Search results for: "Perception"
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- Developing Absorption… In other words, just hold that perception in mind, and just be with the breath, with the breath. As he says elsewhere, “If you think skillful thoughts all day, it can get to be tiring for the mind.” They may be good thoughts, they may be helpful to you, but if you think them all the time, the mind gets worn out, and when …
- Serial Clinging Is Still Clinging… Sometimes you identify with your body, sometimes with your feelings, sometimes with your perceptions, your thoughts, your consciousness, or any combination of these. If you were to draw a picture of your sense of self, it would be like an amoeba, changing shape all the time. It all still counts as clinging, because the Buddha’s not telling you, “Wander around with your ideas …
- Evaluation… You just keep on thinking the same thought, applying the perception to whatever your topic is. That doesn’t help, though, you if you’re having trouble settling down. But if you actually evaluate what’s going on, you can improve the situation. You evaluate the breath. You evaluate the way you’re perceiving the breath, the mental images you have of the breath …
- Love Me, Love My Defilements… Feelings feel, perceptions perceive, fabrications fabricate the other aggregates into actual aggregates, and consciousness cognizes. These things are defined by their activity. And these activities are the raw materials from which we create our sense of self. In our delusion we tend to think of “self” as a thing we’re stuck with, either for metaphysical reasons or for social reasons. But that’s …
- The Buddha Aimed High… You look at those first three Dhamma summaries and they reflect the three perceptions that the Buddha has you adopt as part of the path: aging, inconstancy; illness, stress; death, not self and the ultimate loss of control. But again, he doesn’t leave you there. These reflections are there in service of that quest to find a way to bring about dispassion for …
- Your Committee of Addicts… These are basically ways in which we put the aggregates together—our sense of our body, our feelings, our perceptions, our thought constructs, our acts of consciousness. We put them together into something that we actively hold on to. The Buddha’s great insight was that if you’re really serious about going beyond suffering, you can take the different things that you hold …
- Determined Goodwill… When you find yourself overwhelmed with thoughts of ill will, stop and ask yourself: “How am I breathing? How am I talking to myself about the issue? What’s wrong with what I’m saying? How can I change what I’m saying to myself?” And finally, “How can I change my perception of the situation? The feelings that I’m focusing on?” In …
- Refuge… There are the perceptions that keep you with the breath through the way you picture the breath to yourself. You can work with those to see what way of picturing the breath leads to a feeling of breathing that feels really good inside. There’s fabrication, your internal conversation about the breath, your directed thoughts and your evaluations of what’s going on; and …
- The Middle Way… You may want to hold in mind the perception that every cell in the body is breathing and they’re all breathing together. You’re just here watching over them, feeling them from the inside, allowing your awareness to spread through the whole body, with a sense of being connected, a sense of being in harmony. When you do that, it’ll help to …
- For What It’s Worth… You slap a perception on it and say, “This is a thought about x, about the future, about the past, whatever.” Then you go with it. You start weaving things around it. So you’re trying to catch that process earlier and earlier. And the way to do that is, as soon as you’ve noticed that you’ve wandered off, you drop whatever …
- In Training… Why take it on?” Again, you’re sorting through your desires and choosing the ones you think will give better results, based not only on your own perceptions, but also on what you’ve learned from those you respect. That’s what the training is all about. So when you come to practice the Dhamma, think of yourself as being in training. All the …
- Not-self Is a Value Judgment… Even when he was talking to people on the verge of becoming arahants giving them that questionnaire, notice how he phrased the questions: “Form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness: Are they constant or inconstant?” — “They’re inconstant.” “If they’re inconstant, are they easeful or stressful?” — “They’re stressful.” And then the final question is not, “Then is there a self?” No, the question is …
- Meaningful Choices… You fabricate the present moment by the way you breathe, by the way you talk to yourself, by the perceptions and feelings you focus on. You do this given the raw material coming from your past karma, which means that mastering concentration is going to take a while because the past karma coming into fruition at any particular moment will differ. It’s not …
- Look after Yourself Happily… At the same time, there are skillful ways of applying the perception of not-self, when you realize you don’t want to hold onto something unskillful. But both self and not-self are there as strategies for happiness. You identify what you want, what you hope to attain, in the sense that you will enjoy it. And then you look at what capabilities …
- Equanimity on the Path… It’s put together from certain perceptions and feelings, and if you look at it from that point of view—in other words, you’re satisfied in one area of the mind, but another part of the mind is not yet satisfied, because there’s got to be something better: That way you use equanimity properly to go beyond it. Even with the state …
- Appropriate Attention Always… Within the concentration, as it develops, the feelings get more refined, your perceptions get more refined. Then you can get to a state of really solid equanimity, where you can see things as they’re happening very clearly. As the Buddha said, this is where mindfulness becomes pure. These are things to develop in as many circumstances as you can muster. The Buddha’s …
- Learning by Doing… Then there are the perceptions that hold you here: how you visualize the breath to yourself, what image you hold in mind. The fabrications that ask questions and make observations. And then your awareness of all these things. All the aggregates are right here. Everything you need to know and understand is right here. These are all activities that you’re doing right now …
- A Good Mood to Meditate… Then there are mental fabrications, which are feelings and perceptions: the labels you put on things, and the actual feeling-tones themselves—pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. All these things get mixed together and fabricated into emotions. So it’s important to realize that an emotion is a fabricated thing. It’s not primal. It may deal a lot in the lizard part …
- Categorical Truths… You cling to the body, you cling to your feelings, your perceptions, your thought constructs; you cling to consciousness of the senses. Wherever you cling, that’s the suffering. This is called a noble truth because when you understand your suffering in this way, you see that there’s something you can do about it in such a way that takes you beyond all …
- An Exercise in SensitivityOne of the teachings of the Forest Tradition is that when insight or discernment comes, it doesn’t necessarily have to express itself in terms of the three characteristics or the three perceptions of inconsistency, stress, and not-self. Anything that allows you to see that you’re holding on to something that’s making you suffer, and you don’t have to hold …
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