Search results for: "Perception"

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  2. Urgency & Contentment
     … The perceptions and feelings that you develop working with the breath: Those are mental fabrications. Everything you need to understand for the sake of awakening is right here. So think about this in a way that gives you a sense of contentment, content with being with the breath, that everything you need to understand about the Dhamma is something you’ll be able to … 
  3. Clinging & the End of Clinging
     … is suffering.” He said something more specific, useful, and insightful: “Suffering is the five clinging-aggregates.” As he pointed out elsewhere, the problem isn’t with the aggregates of form, feeling, perceptions, fabrication, or consciousness. The problem is with the clinging. So, suffering is clinging. When he said that all he taught was suffering and the end of suffering, he was basically saying all … 
  4. The Dhamma Channel
    When you focus on the breath, also pay attention to the perception you have of the breath: the image you have in mind. Think of the body being filled with breath channels and that they all connect—so that when you breathe in, every part of the body gets nourished by good breath energy. If one part of the body has an excess and … 
  5. Borrowed Wealth
     … Because your body, your feelings, your perceptions, and thought constructs, even your consciousness, acts of consciousness: They come and they go, and you have to leave them at some point. And the question is, in taking possession of these things and taking care of them, what do you have to show for your effort? Most people go for a life of sensual pleasures: nice … 
  6. Light Merit
     … If you have the right perceptions, the right insights into what’s going on, you can release yourself from that suffering. Even if it’s just a temporary release, it’s an important lesson, an important skill, so that whatever comes up, you’re not weighing yourself down unnecessarily. You get to be like a good cook. Good cooks can take even slightly spoiled … 
  7. Dwelling in Emptiness
     … Where is there disturbance in your concentration, and where is there not? What things have you let go of when you’re in a particular state? What things are you still holding on to? Holding on to a particular perception will have an element of disturbance. So this is what the teaching on emptiness is about: looking very clearly at where the disturbance is … 
  8. The Language of the Heart (1)
     … In my particular case, I remember reading a passage where he talked about how thoughts begin to form in the mind with a little bit of a stirring, a perception is slapped onto them, and then they turn into full-blown thoughts. I had noticed that in my own meditation; I had never seen it explained anywhere. And so my immediate reaction was, “Finally … 
  9. The Hall of Mirrors
     … So try to loosen up your intentions a bit, loosen up your perceptions. Think outside the box so that you don’t simply fall into the old hall of mirrors that you’ve been living in for so long. If you were to make another comparison, it’s like trying to detect very faint infrared radiation from outer space while you’re standing on … 
  10. Discipline Is a Choice
     … You have to learn different perceptions to hold in mind to remind yourself that this is where you really and consistently want to go. Some people say it’s narrow, being committed like that. But then the people who refuse to commit to anything in life, where do they go? What do they accomplish? They just wander around aimlessly, off into the woods on … 
  11. Questioning the Hindrances
     … At the same time, with right concentration you don’t go wandering off into the thoughts, analysis, and world perceptions where insight practice—without any good, solid concentration foundation—can lead you. So you need the two qualities together, stillness and insight. They work together. The stillness is what enables you to see. Now, you can wallow in the stillness, get carried away by … 
  12. Enlarged Awareness
     … You can try to stick with this one perception, the awareness filling the body, pleasure filling the body, or equanimity filling the body. Try to maintain that wherever you go. That way, the meditation becomes your foundation, and your sense of the world or your sense of yourself within the world begins to change. It’s not that there’s a little you inside … 
  13. Mindful, Alert, & Ardent
     … Then there is what’s called mental effort, which means learning how to hold certain perceptions in mind. How do you perceive the breath in a way that makes it interesting? Think of the breathing not just as air coming in and out of the lungs, but as the whole energy process by which the air comes in and out. That energy process affects … 
  14. Endurance & Contentment
     … knowing how to breathe, knowing how to talk to ourselves, knowing what perceptions to hold in mind. One of the most harmful mental fabrications to focus on is how you’re suffering under some condition that other people are not suffering under and thinking that it’s not right. But then again, you don’t know other people’s states of mind. They may … 
  15. A Room of Your Own
     … But if you can learn how to be gentle and perceptive with the comfortable spots, then the uncomfortable spots will feel less threatened by your attention and they can begin to open up. They, too, can be brought into the compass of the sense of ease, feeling at home in the body. Some of your inner barriers begin to break down. One of the … 
  16. Immediate Knowledge
     … This is where intention and feeling and attention and perception—all those factors of name and form—all meet. Even though you may not be able to parse them out yet, at least you know that all the important things you need to know are right here. Try to make this “right here” the basis of whatever other certainty you’re going to try … 
  17. Meditation Prep
     … For lust, he said to try to develop the perception of the foulness of the human body. Now this is not about having an unhealthy negative image of the body; it’s actually training in having a healthy negative image of the body. You realize that everybody is in the same boat this way. We’re all filled with blood, pus, contents of the … 
  18. The Best of a Bad Situation
     … You can’t imagine relating to your thoughts, your feelings, your perceptions, even your acts of consciousness in any other way aside from clinging to them. But the Buddha is saying there are other ways, to expand your imagination. One way of expanding your imagination is to start with something really simple: generosity. I used to read stories of explorers going to the Arctic … 
  19. Guarding Against Trouble
     … What can I do that would enable me to be with pain but not suffer from it? A lot of this has to do with the perceptions or labels you apply to the pain: where the pain is in the body, how it’s affecting you. Sometimes you find that the mind actually thinks that the pain has a will. It intends to hurt … 
  20. Mindful & Discerning 24/7
     … the ability to breathe in a way that’s more wakeful; useful perceptions and images you can hold in mind to stir you to get up. Think of Ajaan Mun standing next to your bed, or Ajaan Lee, someone who you’d be embarrassed to have see your thoughts. This way, you use all of your fabrications—bodily, verbal, mental—to deal with the … 
  21. You Contain Multitudes
     … The Buddha talks about perception as a mental fabrication, and that includes visualization: visualizing yourself as capable of following this path. Just think of the great ajaans in Thailand. They were born out in the countryside in the northeast. The people in the northeast were looked down on by everybody else in the country. If they had taken on other people’s opinion of … 
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