Search results for: "Perception"
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- All of a Piece… So these perceptions are ways for gauging how well you’re doing on your path. Even with the whole issue of self and not-self, the Buddha’s take on these as things is that he looks at the activity of holding to a view about self and not-self. This is important. Some people say that the Buddha denies the existence of a …
- Tenacity… You have a perception about it, which may be just a feeling in that spot. Or you may have a mental image. You hold on to that, and you resist the temptation to drop it in between the breaths. You get so that the out-breath goes into the in-breath, and the in-breath goes into the out-breath. It’s all one …
- Delight in Conviction… There are a lot of potentials you have here for understanding yourself, understanding your breath, understanding the way you talk to yourself, understanding the perceptions you hold in mind—even the feelings you focus on. These are not just random things. They’re things that you play a role in shaping. With some good guidance, you can learn how to shape them well. The …
- Shelter Through Restraint… And once that perception’s been slapped on, that this is a thought, then it turns into a thought world, and then you go into the thought world. And there you are: becoming. You learn to see this because you’ve been exercising restraint, keeping the mind on one object and saying No to everything else that would come through the mind. It’s …
- Cutting Through the Hype… Or you can see a particular perception coming into the mind and going away. You can start seeing the impact it has on other parts of the body and the mind. That’s when you begin to get a really good sense of what’s skillful and what’s not. This issue of skillfulness is very basic to all the Buddha’s teachings. There …
- There’s Work to Be Done… Both those perceptions can be put aside. So take heart that this path does go to something that’s really of essence, but it’s going to take work. You have to develop the sense of yourself as being capable of doing it, and wanting to do it. And having the resources inside to carry it through. There may be work, but it’s …
- Change Your Mind… So you experiment with breathing in ways that give rise to pleasure, breathing ways that give rise to rapture, being sensitive to how feelings and perceptions have an effect on your mind, and learning how to calm that effect. You also experiment with breathing in ways that have an effect on the mind, or gladdening the mind while you breathe in and breathe out …
- Stupid about Pleasure… They were determined to maintain the perception of the beauty of the body in spite of what they were seeing every day. The side of the human mind that wants to maintain its old attachments: It doesn’t give them up easily. It does everything it can to hold on. You give things up only when you really see that there’s a direct …
- To Gladden the Mind… At the same time, the mind is something that you can fabricate, too, through your perceptions, through your feelings. So if the problem is the mind, you make adjustments there. The Buddha talks about this in several places. In one place, he says that there are times when you try to get the mind to stay with the body, stay with the breath, say …
- Universal Truths… What you end up with is identifying yourself with a particular idea, or a particular feeling, a particular perception, and that becomes limiting too. So even though these questions may sound large and weighty and profound, they really aren’t. Ajaan Lee makes the comment many times that people tend to take high Dhamma and think that it’s low, and low Dhamma and …
- Exercising the Mind… You’ve got to stay with the breath coming in and going out, or at least stay with the perception of breath flowing through different parts of the body. Ideally, what you want is the breath filling the body, the sense of ease filling the body, and your awareness filling the body, all three together. If the awareness is too small, then it’s …
- Determination… You have to stick with your perception of what’s going to be skillful and what’s not. In other words, discernment is strategic. It’s not just a matter of knowing about emptiness or not-self or dependent co-arising. It’s looking at your mind, figuring it out: What are the obstacles? What’s the allure of the things that are unskillful …
- You Are Not Redundant… If you can learn how to look at what you’re doing and see the extent to which your feelings and your perceptions shape the state of your mind right now, you can do something about it. As the Buddha says, basically, you can take that principle all the way to the ultimate happiness. But even if you don’t go that far, the …
- Therapeutic Seclusion… things that are making you suffer. The first noble truth is that you’re doing things that make you suffer. After all, the aggregates are activities. Form keeps changing. Feelings feel. Perceptions perceive. Thought fabrications fabricate. Consciousness cognizes. These are activities we’re doing all the time. We’re addicted to doing them in ways that make us suffer, and we don’t realize …
- All-around Alertness… If you’re not open to new ideas, new perceptions, new ways of sensing the breath, then the meditation can get old. And again, if you’re focused on one spot without being willing to connect to other spots in the body, you block out the possibility of seeing connections. And that’s what a lot of insight is all about: seeing connections. After …
- Eeeels… It’s only then that you can begin to trust your powers of judgment, your powers of perception. So in your quest to get the mind still, don’t go over to the other extreme, where you make it so still that it’s not really observant anymore. You can drift off into a nice peaceful quiet place that feels really nice, but then …
- Stop Weaving… Simply the fact of having a body, having feelings, perceptions, thought-constructs, consciousness, clinging to these things, we suffer. Carrying these things around as a burden, we suffer. It’s because we weigh ourselves down that we feel overburdened. When you’re overburdened, the least little thing can set you off, and you end up spreading that suffering around. One of the things we …
- Delight in the Dhamma… Most of our ideas are conditioned by our perceptions coming in from our past background. But the Buddha was able to find something that was totally independent of his past background. That’s why his teachings are true. He came back to the experience of the six senses from a different perspective entirely. He could see clearly what led to the deathless and what …
- Write It Down in Your Heart… Ajaan Chah, for instance, is supposed to be a teacher who taught nothing but “Let go, let go.” At least that’s the popular perception. But there was one time when he was invited to the palace. There was an issue at the time between the students of the universities in Bangkok and the army, and both sides were calling on the king to …
- Obsessive Thinking… Or a certain perception, a little image appears in the mind, you have associations with that image, and you just jump to the associated thoughts. You want to see that process in action, because seeing it and recognizing it will give you some distance from it. In the same way, when the Buddha analyses the different things with which you could identify as you …
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