Search results for: "Perception"
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- Skills to Take Home… As you get out in nature, the perception of wilderness overcomes you—that you’re alone in nature—and nature has nothing at all to do with what’s in society. All of the perceptions and concepts of people back home, all the issues back home, seem small and far away. It’s good to have the mind in that space as often as …
- Not-selfing Your Selves… With all the various skills we’ve learned in making use of the body—making use of our feelings, our perceptions, thought constructs, even our consciousness: The reason we hold onto these things is because we’ve found them useful for finding happiness. Now, the problem is that our notion of happiness may be limited, and we may be turning a blind eye to …
- Skills of the Dhamma Wheel… When the Buddha places attention in the series of conditions in dependent co-arising, it’s under the category of “name,” mixed up with contact and intention and perception and feeling, and all of these factors have fabrication underlying them. So there’s a lot going on even when you think you’re just giving bare attention to something. One of your tasks as …
- Appropriate Attention… You’re clinging to the five aggregates of form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness. And why are you doing that? Because of craving. Now, that right there is pretty radical. Most of us, when we suffer, tend to focus on the causes coming from outside. This person did that, that person did this, the society’s like this, the weather’s like that …
- Choiceful Awareness… How do you breathe and how do you hold a perception of the breath in mind that allows things to work together, so that when the breath energy comes in, the whole body feels like it’s being nourished, with no sense of conflict? As you stay with the breath, you begin to notice that the breath energy in some parts of the body …
- Freedom from Beliefs… You learn how to understand the breath, you learn how to gain a sense of where even your perceptions of the breath can place limitations on it, and you learn how to loosen up some of those preconceived notions so that there’s a greater sense of ease, a greater sense of well-being, a sense of refreshment, rapture, fullness. These things can be …
- The Brightness of Life… Even the five aggregates—form, feeling, perception, thought-fabrications, and consciousness: The Buddha says that they do have their pleasant side. They’re not all suffering. So his understanding of life, his understanding of the world, had a lot more nuance—and was a lot more useful. He didn’t say life is suffering. When he made his shortest explanation of suffering, he says …
- The Not-Self Discourse… feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. They’re not-self. You might wonder why he brought up the topic of not-self. After all, all five of the brethren had attained the Dhamma eye, and one of the consequences of that attainment is that you let go of identity views—views in which you define yourself either as an aggregate, as the owner of the …
- Get Real… changing your perceptions and intentions a little bit here, a little bit there, seeing what feelings result, and trying to be observant as possible, as sensitive as possible, to what’s really happening, to what’s connected with what. This is why you’re told not to force the breath, but to allow it to come in and go out comfortably and then to …
- Ardency… When you’re ignorant of the ways your mind talks to itself, it’s going to lead to suffering, the way you relate to feelings and perceptions is going to lead to suffering. The only way to cut through that ignorance is to be as consistently aware as possible. This is why we start with the breath. It’s right here, something immediately present …
- Developing Discernment… So, do you want to be like a dog that finds something rotten on the ground and just rolls on the rotten thing? Is that what you want to do? Holding that perception in mind helps make the thought a lot less attractive. Remind yourself of the attractions of wanting to stay with the breath. Here’s a path out. The Buddha said it …
- A Gentle Touch… There’s the mental chatter, there are feelings and perceptions, and they could either be directed outside, directed to the past, directed to the future, or the same process can be acting right here, hovering around here. It’s in hovering around here that you bring your awareness where it really ought to be, because if you want to understand how you shape your …
- Honesty & Integrity… Exactly how solid is it? What are the sensations that go into making it up? What are the mental acts?—your acts of perception, the narratives you have about the pain, about how much longer this pain is going to last. If you follow that narrative—of how much longer it’s going to last, or of how long it has lasted so far …
- A Path Rooted in Desire… We cling to the aggregates of form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, consciousness—and that’s the suffering. It’s the passion and desire that wants to hold on to these things as you’re feeding on them. There’s a hunger, and the hunger is not yet satisfied—that’s where the suffering is. That’s to be comprehended. The cause is the craving …
- The Kamma of Self & Not-self… You take the potential for form, the potential for feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness, all of which come from past actions, and you actualize it. Then you identify with it. But your identity can change from moment to moment. Sometimes you’re focused on feelings, sometimes on perceptions, sometimes on the body, either seeing yourself as identical with these things, or as possessing these …
- Do, Maintain, Use… So hold that perception in mind. Realize that this wind property or this breath element suffuses the entire body. When it’s comfortable, a sense of comfort can suffuse the entire body as well. If there are pains in different parts of the body, think of the breath either going around them or permeating through them. But focus your primary attention on the comfort …
- A Genius about Your own Mind… the dimensions of nothingness and neither perception nor non-perception. Yet he saw that there was still danger those attainments. There was still a problem there. They didn’t meet with his standards of totally deathless happiness. And so he moved on. And, through trial and error, he finally found something that was a lot better. We remember his teachers simply because they were …
- The Power of Choice… feelings and perceptions. As you’re meditating, you’ve got all these forms of fabrication right here. And you’re creating this state of form-becoming, the best becoming for seeing the process of fabrication, because everything you need to see is present right here. As you’re doing this, you begin to see that even creating a very nice, stable form of happiness …
- Into Position… But as they analyze the way their mind reacts to the pain, creates more pain when it doesn’t have to, how it can learn how to change its perceptions around the pain, then they can actually gain enough insight into the mind that they gain awakening, at least to some of the early levels. That’s showing real skill in taking potentials from …
- Elephant Training… What this means is that as you learn the ins and outs of the mind – the way its perceptions affect things, and the way you tend to add unnecessary suffering on top of things. You can look for what you’re doing and then change it because experience is not totally a given from your past karma. Some of the things you’re experiencing …
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