Search results for: "Perception"
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- Get Out of the Way… It’s simply a question of whether you’re looking at the right spot, or if your powers of perception are subtle enough. Focus on what strengths you do have. All too often when things are difficult, we let the difficulties get us down. We pile more difficulties on top of ourselves. So make a survey of what is going well. At least you …
- Injustice… to see what it’s based on, to see what feeds it, to see how narrow the perceptions are that keep it going. As for the justification of the anger: When you see that something really has been done that’s unjust, unfair, harmful—then you’re in a better position to think about what could be done, what could be said, and about …
- Peace Requires Character… He traced the causes back through various factors and finally arrived at what he called the perceptions and concepts of papañca. Now, “papañca” is a word that’s hard to translate, but, basically, the concepts of papañca come from the sense that I am the thinker. In other words, you take on an identity as a being, someone who does things. And all beings …
- Solidly Here… You can understand the intentions that form around sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, feelings, perceptions, fabrications—the whole gamut. They’re going to form right here and they’re going to play out right here. If you don’t stick with them, you don’t see how things play out. You don’t see how a cause leads to an effect—or even …
- The Power is in Your Hands… We’re attached to our ideas, to our perceptions, to the way we pay attention to things, and to the intentions we have. We’re attached to the body. We take these things for granted, and the Buddha’s asking us to get a little distance from them so that we can see them clearly. He says that it’s when you see these …
- The True Dhamma Has Disappeared… They take their blindness and advertise it as a perceptive insight. That’s a relatively obvious case. A lot of other cases, though, are not quite so obvious. This means that as you listen to the Dhamma or look for a teacher, you have to be extra careful—and especially careful about your motivation for choosing one version of the Dhamma over another. Don …
- Investigative Work… Who’s making this suffering? Feelings, perceptions, thought-constructs—they’re not making the suffering. It’s the clinging. When you can separate that out, then the aggregates are freed, and you’re freed from them. Ajaan Lee makes this point: He talks about the different consciousnesses in your body. When you learning how to stop laying claim to them, you have your freedom …
- Doing Meditation… coming up with perceptions, coming up with ideas, coming up with plans, deciding to do something. There’s always activity going on in the mind. It’s no wonder we feel such a lack of peace in our lives, because the mind is constantly coming up with things to do. Even when things are peaceful, after a while the mind says, “This is getting …
- The Purpose of Empathetic Joy… As someone once said, “The things we know best are the things we do.” You do concentration by taking form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness, and turning them into a state of concentration—that’s how you really get to know them. If you don’t use them like this, you don’t know them. And if you don’t know them, how can …
- A Home for the Mind… One, you’re learning about the power of your perceptions, the labels you put on things. For instance, you may have a sensation of the arm that you can perceive it as totally solid, or you can remind yourself that the blood is flowing around in there, so it’s not totally solid, there’s liquid too. Then there’s the warmth of the …
- Subduing Greed & Distress… One of the techniques is to think of the world in the Buddha’s definition where he says the world is just input at the six senses and the feelings and perceptions that arise based on that input. That’s all it is: just sensory input. We have a very strong sense that the world is a real thing out there. Even the past …
- Kill Your Anger… As for mental fabrication, look at the images you hold in mind—the perceptions you hold in mind—that go together with the anger. Many of them focus on how outrageous something is. But is it really that outrageous? The Buddha has you remember that people do displeasing things, say displeasing things, and think displeasing things all over the world all the time. This …
- Pain & Patience… form—the way you create the sense of your body, inhabit the sense of your body; feeling—feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain; perceptions, the labels you put on things, either words or images; fabrications—the thoughts you create around things; and then finally, consciousness, which is aware of all these things. These are all activities you’re engaged in. And …
- When Aging Closes In… It’s a matter developing the mind to the point where you no longer have to identify with the body, with feelings, perceptions, thought-constructs, or consciousness. That way, when these things change, as they inevitably will, the mind won’t be affected by the change. That’s a really healthy mind. This is what we’re working on as we meditate. We develop …
- Pleasure & Pain… You have the choice of maintaining the perception of that boundary or dropping it. You begin to see how artificial the whole thing is. That, too, gives you some important insights. Don’t think that concentration practice has to be one thing and discernment practice is something else. In the process of maintaining your concentration, you’re going to learn a lot about the …
- Deconstruction… clinging to the aggregates of form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, and consciousness. The clinging is in the desire and passion you have for those things. The suffering is the clinging-aggregates altogether. Think of this in terms of the image of feeding. You’re hungry: That’s the craving; that’s the desire and passion. You find something you want to eat, so you …
- Samvega for Samsara… form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. Once we latch on to these things, we become a being. Then the problem is that beings need to feed on physical food and mental food, and it’s in the feeding that we suffer. Now, we think that feeding is our main pleasure in life, so when we hear people say that the Buddha said that life …
- The Reflective Self… This, to begin with, requires that your reflective self be very perceptive, because the mind has lots of ways of lying to itself, and you want to be able to see through them. You can tell yourself you have the best of motives and that your practice is going great—and yet it’s a lie. You can tell yourself that the practice is …
- The Best Place to Practice… What are you going to do with it? Are you going to give in? At the very least, can you watch it? Can you—in the Buddha’s terms—exert a fabrication against it? In other words, how does your breathing affect it? How does your thinking affect it? What thoughts are you thinking about when this defilement comes up? What perceptions are you …
- The Buddha’s Lists… Or suppose you’re trying to use the three perceptions to let go of something, seeing that if it’s inconstant and stressful, it should be not-self—but you’re still clinging. Well, remember that the Buddha taught that kind of analysis as part of a larger framework in which there are five steps altogether. When something unskillful comes up, you look for …
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