Search results for: "Perception"

1. Page 59
2. Play AudioThe Buddha’s Shoulds
    … And the three characteristics—or more appropriately, the three perceptions—are there to help you see what’s worth holding on to and what’s not, as you go along the fourth noble truth, the path. If you work on something and you find that it’s inconstant, you have to ask yourself, “Is it stressful? Is this the cause of stress, or is … 
3. Play AudioWhat Should I Do?
    … As the Buddha would say, “Exert a fabrication.” Change the way you breathe, change the way you talk to yourself, change the perceptions you’re holding in mind, and the feelings you’re focused on—to get rid of unskillful qualities and bring skillful qualities more to the fore. Equanimity is when you look at it to see how things are going. Notice that … 
4. Play AudioA Pure Happiness
    … What are they? There’s form, which is how you’re experiencing the body right now; feeling; perception; thought-constructs; and consciousness. The point of this is if you look at what you’ve got in these five terms, you realize there’s not that much there to cling to, not that much there to hold onto. Form is just a sense of the … 
5. Play AudioCharacter
    … Where is the ignorance? How can we get past that? Not with just a trick of perception or a sly technique. Qualities of the character are going to be required to pierce through the ignorance. That way, whatever duties you have in daily life do become part of the practice. By carrying out your daily duties, you’re preparing yourself to carry out the … 
6. Play AudioOn Not Being a Victim
    … When the Buddha describes dependent co-arising, well before he starts talking about sensory data, he talks about issues of attention and intention and perception. These factors influence the way you see and hear and experience things. And they can have an influence either for suffering or for the end of suffering. So one of the functions of the path is to learn how … 
7. Play AudioThe Power of Intention
    … the way we breathe, the way we talk to ourselves, the perceptions and feelings we have. So let’s do that well. As the Buddha said, create a path. The central factor in the path is right concentration, so work on this, because it’s right here where things will become apparent. You use your intentions to create the concentration, and then once the … 
8. Play AudioObserve Yourself in Action
    … bodily fabrication—which is the in-and-out breath; verbal fabrication—directed thought and evaluation, how you’re talking to yourself; and mental fabrication—feelings and perceptions. Feelings are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. Perceptions are the images you hold in mind, the labels you apply to things. You have these things right here as you’re meditating. You’re … 
9. Play AudioKeep Things Simple
    … That way your powers of perception get more and more precise, more and more subtle. But the essential question stays the same on each level of subtlety. So if we keep things simple, the meditation becomes a lot more manageable. And it’s this simple sort of questioning that helps see through the mind’s subterfuges. The mind sometimes has a tendency to get … 
10. Play AudioThe Analytical Mind
     … But then she thought of the space element, so she went there, keeping the perception of “space, space, space” in mind, without paying any attention to any sensation of the body. When she came out of that meditation, everything in the body had gone back to normal. She didn’t die—that’s why we know the story—but she learned an important lesson … 
11. Play AudioLittle Things
     … At the same time, the willingness to look at the details means that your powers of perception, your powers of insight, get very sharp. There are times when your practice seems to hit a plateau and it’s not going anywhere. At times like that, if you turn around to look at what you’ve been doing, you’ll realize that you haven’t … 
12. Play AudioSuccess with Breathing
     … There are also the potentials of the mind that are applied here, where you can watch to see how the mind fashions its experiences with its perceptions, with its ways of talking to itself. You can fashion them in all kinds of ways. But you want to fashion them in a way that leads the mind to want to settle down. These potentials are … 
13. Play AudioTraining the Committee
     … Ajaan Suwat, shortly before he died, was telling me—this was after he had had an accident that caused him a lot of brain damage—that his mind was sending him all sorts of weird perceptions. But the fact that he had been meditating and developed mindfulness and alertness enabled him to recognize that they were weird perceptions. Then he went on to say … 
14. Play AudioReady for the Truth
     … finding pleasure simply with the way you sit here, breathing in, breathing out, holding the perceptions in mind that allow the breath to come in and go out of the whole body, so that, as a sense of well-being arises with the breath, you can spread it around. You have a good foundation, a sense of confidence, a disinterest in the world outside … 
15. Play AudioSelf-reliance
     … You have the voice inside that evaluates, and evaluates more and more wisely, more and more perceptively, with more and more maturity gained through the practice. There’s so much commentary on how bad it is to engage in the judging mind. Well, it’s usually the judgmental mind that’s the problem—the one that jumps to judgments without much evidence and comes … 
16. Play AudioWhere to Look in the Present
     … Then, the quality of the intention and all its influences—the perceptions you have, the feelings you have, the things you pay attention to—will become clearer and clearer. So, if anything else comes up in the present moment—any outside sound, outside distraction, inside distraction, whatever—for the time being just let it pass, let it pass. You just want to stay right … 
17. Play AudioTruth in Action
     … Maybe the perception that’s holding you to the breath is a little bit too coarse. Or in the early stages of the concentration, maybe you’re focused on the wrong spot. There are lots of things you might be doing that are causing trouble. Even though you may be settling in, you ask yourself, “Could it be more refined? Could it be more … 
18. Play AudioIn the Mood to Meditate
     … You can just watch them and see where there’s an opportunity with the breath, thinking in new ways, holding new perceptions in mind, to change the tide. Sometimes it takes a while, but we’ve got a whole hour here. So learn to step back from any negative feelings. Realize you’ve got the freedom to develop positive ones in their place. After … 
19. Play AudioOwners of Our Actions
     … Form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness: These are all not-self. But then the Buddha has us reflect, “We’re the owners of our actions.” Kamma is not not-self. What we do is our responsibility. What we do is our refuge. Given the situation now, it’s good to remember what really is ours, what’s not ours. Because with so many things that … 
20. Play AudioTurn Off the Automatic Pilot
     … If you hold certain perceptions of the breath in mind, and you think of the breath energy as a continuum throughout the body, that’s going to change the way you feel the breathing. You also notice how much pressure you’re putting on the breath. In fact, it’s one of the first things you begin to notice as soon as you focus … 
21. Play AudioIn Terms of the Four Noble Truths
     … attachment to the body, to feelings, perceptions, ideas, even attachment to sensory consciousness. You want to notice that when you leave concentration, these things get heavier, more burdensome. The stories you build around them, the sense of who you are that you build around them, the sense of the world that you build around them, all of which is called becoming: It becomes a … 
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