Search results for: "Perception"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
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