Search results for: "Perception"
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- To Certify Yourself… Just have the perception in your mind—“breath, breath, breath”—along with the intention to stay, and that’s enough. You find that when you can keep the mind still with even less activity, the deeper the concentration grows—the more refreshing, the more energizing, the more solid it becomes—all because you’ve learned how to observe yourself. It doesn’t matter whether …
- It’s All about Action… It’s a perception. Perceive the breath energy coming in and out of the pores, nourishing all the nerves, nourishing all the blood vessels. Breathe in with a sense of fullness; breathe out with a sense of total relaxation: relaxation of the body. Don’t totally relax your mind. You have to be alert. You have to be on top of this. That’s …
- Control… Once you understand the process of what the Buddha calls fabrication, the intentional actions around the breath, that sharpens your sensitivity, so that you begin to see other kinds of fabrication as well, particularly in the way the mind talks to itself, the feelings and perceptions that it creates in the present moment. Some of these are the results of past actions, but a …
- Defilements at the Door… What perceptions fuel your greed, anger, and delusion? What intentions fuel it? What ways of paying attention to things fuel these things? Look into those, because that’s where you can make a difference here in the present moment. You may not be able to choose who’s going to appear at your door or who wants to get into the fortress. But you …
- Everything Gathers Around the Breath… But you don’t really make full use of the perception of inconstancy until you learn to see connections. After all, the Dhamma eye is not simply seeing that whatever arises, passes away. The actual insight is: Whatever is subject to origination is also subject to cessation. Now “origination” here means cause. There is a factor that arises with it when it arises and …
- Something New… There are forms, feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness. Out of those five, fabrications covers the widest variety of mental events. It’s the way you talk to yourself. It’s the way you think. It’s your emotions, your world views, your ideas of what you have to do, what you don’t have to do, how other people should be, how other …
- The Four Noble Truths… All of this falls under the stress that comes from clinging to form, feeling, perceptions, thought-fabrications, and consciousness—consciousness here being the consciousness of the senses. All of this, the Buddha says to comprehend. Now, for most of us, when we run into pain, comprehending is not the first thing we have in mind. We want to push it away; we want to …
- The Noble Path to Happiness… the activity of focusing on the breath, and then other more subtle activities like feelings and perceptions. There’s an element of intention even those activities, he said. Learn to look and see how all these things are connected. While you’re here examining your activities, you’re going to find all the things you need to know about why you’re suffering and …
- Why We Bow Down… That’s why we would be willing to adopt those three perceptions—inconstancy, stress, not-self—and apply them to the things we’re attached to. People sometimes say we can see these things all around us: Things are always changing—but do we know that there is nothing that doesn’t change? Maybe not in our range of experience, but perhaps there’s …
- A Passion for the Path… We cling to our feelings, our perceptions, our thought fabrications, our consciousness. It’s because we cling to these things that we suffer. That’s what suffering is—and we’re passionate about it until we comprehend what’s going on.—in other words, we understand them to the point that we realize that they’re really not worth the passion that goes into …
- Goodwill & Kamma… Every perception, every fabrication, even plain old consciousness contains an intentional element. Something is fabricated out of a potential, coming from past kamma, and turns into an actuality. Just like the issue of past kamma in general: What you focus on is going to become the actual kammic result you experience. And so it’s the intention there that’s important, the intention to …
- Boring… voice that says, “This is boring,” and you’re getting ready to believe it. It’s usually a sign that you’re not paying very careful attention. Fabrications are going on. Perceptions are going on. All the aggregates are going on right here, and you’re relating to them in your old ways. And as we all know, the old ways are the ones …
- The Flamethrowing Mind… feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, acts of consciousness—very simple things that are not very lasting. In fact, they’re very ephemeral. Yet we want to create a sense of our identity as a solid thing we can depend on, and the world as something we can depend on. And we do a fairly good job—good enough, at least, that we can deceive ourselves …
- Doubt… When it comes, why do you go for it? What’s the little perception that the mind flashes that makes it attractive? It’s like looking for the subliminal messages they sometimes send on TV. They’re there, and if you’re quick, you see them. You begin to realize that often the reason we go for these things has very little substance, and …
- Duties… There’s the stress of what they call the three characteristics or the three perceptions of inconstancy, stress, not-self. The fact that things are inconstant means they’re stressful. And if they’re stressful, why call them your self? That kind of stress happens to everybody. But that’s not the stress that weighs us down. The stress that weighs us down is …
- The Buddha’s Metaphysics… Look at the perceptions and feelings you have around it. You can change those. Now, these choices may not immediately destroy the habit, but they can chip away, chip away. You have that element of freedom. And over time, if you keep at it, you find you can free yourself from whatever it was. You see the allure — why the mind went for it …
- Comfortable as an Outsider… You can be aware of the whole body with a sense of well-being throughout the whole body, calming the effect of the breath on the mind, calming your perceptions. These are things you can do. So when you find yourself getting discouraged or getting pulled into the questions of the world, remind yourself: What are the questions the Buddha would have you ask …
- Nourishing & Interesting… so that we can become more sensitive to what we’re doing—how our perceptions shape things, how the way we focus on feelings shapes experience, how the way we talk to ourselves shapes experience. One of the reasons we have Dhamma talks is to give you some ideas of how you should talk to yourself. Think about how the Buddha would teach. He …
- Bigger than the World… You can see that there’s the breath, there are the thoughts around the breath, and there are the perceptions around the breath. Keep everything at that level as much as you can. You’ll begin to see how thoughts of worlds come up and thoughts of who you are come up. But instead of making those thoughts the context, you make this sense …
- The Buddha’s Cure… If there are parts of the body where the breath doesn’t seem to go, just watch them for a while and ask yourself, “Suppose the breath did flow there?” If you hold that perception in mind, what would that do to those sensations? There are some sensations in the body that seem hard and resistant. You think, “Well, maybe those are bones; maybe …
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