Search results for: "Perception"

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  2. Equanimity in Heart & Mind
     … This requires that you hold a perception in mind of the breath flowing in. Ask yourself: Where do you feel that it flows in? Here, we’re not talking about the air. We’re talking about the energy. Where does it come in? Or does it feel more like it’s originating from inside the body itself, and welling up to fill the whole … 
  3. Use Your Defilements
     … Then you’ve got perception, the images you hold in mind, both of how the breath comes in, how it goes out, and of how you can play with those perceptions. You realize that the way you perceive things is going to have a huge influence on how you actually experience them. The same with sankhara, fabrication: You direct your thoughts and you evaluate … 
  4. A Concentration Diet
     … That’s because you have to be very careful not to be overcome by the pleasure in order to hold on to the perception of the breath, which gets you more and more sensitive to the process of perception and thought-fabrication in the mind. You can also begin to see how these things can contribute a little bit of stress to the mind … 
  5. Admirable Friendship, Inside & Out
     … When you do this, when you hold this perception in mind, when you focus in this way, what are the results you’re getting? If you change the focus, change the perception, what results do you get? You want to be clear about that. In this way, you become your own admirable friend. You establish an admirable friendship inside, which is where you really … 
  6. Training Your Moods
     … Because your mood is composed of what? The way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself, the perceptions you focus on, the feelings you focus on: in other words, bodily, verbal, mental fabrication. So when a mood begins to take over the mind, begins to take charge of things inside, ask yourself, “Who are you? What are you made of?” Can you go … 
  7. Victory
     … People can sympathize with those feelings, but they can’t directly feel them—just as I can’t get into your visual perception and see what green looks like to you, to see if your green looks like my green, or to see if sour tastes the same to you as it tastes to me. In the same way, we can’t get into … 
  8. Squeezing Goodness Out of the Aggregates
     … The perception of not-self is something you apply to things that get in the way of practicing virtue and concentration. In other words, anything unskillful in your menagerie of selves, you learn to look at it more objectively. Put a question mark around it. And as you get better concentration, you can pull away from those things. Step back from them. Recognize them … 
  9. Inner Discontent
     … The Buddha actually encourages that perception: that there’s something wrong. He doesn’t tell you to accept everything with equanimity or just let it be. A sense of contentment, a sense of equanimity works in some cases, but not all. Admittedly, an important part of the practice is learning to gain a sense of when you can just let things be, either because … 
  10. Reliable Action
     … You begin to notice a lot of the disturbance has to do with your perceptions. You could sit here thinking about how you’re in the midst of this room with all these people and about the narratives of who said what today, and that perception could fill the mind with disturbances. Or you could perceive what you have here simply as physical and … 
  11. Skillful Selfing
     … The path that did work was to focus his desires on taking these aggregates, these raw materials from which we create our sense of self—the form of your body, feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness: taking these things that we normally grab onto to create a sense of self in a particular becoming, and turning them into a path. Even though there may … 
  12. Wild Horses
     … There’s a state called the state of non-perception where you totally blank out, and you stay blanked out for quite a long time. Then you come out, and as one Thai ajaan said, you’re bam bam, boe boe: You don’t have all your wits about you, because the mind has been suppressed for so long. So even though craving is … 
  13. Dissolving Narratives
     … You’re trying to fill your body with one perception, the perception of breath energy coming in, going out. And by enlarging your sense of awareness of the body, you make it easier to stay in the present moment. If you’re just on one little spot, it’s very easy to get knocked off. But if your frame of reference covers the whole … 
  14. The Buddha’s Filters
     … The things you tend to pay attention to, the intentions you have around them, your perceptions of the world: A lot of those factors are included in dependent co-arising before sensory contact. A recent writer was talking about how everything from sensory contact on was very clear, but the earlier factors were pretty murky. Well, that’s because they’re murky in our … 
  15. Scribe Knowledge, Warrior Knowledge
     … He realized that you couldn’t just stop feeding off of form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. If you forced yourself to stop, parts of the mind would come sneaking out for a midnight snack. You’ve got to give the mind a good source of food inside. And when the Buddha’s talking about food in terms of the practice, concentration is the … 
  16. The Most Important Thing to Be Doing
     … Think of it seeping in—and hold in mind the perception that the parts of the body that seem to be resistant are porous. Allow that ease to permeate, to settle in, and you’re sitting here surrounded by that sense of ease. If you have a sense of the blood flow through the body, allow that to feel easeful as well. In other … 
  17. Monotasking
     … He’s talking about the feelings and the perceptions, those images or the labels you have in the mind. What’s your image of the breath coming in? What’s your image of the whole process of breathing? If it feels like it’s creating a rough breath, try to change it. Think of the breath as something much more subtle and smooth: the … 
  18. Habits & Practices
     … the form clinging-aggregate, the feeling clinging-aggregate, perception, fabrications, consciousness clinging-aggregate. That’s because we’re not familiar with our clinging on this level. It’s easier to relate to the different clingings that the Buddha says get applied to these five aggregates. In fact, that’s what the whole issue of comprehension is. First, to get familiar with how you experience … 
  19. The Brahmaviharas on the Path
     … And feelings and perceptions count as mental fabrication. The breath is what actually takes an emotion and makes it real in the body. So a good way to start with the brahmaviharas is to learn how to breathe in a way that feels really good. You have to develop some sense of wellbeing within yourself before you can wish it for other people. Ajaan … 
  20. The Wheel of Dhamma
     … It’s based on the oneness built around the perception you’re using to stay in that state. Once you can actually see that fact as it’s happening, then you let go of that particular perception. It’ll be replaced by a more refined one. So you settle in there, appreciate the lack of disturbance there. Then try to sense where there’s … 
  21. Persistence: Lift Your Heart
     … Other times it has more to do with the whole issue of perception. When you feel tension in some part of the body, is it really in that part of the body, or is your mind lying to you? Is your picture of your body all scrambled? Try thinking of it in other ways. Often I’ve thought I had a pain or tightness … 
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