Search results for: "Perception"
- Page 50
- The Elephant Hunter… Everything else you know in life falls under the pattern of the dependent co-arising, where things that you see through the six senses, even things you directly experience through those senses, are colored by the perceptions you’ve had in the past, thoughts you’ve had in the past. So there’s always some bias in ordinary sense perceptions. But the awareness of …
- Believing & Knowing… Just as our normal every day perceptions can be clouded by our defilements, psychic knowledge can be clouded by defilement, too. The only sure way is to get rid of those defilements—your greed, aversion, and delusion—so that someday you’ll find your bull elephant. You’ll see for yourself that what the Buddha taught was true. The Buddha really did know what …
- Dimensions of Right Effort… feelings and perceptions. The perceptions are the labels you put on things, “This is good. That’s bad. I like this. I don’t like that. This is permanent. That’s impermanent.” Sometimes the trouble comes from putting the wrong labels on things. So ask yourself, “Well what precisely is the perception I’m worked up about?” If you see, say, an object that …
- Doing… The same with feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, consciousness. He doesn’t tell you just to give to up and say, “Well, that’s not my self, so I’ll just learn how to accept things as they are.” That short-circuits the whole path. You never get anywhere. He says to try training these things into a state of stillness, a state of well …
- Questioning Your Way to Certainty… You see form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness, and you ask yourself, “Are these things constant?” Well, no. And the Buddha here is not asking in the abstract. He’s asking you to look: to look at your sense of form, your sense of the body that you’re experiencing right here as you sit here. Look at the feelings that arise and pass …
- A Tradition of Ingenuity… Maybe the way you’re talking to yourself has something to do with the problem, or maybe it’s the perceptions you’re holding in mind. Feeling also appears in name and form. There it’s associated with attention, intention, perception, and contact. What are you paying attention to when you’re suffering from a physical pain? Could you change that? Pay attention to …
- A Memorial to Your Life… And depending on what you find, either you go to a deeper level of concentration—for example, if you see that to have any perception of the body as having a shape is imposing a little bit too much on it, okay, drop that perception. Let the body just be a cloud, little droplets of mist, not clearly defined. Then notice the space between …
- What’s Worth Doing?… This is why, as the sense of comfort grows in the meditation, you should try to expand your awareness to fill the body and maintain that perception of breath. Because that’s what keeps you in proper concentration, keeps you alert. In fact, all the way through the different states of jhana, you have to hold onto the perception of your object. You can …
- Dhamma Intelligence… How do you become more perceptive? You have to start out by being more alert, more mindful, more ardent in what you’re doing. And here the question of figuring things out is not one of figuring things out from first principles. You figure things out from what you’re trying to do. If it’s not getting the desired results, what are you …
- Some Assembly Required… Things come up from the past, and as the Buddha said, we take these potentials and shape them into forms, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness—for a purpose. Our primary purpose is simply to have these kinds of experiences so that we can then use them, to get some pleasure out of them. That means that our experience is purposeful. We’re not just …
- Taking Stock… We had that chant just now about how form—one of the forms in our life, of course, is the form of the body—feelings, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness: All these things are not-self. They don’t really lie totally under your control. But it’s not as if you don’t have any control over them at all. You do have some. So …
- Issues of Control… You sensitize yourself to it—the fact that feelings and perceptions are shaping your mind—and then you try to calm their impact. Which feelings you can focus on are most calming? In the beginning, there might be some intense feelings of pleasure that you just want to drink up, drink up, drink up. Well, drink them up. As the Buddha said, when you …
- The Range of Our Responsibility… When you’re dealing with the breath, what kind of breathing is good? And how do you relate to the breath? Where do you focus? How do you conceive the breath? What kind of perceptions do you have related to the breath? If you think of the breath as the air that you draw in and out of the lungs, does that help the …
- The Power of Human Effort… feelings and perceptions, the labels you place on things in the body and mind. You see this most clearly as you’re working with the breath energies in the body. Parts of the body that maybe you never thought of as having anything to do with the breath: Try labeling them as “breath.” There’s still breath; there’s breath that goes around in …
- The Wisdom of Dualities… When is it useful to emphasize the pleasant aspects of something and when is it useful to emphasize the stressful aspects? When is it useful to emphasize the fact that you have some control over your actions, and when is it useful to focus on things being not-self? The whole purpose of these three perceptions—inconstancy, stress, and not-self—is to give …
- The Carpenter’s Adze… He could have said to calm your perceptions and feelings. But no, he said to calm mental fabrication. He’s focusing on the fact that you’re fabricating the state of your body, and you’re fabricating the state of your mind. And he wants you to see it in those terms, and to reflect on what you’re fabricating. He said to breathe …
- Beyond Sound-bitten Dhamma… But the Buddha realized that this attainment he’d reached—the state of neither perception or non-perception—was not the deathless. He wasn’t going to settle for anything less. So, in that case, he made sure that he was not content with his practice. Then there’s this case when he taught Rahula, “When you’ve see that you’ve done something …
- When the Mind Is Still… Sometimes the tangle appears first, then you slap a perception on it. You say, “This is a thought about x or a thought about *y,” *and then you run with it. By that time, it’s too late—not too late to stop the thought, but you’ve missed a lot of important steps. You want to see how your thought worlds are formed …
- It’s All in What You’re Doing… You’ve got the perception that’s holding you with the breath. You’ve got the thought fabrications that are directing your thoughts and evaluating to get the breath and the mind to settle down together. And then you’ve got the awareness, the consciousness, that’s aware of all these things. That’s where you’re going to see those five aggregates. It …
- A Complete Training… Then you realize that to keep this attitude going, it helps to breathe in a comfortable way, to talk to yourself in a comfortable way, and to have perceptions and feelings that will help induce those pleasant feelings of goodwill. This means you’re beginning to see the process of fabrication. Then as you get more into developing the meditation—working with the breath …
- Load next page...
