Search results for: "Perception"
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- Start by Relaxing Your Hands… Play with your perceptions and you find that that helps things along. It also helps you to begin to question some of the perceptions you’ve been bringing into the practice. Exactly how does the breath come in anyhow? What is breath energy? What pulls the breath in? What pushes it out? Does it have to be pulled? Does it have to be pushed …
- The Return of Chickens from Hell… You’ve got perceptions, the labels you put on things, and you’ve got the intentions that are fabricating these things, and then you’ve got consciousness, which is aware. Those five activities—form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness—are the aggregates. And as the Buddha said, if we cling to them, we’re going to suffer. Particularly if we cling to them with …
- Self View & Conceit… You see what you’re doing, what perception you’re holding in mind. As you abandon any perceptions that create even the slightest disturbance, you go into deeper, deeper, and deeper stages of concentration. Basically, what you’re doing is asking yourself the questions of the four noble truths: “Where’s the suffering? Where’s the stress?” In this case, it’s very subtle …
- Skills to Make You Free… You can ask yourself about the perceptions you have around the pain. Focus on the actual sensation itself and ask yourself, “Is it the same thing as the body part that it’s in? Is it a solid block of pain, or is it moments of pain?” If you can see it’s moments of pain, then you can ask yourself, “Are these moments …
- Pleasure on the Path… So play around a little bit with your perceptions of the breath, too. Then as you find yourself getting more and more interested in this flow of energy in the body, the mind begins to settle down. A quality of ease comes with that, when the mind has one place where it can stay and doesn’t have to go jumping around. It’s …
- Battling Negativity… Our sense of “I am this” or “I am that” can be centered on form, feeling, perception, thought-constructs, or consciousness. And as soon as we slap the label of “I am this” or “I am that” onto something, we’re going to cling to it. And there you are: suffering. Suffering is bound up in how we define ourselves. So when we start …
- Hope… The same with perceptions, thought-constructs, even consciousness: All of these things have an element of fabrication. There’s an element of doing, an element of intention in all of these things. And we tend to miss that, which is why we miss the point where we can make a difference. So always keep that in mind. Your feelings have an element of doing …
- Horror Stories… As I said earlier, the place where you’re going to find awakening is a place you’ve been many, many times before, just focused in the present moment, noticing how the breath changes, how it has an impact on the body, how it has an impact on the mind, how the mind has an impact on the breath, and how your perceptions have …
- Consciousness, Awakened & Not… The perceptions that incline you in that direction, such as the three perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self: Those, too, are actions. It is possible to cling to them. Or you have an experience of the deathless and you cling to that. So you have to be very sensitive to what you’re doing. Circumspect all around. It’s only then that you …
- High-Level Dhamma… Either they’d get depressed or else they’d start trying to squeeze their minds into the direction they had learned from the books, which was basically just perceptions based on ignorance. As Ajaan Lee once said, most people mistake low-level Dhamma for high-level Dhamma, and high-level Dhamma for low-level Dhamma. When we read about high-level Dhamma, all we …
- The Second Noble Truth… form, feeling, perceptions, mental fabrications, and consciousness at the senses. We try to grab onto these things, to pull ourselves to safety, to find some place to rest, because as the Buddha said, it’s only when there’s peace, when there’s a sense of resting, that the mind has any real happiness. And yet, this is all that the river can grow …
- Two Things to Keep in Mind… There are perceptions and ways of thinking, ways of breathing with regard to that pain that, if they’re done with ignorance, are going to cause suffering. So how can you bring some knowledge to this process of how you experience pain? How you label it, how you breath around it. When you’ve learn some of these lessons from physical pain, then you …
- Toxic Environments… Hold that perception in mind. A lot of the reason why we feel so influenced by toxic places is because we’re hoping to take in something from them. We’re hoping for approval, something to give us some emotional sustenance. So we hope to feed on them. Of course, when you open yourself up to feed on things, they can be toxic. You …
- The Dhamma Eye… After all, there are states of concentration that the Buddha calls non-perception where you totally blank out, but they’re not noble states. If you happen to die while you’re in them, you go on to the state of non-percipient beings, where you’re totally unconscious. When that attainment wears off, you regain consciousness and leave that state, and then you …
- The Uses of Concentration… This may involve a slight trick of perception. We tend to focus on the pains, the tight areas, the problems, and we miss the areas that are actually okay. It’s like that book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which teaches how to draw a face by focusing not on the eyes or the nose or the mouth, but on the …
- Desire Is Part of the Path… Your perceptions are things you do. Thought constructs, fabrications are things you do. Consciousness is something you do. And we’re addicted to these activities. With the path, the Buddha is giving us something better to be addicted to as we get the mind into concentration. He himself said he got on the right path when he realized that he could divide his thoughts …
- Breathing to Awakening… As you think in these ways, you realize you’re working both with the breath and with the perceptions around the breath—and that’s what analysis of qualities is all about: getting to know the activities of your mind as you engage it in something interesting. There were people who used to criticize Ajaan Lee, saying, “How can you teach people the breath …
- Training Your Selves… You latch on to something—to form, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, fabrications, consciousness. In latching on to these things, you make yourself subject to things that you don’t want. So there is a way out that doesn’t involve just being accepting or resigning yourself to the way things are. We were talking today about the translation of dukkha sometimes as unsatisfactoriness. It …
- The Shape of a Circle… There’s another passage in Ajaan Chah where he says that just the thought reminding yourself about these three perceptions—these three contemplations, about inconstancy, stress, not self—is enough to pull down any unskillful desire, any unskillful craving. The contemplation itself comes out of a kind of desire. You have to want discernment in order to gain it. You have to want to …
- Stay… Or if you know that you’re angry, you stop and tell yourself, wait a minute, as long as anger is taking over the mind, you can’t rely on your perceptions. At the very least, you try to ease the breath, get the breath back to normal. The process of getting the breath back to normal requires that you stop being angry and …
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