Search results for: "Perception"
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- Cook Your Mind… the way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself, your perceptions and feelings. Those are aggregates. You get hands-on practice in using those aggregates to develop skillful thoughts, to calm the mind down, to create a state of concentration. Then when the mind is in concentration, you begin to see the aggregates even more clearly—and you can see that they really …
- The Breath Soufflé… There’s physical fabrication, which is the effect of the breath on the body; verbal fabrication, what you talk to yourself about; and then mental fabrication, the feelings you create through the breathing, through your attention to the breathing, and the perceptions you hold in mind to be aware of the breathing as a whole-body process. They’re all right here. We take …
- Dreams & Voices… Take the whole issue of the three perceptions. When you see that things are inconstant, stressful, not-self, those facts on their own don’t really tell you what to do. If something is inconstant, is it worth going for? Sometimes, even in very unskillful cases, you can actually convince yourself that it would be—especially if you tell yourself that that’s as …
- Over the Pass… feelings, perceptions, acts of attention, acts of intention, contact among these things, without any reference to whose they are. When they first arise, that’s what they are: just events. But then we turn them into worlds, and we turn them into ourselves, and create becomings out of them. This is why part of the formula for right mindfulness is putting aside greed and …
- Barriers in the Heart… There’s the word sañña , which we usually translate as “perception” or “mental label.” But in Thai it also means an agreement, a contract. When you look carefully at the way your mind works, you find that it keeps making agreements with itself to turn a blind eye to things, to put up barriers so that it can’t see the full story, so …
- Patience & Urgency… The technique is here to develop your powers of perception, to develop your powers of concentration, so that you can use your discernment to figure things out more clearly for yourself. If you rush through things, discernment doesn’t have its chance to develop its skill, doesn’t have its chance to develop its powers of observation. What happens all too often when you …
- Respect Opens Possibilities… The aggregates are activities we indulge in. We chanted about them just now. Form—your body is constantly in action. Feeling—feelings of pleasure, pain, feelings of neither pleasure nor pain. Perceptions—the labels you apply to things, the meanings you give to them, how you identify them. Thought fabrications—the way you put ideas together, the way you talk to yourself. And finally …
- Free from Animosity… our sense of the form of the body as we feel it from within, our feelings, our perceptions, our mental constructs—mental constructs are the stories we tell ourselves, the analyses, the comments, we make on things—and then finally consciousness at the senses. These are the things with which we ordinarily assemble our sense of who we are and what’s ours. Yet …
- How to Listen… Now, gaining the Dhamma eye doesn’t necessarily change your personality, but it does change your perception of what is possible in the world. It is possible through your own efforts to find a deathless happiness. You may not fully experience the deathless—that’s what’s called stream-entry—so there’s more work to be done. But what you have experienced reorients …
- Mindfulness + Discernment = Intelligence… As the Buddha points out, that’s going to lead people to say, “It doesn’t matter what I do.” The three characteristics or the three perceptions are teachings where we have to know the right time and place. In other words, they have to fit into the skills of the four noble truths. That’s when you use them intelligently. So this is …
- Talking to Yourself… That’s another perception. Remind yourself: You’re not necessarily focusing on the air coming in and out of the lungs, you’re keeping track of the movement of energy around and throughout the body. This can be related to the blood, can be related to the dynamics of breathing. When you expand the chest, there’s pressure put on different parts of the …
- Goodwill, Gratitude, No Guilt… Hold in mind the perception the breath can penetrate anything. After all, it’s energy. The solid parts of the body are composed of atoms that are mostly space. So let the energy go through. This way, you give yourself a grounding, something to do in the present moment. Otherwise, if you’re just here—“in out, in out”—the mind suddenly goes out …
- Lessons from Stilling the Mind… In other words, you drop your thinking and evaluation of the breath—your discursive thinking about it, thinking in terms of sentences—and you’re just left with a perception of breath: “breath, breath, breath.” And you want to stay right there. In doing that, you’ll learn something interesting about the mind. Even though you’re not doing any directed thought and evaluation …
- Start Out Small… Ajaan Fuang once noted that we now have lots of books on meditation, lots of explanations, and in some ways it’s a help, but in other ways it’s a hindrance — a hindrance in that many of our perceptions and memories picked up from books and Dhamma talks clutter up the present moment. They actually get in the way of seeing what’s …
- Battling the Hindrances… You have to exert, as the texts say, a fabrication, which means you have to think about things in a new way, breathe in a new way, change your perceptions, until you can finally get past that particular defilement. So it takes work, and as with all work it requires desire. So chandam janeti, try to generate that desire that you really do want …
- Sensitive to the Mind… the perceptions that hold you with the breath, and then the feeling-tones that you give rise to by the way you breathe. These are all very explicit in the instructions. And of course, when you’re with the breath you’re guaranteed that you’re in the present moment. But there are times when the mind is not willing to settle down with …
- Choices that Matter… You can choose what kinds of perceptions you hold in mind about the breath. You can perceive the breath as the air coming in and out through the nose, or you can perceive it as the energy flow that goes through the body that allows the air to come in and out. The Buddha would actually recommend the second because when he talks about …
- Dedicating Merit… You solve the problems by understanding consciousness from inside, what your intentions are, what your perceptions are, the questions you ask, how you can change these things. All this is consciousness changing itself from within. In this case, consciousness is prior. If it weren’t, meditation wouldn’t be doing anything useful at all. But it is doing something. It’s changing our minds …
- Strategies for Happiness… The same holds true for feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, and consciousness. But the Buddha doesn’t have you just drop and abandon these things — he has you turn them into the path. In other words, you take these things you identify with and you turn them into tools. Once they’re tools, it’s possible to get a sense of distance from them and …
- The Water in Your Cup… Don’t get tied down by the perception that when you’re meditating, the breath has to be gentle or shallow or whatever for there to be concentration. You can concentrate on all kinds of breathing. But you want to listen to what your body needs right now. Pay close attention. This way you get to see things you didn’t see before inside …
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