Search results for: "Perception"

  1. Page 63
  2. The Safety of Jhana
     … You’ve got your old karma and then you’ve got consciousness, focused in on whatever old karma presents in terms of form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrications, or consciousness itself. Instead of delighting in the idea of making something new out of these things, you can simply see them as they arise and pass away. That’s how you go beyond the dichotomy between … 
  3. True to the Breath
     … the feelings and perceptions of the mind. Try to see them simply as a process. A feeling comes, and you decide immediately whether you like it or dislike it and then you get involved in it. It becomes your feeling. Then you feel happy, you feel pleasant, or you feel pained. It’s no longer just a process. It’s your feeling, and that … 
  4. Reflect
     … What are the perceptions that go into it? What are the ways you’re talking to yourself about it? In other words, all the aggregates are right there. You want to see how you’re clinging to them, and how you’re creating suffering. Now, when we’re talking about suffering coming from within, it’s not as if we’re letting everybody else … 
  5. What Is Skillful?
     … You dig down into the causes of dependent co-arising and you find the Buddha talks about fabrication, he talks about perceptions and feelings. He talks about the way you talk to yourself. He talks even about the way you breathe. So you dig down into your intentions and you come back to right where we are, right here, right now: the way you … 
  6. Dhamma Survivalism
     … So as we meditate, we’re actually trying to gain a sense of the mind as something separate from its thoughts, from its perceptions, from all sensory contact, because it’s only when it’s separate that it’s really secure. Now, this would be selfish if finding happiness for ourselves meant taking things away from other people or pushing them out of a … 
  7. The Problem Is Birth
     … Notice that when he was asked, “What happens when a being goes from one body to another?” he didn’t say, “There’s no such thing as a being.” He said that wherever there’s attachment to the aggregates—form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness—there is a being. It’s in taking on that identity as a being: That’s why we keep on … 
  8. To Suffer Is an Active Verb
     … We’ve got potentials coming in from the past for form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. And then, for the sake of having aggregates to use, we fashion them—we put them together—into actual aggregates. The Pali in this particular sutta is rather strange: It says that we do this for the sake of feelingness, for the sake of formness, for the sake … 
  9. Think Like a Thief
     … If you feel desire or passion for form, feeling, perception, thought formations, consciousness, all of which are activities, you feed off of these things the way the fire feeds off fuel. And you get stuck on these things the way fire stuck in its fuel. The basic image the Buddha uses here, as you know, is in the word nibbāna. It refers to a … 
  10. Questioning Impermanence
     … And the feelings and perceptions that go around the breath, those are called mental fabrications. As the Buddha said, these are all the fabrications you need to know, right here. When you direct your thought to the breath and you evaluate the breath and the feelings of pleasure and pain that come with the breath, you’ve got all the raw materials for awakening … 
  11. An Auspicious Birth
     … It wants this kind of feeling, these kinds of perceptions, thought constructs, this kind of consciousness. We talk of the first kind of birth being auspicious when you’re born into a family that’s got material comforts and you have an opportunity to meet with the Dhamma. But it’s really made auspicious by this other kind of birth, the momentary attachment, because … 
  12. Space for Sustained Contemplation
     … And as you’re dealing with the types of fabrication around the breath—the directed thought and the evaluation, perceptions and feelings around the breath—that sensitizes you to the fabrications that are always going on in the mind. Whatever the attachment is, whatever the craving is, you realize it has to be made out of these things. That’s what you want to … 
  13. Bases for Success
     … one single perception, one single object filling the range of your awareness. In this case, it would be the breath filling the body, and that’s the one thing you’re working on. That’s what the effort is all about. Any hindrances that come up—in other words, anything that would distract you from this one object—you’ve got to put aside … 
  14. Here Be Tigers
     … We’re here to understand our minds, but first we need something close to the mind to focus on, to gather all the thoughts and all the feelings and perceptions in the mind into one place. The breath is good because it’s always there, and you don’t have to create it. It’s not like a meditation word that you have to … 
  15. No Who or Where
     … You’ve got the breath coming in, going out—bodily fabrication; the way you talk to yourself—verbal fabrication; perceptions and feelings—mental fabrications. And just leave them there. The question of who’s doing them and where they’re being done—that’s the irrelevant part. The who and the where: Put that aside and just look at the events. Try to put … 
  16. Freedom through Restraint
     … That’s the proper use of those perceptions right now. We’re here to commit ourselves to a skill, to a narrowing of the focus of our attention to the point where the real problem is. As the Buddha said, all dhammas come from desire. In this case, “dhammas” mean all phenomena, except for nibbana. Nibbana is beyond dhammas. So what is desire doing … 
  17. Intense Stillness
     … Try to maintain that perception, maintain that sense of intense stillness. That’s the kind of concentration you can live with. That’s the kind of concentration you can put to use. It’s not just resting. It’s part of a quest. You’re here looking for defilements in the mind, and you’re going to see them best when your eyes are … 
  18. The World of the Body
     … If you get into more formless types of concentration, it’s very easy to slither and slip around, because all you have is the perception of space or of knowing to keep you in place. But if you’ve got the body here and you’re fully inhabiting the body, you’ve got your grounding. The ability to stay with the body, to fully … 
  19. Faith as a Virtue
     … Anything influenced by those factors—your intentions, your perceptions, your acts of attention—can always be called into question. But he was somebody who stepped out of space and time entirely, gained knowledge that was not subject to those things. It’s up to you to decide whether you want to believe in that or not. So in some cases, our conviction in what … 
  20. A Matter of Life & Death
     … So when any difficulty comes up related to pain in the meditation, ask yourself, “What am I doing that’s taking this physical pain and turning it into mental pain?” When situations outside are difficult, ask yourself, “What am I doing that’s taking that tangle outside and using it to tangle up my own mind?” It’s your perceptions, your thought constructs: These … 
  21. Balancing Effort & Patience
     … There’s a sutta where the Buddha says even in just your basic experience of form, feeling, perception, and the rest of the aggregates, there’s an intentional element in all of them. So you’ve got to learn how to make those intentions skillful. You can do that only by watching what’s going on, and experimenting with the way your mind is … 
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