Search results for: "Perception"

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  2. An Island of Concentration
     … Often it’s not so much the people themselves, it’s our perceptions of them, our thoughts about them, our feelings around them, and those are very ephemeral. If you try to hold on to them, they cut into you. One of the Buddha’s images is of a person being swept downstream, and there are grasses growing on the riverbank, so he tries … 
  3. Guarding the Truth
     … You have a perception of how the breath comes in and out of the body, and you’re creating feelings of pleasure as best you can. Those are mental fabrications. You’re doing this by maintaining that intention to stay with the breath. You’re paying attention to the things that might get in the way, trying to deal with them skillfully. All these … 
  4. When You’ve Played Enough With the Breath
     … You’re breathing in such a way—you’re using feelings and perceptions in such a way—to calm the mind down. In the third tetrad, you’re focusing directly on what kind of states you want the mind to have. The steps are these: In the first one you breathe in and out sensitive to the mind, in the second one you breathe … 
  5. No Mistakes Are Fatal
     … Then there are the final set of building blocks, feelings and perceptions: feelings of pleasure, pain, or neither pleasure nor pain, and the labels you put on all these things. You apply all those to the breath as well. So you’ve got all the building blocks for your experience right here, and instead of building them into elaborate worlds, you very consciously don … 
  6. How to Look, How to Listen
     … I’m focusing on the wrong perceptions,” that’s when you learn. In other words, you look at how you’re fabricating things in an unskillful way, because this is how dependent co-arising gets set into motion. You’re fabricating in ignorance. You’re putting together your experience, right here, right now, and you’re hardly even aware of how you’re doing … 
  7. Precarious Knowledge
     … It’s in feelings and perceptions and thought constructs and consciousness, all of which are based on very changeable factors. When I was doing that collection of similes by Ajaan Chah, I noticed he had several similes where talked about the issue of scholarly knowledge versus meditation knowledge, or the approach of, say, Buddhist scholars as opposed to the approach of meditators. Scholars, as … 
  8. Verified Confidence
     … And, as we all know, once you start thinking in terms of fabrication—that’s the way you breathe, that’s the way you think, talk to yourself, the perceptions you hold in mind, the feelings you hold, focus on; these things fabricate your sense of the body, they fabricate your words, they fabricate the mind: When you begin to see what you’re … 
  9. Bases of Power
     … This ability to play with the breath and play with your perceptions around the breath is a lot of what this fourth quality is about. In other words, you get yourself really interested in cause and effect. Some people have trouble getting into concentration because they have the type of mind that likes to figure things out and they’re told to just be … 
  10. The Need for a Purpose
     … We have a purpose, which means, of course, that we have some expectations, that by fashioning a sense of form, feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness out of the raw material given to us by our past karma, we’re looking for something. We have a purpose in mind. This is the nature of our mind. It’s purposeful. When it has no purpose … 
  11. A Friend to the World, A Friend to Yourself
     … You develop insight through your perceptions, through your feelings, through the way you talk to yourself again: verbal fabrication and mental fabrication. The discernment is what cuts through your defilements. That, too, is a strength. In between, you’ve got persistence and mindfulness. Persistence is based on your conviction. It’s always a matter of seeing whatever’s going to be skillful and trying … 
  12. Training Your Commentator
     … You don’t even have full sentences, just the perception of, “Breath, breath, breath.” Occasionally you check to see if it’s going well. If it’s going well, okay, good, then back to, “Breath, breath, breath.” That’s it. But before you get there, there has to be a certain amount of conversation. So learn how to speak to yourself in a way … 
  13. Housecleaning
     … As soon as you see any perceptions coming up saying that this is a thought about that, this is a thought about this, breathe right through them. Breathe through whatever stirring there is right there, and you can nip the thought in the bud. This way, as you clean things out, you find that this house here in the present moment really becomes a … 
  14. At Home with the Breath
     … As long as the breath is not yet comfortable, try to find ways of changing the rhythm, changing the texture, changing your conception or perception of the breath, the way you label it, the way you have a mental picture of what’s going on in the breathing process. You can change all of these things to see what you find easiest to settle … 
  15. Smart About Lust
     … This is why we bring out the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self to help underline the drawbacks of your fantasies so that you can develop dispassion for them and gain release, escape from them. The Buddha compares sensuality to a fetter. It’s like being in prison. Your defilements have managed to make the prison nice enough so that you feel like … 
  16. Victory
     … So try to hold these perceptions in mind because they remind you of what true victory is—and how you can gain a victory that really matters.
  17. Feeding on Open Wounds
     … So change your perception. You can think of breathing in from the back of the neck or up from the floor. See what that does. Think of the breath going down the arms, going down the legs. You can either go inside the arms or on the surface of the arms, whatever feels good, whatever minimizes the pressure of the process of breathing, so … 
  18. Suffering Comes from What You’re Doing
     … When it goes up a bit, ask yourself, “What did I do just now? What perception did I hold on to? What feeling was I focusing on? How was I focusing?” If the mind can’t settle down, you tell yourself, “How can I be patient with this, so that my irritation about the disturbances in my mind doesn’t add more disturbance?” In … 
  19. The Heart of the Teachings
     … the way feelings and perceptions shape your mind. And then calming that effect. Breathing in and out sensitive to the mind, and then noticing if the mind is out of balance, what you need to do to bring it into balance. Either gladdening it if it’s dull, steadying it if it’s too restless, or releasing it when it’s burdened with things … 
  20. Patterns to Happiness
     … There are points you can focus on—in terms of intention, attention, or perception—that can help you make sense of this whole question of why there sometimes is happiness, and why sometimes there isn’t, and what you can do to master the processes of cause and effect so that you can tap into happiness, tap into a sense of rapture whenever you … 
  21. The Choice Not to Suffer
     … Your perceptions are what connects them, your labels saying, “This pain is fixed in my body” or “This pain is fixed in my awareness.” It’s like you’re shooting yourself. Then the Buddha comes along and says, “Hey, you have the choice. You don’t have to shoot yourself.” This is the point where the mind really welcomes the idea that things are … 
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