to Learn… You can see how you change the perception of the situation in which you are and how that change in your perception changes the total experience, can make it manageable, can make it unmanageable. You have the choice. When you realize you have that choice, then you open up to the fact that we have the freedom of choice all the time—simply that …
- Equanimity & Exertion… Then there are also mental fabrications, which are perceptions—the labels you have for things, which can be either individual words or mental pictures—and then feelings: feelings of either pleasure, pain, or neither-pleasure-nor-pain. You can work with all of these things to deal with that second kind of cause. For instance, there are times when working with feelings of pleasure …
- Empathetic Joy… You see this much more clearly when you consciously shape things, when you experiment with your perceptions. Take your perceptions about the breath: When it comes in, where is it coming in? We know that the air is coming in and out of the nose, but what about the other sensations in the body that don’t correspond with what we’ve been told …
- Inner Strength, Inner Wealth… There’s form, feeling, perception, fabrications and consciousness. You can probably think of lots of other ways of dividing up the activities of the mind. But these five are especially relevant to the way you feed, both physically and emotionally, intellectually. Form would be, on the one hand, the form of your own body, which you need to keep going. Then there’s the …
- To Go Where You’ve Never Gone Before… states of the dimension of nothingness, the dimension of neither perception or non-perception. But his realization was that they’re not the goal, but they can be used as the path to something he had never before reached. You learn how to reflect on them. You learn how to look at them to see where there’s still some clinging in there. Letting …
- True & Beneficial… So that kind of self-perception is useful temporarily, but eventually it’s going to have to go. You do have to work on it. You do have to make it skillful. Some people don’t like themselves. They’re happy to hear that there is no self, that what they don’t like doesn’t exist—but that aborts the path. There are …
- To Comprehend Suffering… These are the activities of form, feelings, perceptions, thought-fabrications, and consciousness. But theimportant word there is the clinging, because there are places where he says that the aggregates on their own are experienced by arahants. Arahants have form, feelings, perceptions, thought-fabrications, consciousness, but they don’t suffer, because they don’t have the clinging. So, the first noble truth: To comprehend dukkha …
- What You’re Choosing to Do Right Now… feelings, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness. The fact that you are fabricating these things… The way the Buddha explains it is that there’s a potential for all of these things coming in from the past, and you decide that you want a feeling, or you want a perception, so you fabricate those potentials into something you actually experience right now. What this means is that …
- Papañca… Papañca is a particular kind of thinking that’s based on particular perceptions. It starts with the perception—“I am the thinker.” There’s an “I” in there. “I’m the one who’s doing the thinking.” “I’m the one who’s inhabiting the body.” “I’m the one who’s using the body.” “I’m the one who’s trying to find …
- The Bureaucracy of the Defilements… Then a perception comes along and stamps a meaning on it, saying that “This is a thought about x.” You realize you can go with that perception or not. If you’re clear about what’s happening, if you’re watching the functionaries, then you can decide, “Do I really want to go with that?” And your decision is an informed one. And it …
- Right View, Right Attention… You’ll need to figure out ways to work with the breath, asking yourself, “Where does the mind feel a sense of depletion? Where does the body feel a sense of depletion right now? Can I breathe in a way that gives rise to a sense of fullness there? What is the perception I’m holding in mind of the breath? How can I …
- Fix Your Views… You have to understand the teachings of the three characteristics, or the three perceptions, in the context of the duties of the four noble truths. They’re appropriate and useful for abandoning your craving and for comprehending your clinging. But when you’re trying to develop a path, you use those perceptions only on things that would pull you off the path. You don …
- The Brahmavihāras Aren’t Enough… Whatever is fabricated, you perceive in line with the three perceptions of being inconstant, stressful, and not-self, or in line with variations on those perceptions: a disease, a dart, alien, empty. In other words, look at the state of concentration itself in terms of the five aggregates, in terms of whatever other fabrications you might use as a framework, and see that it …
- The Flowing Mind… Then there are the images you hold in mind, the perceptions and the feelings you focus on, and you play a role in shaping them. Again, all too often, they seem to just come out of nowhere. A pain is just a pain—it’s already made. A perception is an image—it’s already made. That’s what it looks like. But actually …
- Strong Against Anger & Fear… There’s the way you breathe, there’s the way you talk to yourself, the images, the perceptions you hold in mind. You have to realize that you can breathe in different ways, you can talk to yourself in different ways, you can hold different perceptions in mind. I was listening to a “Dhamma talk” a while back where someone was saying that if …
- Load next page...
