Search results for: "Perception"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
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