Search results for: "Perception"

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  2. Disenchantment
     … He says, “Wow, I was really fooled by that guy.” In the same way, the Buddha says that once you attain the first taste of Awakening, you look back on your old pleasures and realize how you’ve been fooled by the mind — that in finding your pleasure, what you’ve been feeding on is just forms and feelings and perceptions and thought constructs … 
  3. Not Resolved on Self
     … They’re made out of feelings, perceptions, thought-constructs, the sense of the form of the body, your consciousness. So when you start taking apart the things that disturb you, you find that it begins to have an effect on what goes into making up your sense of self: who you are, who’s doing the practice. It’s like an avalanche as the … 
  4. Levels of Truth
     … form, feeling, perception, fabrications, consciousness. All these things are things that we cling to, and in the clinging there’s going to be stress. That’s something you want to comprehend. You want to watch as it’s actually happening to understand how it’s happening. Then, in the course of performing that duty, you learn to see the cause of stress: what’s … 
  5. Above & Beyond Suffering
     … Once the mind is ready to settle down and explore the present moment, focus simply on the various ways that your perception of the breathing creates problems, creates discomfort in your breathing. Change your perceptions; see what happens. As you do this, you get more and more sensitive to what’s going on in the present moment in the breath. And from there you … 
  6. Tranquility, Insight, & Concentration
     … You realize that you have to have a perception in mind—an image in mind that you hold—of how the breath comes in, how it goes out. There are different images you can use, some of which will be more conducive to a sense of ease and well-being than others. You experiment to find out which are which. And you have to … 
  7. Your Breath, Your Territory
     … its perceptions of the pain, its way of talking to itself about the pain. It’s simply a matter of change of focus. You’re with the breath, with the body, but you’re also noticing how the mind relates to them—both as an active principal, with its perceptions, and then as a passive one, simply being aware of what’s going on … 
  8. Alone & Together
     … Even the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self have their time, they have their place—and also times and places when they’re not appropriate. You can start thinking about not-self and decide, “Well, there’s nobody there—nobody’s responsible, I have no free will, no choice, because there’s no me.” You can get involved in some really serious wrong … 
  9. Listening to the True Dhamma
     … When it talks about perceptions, okay, you’re engaging in perceptions right now—whatever images you have of how the breath flows in your body, where you are in the body, what pictures you have in the mind. Are they the best pictures for getting the mind to settle down? The Dhamma points you to things you’re doing all the time but haven … 
  10. Cornered
     … your perceptions, the images you hold in mind of the breath as a whole-body process, and the body not just as a big lump of flesh, but as a body of breath energy. Then you can ask yourself, are the breath channels in this body connected, or have the plugs been pulled out? Okay, where can you plug them back into one another … 
  11. Healing Breath
     … Your perception of the breath is such that you can see every sensation in the body is related to the way you breathe in one way or another, even the flow of energy in your nerves, the flow of energy through your blood vessels. The breath is a very light and quick movement of energy throughout the solid and liquid and warm parts of … 
  12. Painful Thinking
     … What are you doing right now to make yourself suffer because of that particular thought, that particular perception of reality? See how much the perception itself is designed to make you suffer. Learn to think in ways that help lessen the suffering. The Buddha has an interesting technique. He says to remind yourself of the universality of it all. Because so many times when … 
  13. The Buddha’s Investment Strategy
     … Many, many beings all the way from beings in hell, beings up to the various levels of heaven, even Brahmas, in states of infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness, neither perception nor non-perception: They are all dying and being reborn, and moving around from level to level. Seeing all these movements, he was able to see that there was a general principle to them … 
  14. The Duty to Understand
     … clinging to form, clinging to feelings, clinging to the perceptions or mental labels, clinging to thought constructs, and clinging to acts of consciousness or cognizance. The clinging is something we have to comprehend. It’s important to keep in mind the duties that go with each of those noble truths, because all too often we get our duties mixed up. We try to let … 
  15. Descartes’ Error
     … And it starts with a very simple perception: “I am the thinker.” This reminds you a little of Descartes when he said, “I think, therefore I am.” Or as someone once said, “I think, therefore I am, I think.…” and from that one thought, you start spinning off into all kinds of other things. If you’re the thinker, you’ve got to think … 
  16. An Inside Job
     … What you experience may be an intention or a perception. From the point of view of your experience, science talks about things far away and inferred. So it’s a mistake to see the practice as a kind of science. Now, there are some parallels. A scientist conducting an experiment has to make a few assumptions about the power of action: that the scientist … 
  17. An Issue of Control
     … There’s attention, the things you pay attention to; perception, how you label things; the intention itself; and then the contact among all these things. This contact is what spurs you to act. You see things in a particular way. You’re focusing on a particular issue, and you’re going to act in line with that. Now, the Buddha says the most useful … 
  18. Getting Familiar with Concentration
     … feelings and perceptions. There are feelings of ease or dis-ease, which are associated with the breath. Your perceptions: the labels you give to the breathing and the other sensations that arise up around the breathing. So everything you need to know is right here, and it’s largely a matter of getting familiar with it. To be familiar with it, you have to … 
  19. Unraveling the Present
     … Then there are mental fabrications, feeling and perception, and those are right at the breath as well. There’s the feeling of pleasure or pain, or the neutral feelings that come with the breath. And then perception: Those are the labels you put on things when you say, “Okay, that feels good. That doesn’t feel good.” All these things are right here. The … 
  20. Insight Is a Judgment Call
     … Change the perception in your mind that sees anger as a strength, and learn to see it as a weakness. When you don’t show your anger to other people, they don’t know how to get to you. Think of it in that way. So go through all the various perceptions that give some allure to your anger, or allure to your lust … 
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