Search results for: "Perception"

  1. Page 72
  2. Anybody Home?
     … form, feelings, perceptions, mental fabrications, acts of consciousness coming and going, coming and going. They’ve been coming and going in all kinds of zigzags. You want to learn how to see that they’re really not worth getting involved with. He represents this by the little children suddenly getting sick and tired of their mud houses, realizing they’re nothing but mud, and … 
  3. Fear
     … This is one of the reasons why the Buddha said, “Look at your body, look at your feelings, perceptions, thought-constructs, even your consciousness. Can you really claim that they’re yours? Do they lie under your control? If they’re not under your control, why do you latch onto them?” It’s because of our fear that if we don’t latch onto … 
  4. The Pleasure of Concentration
     … This is largely an issue of the perceptions that you use around the breath. Remember, we’re not trying to pump air into a solid body. Our immediate experience of the body is breath energy. So as the breath flows in, it’s simply energy mingling with energy. As it flows out, it’s energy draining out from energy. There are no clear dividing … 
  5. Good & Independent
     … It was usually caused by a perception, an activity of the mind. When he dropped that activity, the disturbance would go away and he’d get deeper into concentration. He didn’t have any guides to tell him that he had to do this or that jhana or whatever. He was feeling his way instinctively through this question of: “Where is the stress? What … 
  6. The River Gauge
     … So hold those perceptions in mind—that when you’re breathing, what you feel in the head, what you feel in the different parts of the body, is already breath. It’s not as if you have to pump breath through those sensations. Just ask yourself, “Okay, if that were breath, what kind of breath would it be? What direction is it going in … 
  7. Appropriate Attention
     … You know that in those two things—the craving or the passion and desire on the one hand, and these aggregates of form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness on the other—the craving is to be abandoned, while you have to comprehend those aggregates that you’re clinging to. When you think in these ways, that’s called appropriate attention. So, as you go … 
  8. Meditators at Work
     … You get to play around with the breath energies, play around with your perceptions around the breath. You can think of the body as a big sponge and, as you breathe in, the energy is coming in through all the pores. Or if you prefer, you can think of the energy starting within the body, at any one of the centers that Ajaan Lee … 
  9. The Breathing Game
     … So, if you look very carefully at your perception of reality, you find that the cartoon has big blank spaces where your intentions are, and also big blank spaces where the connection between your intention and the happiness or the pain that results from your intention should be. But they’re just missing, and this is what meditation allows us to fill in. If … 
  10. Strengthening Concentration
     … What you’ve done is that you’ve changed your perception, changed your understanding, in a way that enables you to strategize more effectively in overcoming resistance in the mind. The same thing applies with concentration. The Buddha talks about times when you’re trying to focus on the breath, and the mind says: “Oh, I’m not willing to settle down.” He calls … 
  11. The Karma of Self
     … So if you could think of your perception of self as a tool and understand exactly what kind of self you want to define—the self that’s in control and the self that really does prefer pleasure to pain—that’s enough “self” to do the practice. Remember that the Buddha’s teachings are a path. He doesn’t start out with, say … 
  12. The Heightened Mind
     … We can observe ourselves as we meditate and begin to see how we’re using form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrications, consciousness—all the aggregates—in this state of concentration. You can start analyzing it. Where’s the stress? In fact, one of the ways of improving your concentration is to step back a bit like this and ask yourself, “Where am I causing unnecessary … 
  13. Thinking & Evaluating
     … There’s the feeling of the breath, there’s the perception of the breath, and the thinking about the breath. How do these mental functions interact? When you perceive the breath as uncomfortable, think about it for a while: What kind of breathing would make the body more comfortable? And if thinking doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere, just watch the breath for … 
  14. Mental Movements
     … clinging to your body or forms of any kind; clinging to feelings, perceptions, thought-constructs, consciousness. There’s clinging only when there’s craving. So, these are the issues we have to watch out for. He says suffering is something you have to learn how to comprehend: understand why it’s happening, how it’s happening. To do that, you have to get the … 
  15. The Right Time at the Right Place
     … Right here in the state of concentration, you’ve got the form of the body, you’ve got feelings of pleasure, you’ve got the perception that holds you here, you’ve got the fabrications of directed thought and evaluation that are your internal analysis—your internal conversation on how to get the mind and the breath together well—and then there’s consciousness … 
  16. Happily on the Path
     … fabrication, intentions, attention, perceptions, feelings. We’re actively shaping things, and that’s what we’re trying to train: the way the mind shapes its experience. Part of that is learning how to find joy in simple things like generosity and virtue, and moving up to finding joy in the concentration, joy in the fact that you’re getting some control of your mind … 
  17. What You Can’t Change, What You Can
     … The perceptions and labels you put on things, the thoughts you put together: These are the big culprits, so these are the things you want to watch out for. You begin to realize that even though there are a lot of things in the world you would like to change and you discover that they can’t be changed, there are other things that … 
  18. Taking the Buddha at his Word
     … He said, “Notice that the list of strengths doesn’t start with perceptions or ideas or concepts. It starts with conviction.” It’s like being in a forest. If, when you’re lost in the forest, you’re convinced that there’s a way out, you have the chance to find it. If you’re convinced there’s no way out, you’re doomed … 
  19. Between You and Your Eyes
     … It’s only that way you can use the basic building blocks of experience—the breath, directed thought, evaluation, feelings, and perceptions—so that they lead away from suffering and don’t simply pile more suffering on. So even though we are doing the meditation to gain results, you can’t keep your focus on the results down the line. You’ve got to … 
  20. In the Present
     … It can flow anywhere in the body, so wherever there’s a sense of tightness or blockage, hold in mind the perception that allows your mind to believe, okay, the breath can go through the blockage, no matter how solid your bones or the pains or any other solid-seeming parts may seem. There’s a lot of space inside the atoms of the … 
  21. Don’t Stop with Awareness Itself
     … You learn how to stay with that for a while, holding that perception in mind. Then finally, consciousness: You would turn around and ask, What’s aware of the space? There you would be with awareness itself. And he wouldn’t have you stop there. He’d have you reflect on that awareness. But first, he’d have you use it to see what … 
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