Search results for: "Perception"
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- The Gift of Discernment… What are you holding onto in terms of the form, whatever forms there may be in your experience right now? What are you holding onto in terms of feelings, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness? How are you holding on? Why do you hold on? What’s the allure? When you see the allure, then you want to see the drawbacks of holding on like that. That …
- Responsible for Your Actions… If the mind isn’t clear, then it just goes on its usual blurry perceptions of what’s going on. It’s like trying to test a cloth that’s hanging over a line. If you want to test if it’s dry, your hand has to be dry. If your hand is wet, you can’t tell whether the cloth is wet or …
- Push Yourself… If lust comes up, how are you talking to yourself about that object, your relationship to the object, your role in your fantasies? Can you talk to yourself in different ways to make the resolution to get past the lust stick.? What perceptions do you hold in mind? That’s mental fabrication. What feelings can you develop around not being involved in the lust …
- The Dhamma Eye… You have to know this part of the mind really well, the part that’s adjusting things in the present moment, using the different kinds of fabrication—bodily fabrication, the way you breathe; verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself; and mental fabrication, feelings and perceptions. Get to know these things really well, so that when they finally fall away, you’ll know …
- Mental Experiments… I’m talking about the state of non-perception, where you really focus on a very minute spot and refuse to deal with anything that comes in through any of the senses. As a result, you can totally blank yourself out. You lose the sense of the body, you can’t even hear anything, and you can stay there for long periods of time …
- A Mind Without Inertia… Your greed, your aversion, and your delusion, identifying with your body, identifying with your feelings, your perceptions, your thought fabrications, even with acts of consciousness: These things weigh the mind down if you hold on to them. This is the Buddha’s ultimate mode of attack when you see the mind holding onto something. The phrase, “holding on,” here, is metaphorical. The mind doesn …
- Protect Your Energy… Then there’s mental fabrication, the perceptions and feelings you have. Those are things you have some control over as well. Those are things that you use to shape your experience, too. If you do it with ignorance, it’s going to add more suffering on top of things. If you do it with knowledge, with right view, it actually becomes a part of …
- Truths of the Will… Is it a part of the path or is it part of the path of practice leading to suffering, which comes out of ignorance and craving? To see that requires that you be very, very perceptive. But you’ve got to believe in the process that it is useful to look at your intentions, that you can learn from looking at your intentions, and …
- Conditions for Concentration… Ajaan Lee, when he talks about settling down in concentration, has one point where he says that before you focus on the breath, you can contemplate the three perceptions, you can contemplate the body, all kinds of things to get the mind in the right mood. The right mood is one that’s sober, but joyful. Now, you may say, “I came to the …
- Focal Points… One of the points of experimenting with the meditation like this is to uncover some of the perceptions that underlie the way you’re functioning. If you don’t ask strange questions about what you’re doing or try a few strange variations, you’ll never see how strange your underlying assumptions are. For all this time, you thought, “It had to be that …
- The Anatomy of the Present… We take the raw material coming in from the past and we shape it into a feeling or into a perception because we have purposes in using these things. So our purposes are what determine how we’re going to experience things. And as I said, one of these prior factors is intention. That intention is your present karma. What’s coming in through …
- Noble Priorities… form, feeling, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness. The clinging is the big problem. That’s the suffering. What causes it? The three kinds of craving, which are things that you do. You could attack those three kinds of craving by doing other things—in other words, following the path, starting with right view all the way through right concentration under the headings of virtue, concentration …
- The Roles of Equanimity… That’s the kind of equanimity we want—because when the mind is feeding off the world, you can’t trust its perceptions. When there’s no feeding off the world, you can look in a really balanced way at things and see what really needs to be done. In other words, you don’t stop with equanimity. Equanimity is a means, not a …
- Choices… Those are the ones to which you apply the perception of not-self. You don’t have to identify with them. You have the choice. And when you see yourself as not just one unitary thing, but as using many different senses of self, it’s a lot easier to start letting go of the unskillful ones and to start nourishing the skillful ones …
- Asking the Right Questions… The feelings of pleasure and the perceptions you hold in mind about the breath: Those are mental fabrications. The questions about discernment concern how to view fabrications in a way that gives rise to dispassion. Of course, this doesn’t mean just trying to drop them immediately as soon as you close your eyes. First you’ve got to get the mind into concentration …
- Learning from Determination… But then you realize that if you drop that perception, that mental note, that mental label, that little image in mind that there is a boundary to your body, the boundary disappears. That’s how you get into the formless attainments, not by going anywhere else, just staying right here, but finding that the sense of a boundary goes away because you’re not …
- The Reasonable Path… You can get the mind into a dead concentration where you totally have no sense in the body at all, where you enter a state called non-perception. But it’s such a wrong state of concentration that the Buddha doesn’t even list it among the stages of right concentration. So when we’re working in the practice, we have to realized that …
- Skillful Attachments… just feelings and perceptions and thought constructs and consciousness and the form of the body. If you really look at these things carefully, you realize that there’s nothing there that’s solid or lasting. And when you look at that fact from the point of view of a well-concentrated mind, instead of being depressing or disturbing, it’s liberating. You really have …
- A Mind Like Earth… A perception I find useful is that when there’s a lot of noise, it’s like wind going through a screen on a window. Try to make your sense of the body, make your sense of the mind in the present moment, like the screen on a window. When the wind blows through, the screen doesn’t catch the breeze and, as a …
- Oozing Bodies, Oozing Minds… There’s another contemplation called the perception of drawbacks, in which you think of all the diseases that can happen in the body. We want so much out of the body, yet it can’t provide all the things that we want. In trying to get what we want out of it, we have to ignore, we try to deny, a lot of what …
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