Search results for: "Perception"
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- No One Size Fits All… focusing on the impact of the breath on the body, learning how to allow that impact to calm down; focusing on the feelings that the breath creates—feelings of pleasure, feelings of rapture, refreshment—and allowing those to calm down; noticing how you perceive the breath energy in the body, working with different perceptions that allow the breath to calm-down; using the breath …
- Sensuality… Through our perceptions of those properties, we can emphasize one over another, bringing properties that have been out of balance back into balance. The properties also provide a useful basis for understanding suffering, this tendency we have, when there’s a physical pain in the body, to glom everything together. It’s our ability to separate these things out, see the pain as one …
- Stand Your Ground… But if you start thinking about what’s inside the body, you apply a different perception that’ll cut through a lot of the passion that you might otherwise feel. So you want to look at *how *you’re looking at things, *how *you’re listening, who’s doing the looking, who’s doing the listening. Is greed doing the looking? Is anger doing …
- Seeds of Becoming… There’s the breath, which is the physical fabrication; then there’s directed thought and evaluation, which are verbal fabrications; and then there are feelings and perceptions, which are mental fabrications. These are the basic building blocks from which you create this world, the world of a concentrated mind. You use your powers of directed thought and evaluation to work out the disturbances, to …
- Interconnectedness… We intentionally shape this process, because the most important type of interconnectedness is the interconnectedness in the mind—how our perceptions and our intentions, the questions we ask ourselves, the answers we give ourselves, how we go about forming those answers: how these processes are all interconnected. They can be interconnected in a way that leads to suffering or in a way that leads …
- Understanding Happiness… If you think in ignorance, if you label your perceptions, label your experiences in ignorance, it all leads to suffering. So here’s an opportunity to do all of this with awareness. You breathe with awareness, think about the breath with awareness, and label the different sensations in the body as they relate to the breath with awareness. This cuts back on the causes …
- Practicing Your Scales… And it has the advantage that it develops your powers of perception, your powers of discernment while you do it. So just as when you learn how to play the scales well, you’re learning a lot of the other skills you are going to need to play music well, in the same way when you learn how to keep the mind with one …
- Knowing the Body from Within… What can you do to get them to move? What can you do to get them to flow? Changing your perception will also change your questions, change your ideas of what’s possible. Then there’s the warmth, the fire property. Sometimes it seems too warm, sometimes not warm enough. Which parts of the body are warmest right now? Do they feel comfortable or …
- Up for the Challenge… So first you’ve got to be convinced that your actions do make a difference, and then you have to develop the perception that you’ve got to make an effort. You hold that in mind, and you have to keep these things in mind, even though things are rumbling around in the body. This is why we have to strengthen mindfulness, to keep …
- Buddhist Engineering… You take the potentials, say, for form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness, and you turn them into the actual experience of these things, using your present intentions. This, too, is a type of fabrication, and we’re doing it all the time. We want to get more sensitive to exactly how we’re doing that. That’s where the emphasis gets more and …
- The Science of Meditation… Those are the three characteristics or the three perceptions for developing dispassion. Right view has a larger framework: It’s all about the four noble truths. You’re looking for the stress, trying to comprehend it, until you can understand the cause. When you see the cause, you abandon it. The causal connection is what’s important there. Similarly with the path: The path …
- Breath Meditation: Four Sets of Tools… This is where you see the role of perception in adjusting your feelings—and also its impact on the mind, because that’s the third tetrad: dealing with the mind. Sometimes the problem is not the feelings in the body. It’s just that the mind is either over-excited and too active in thinking about things or else too sluggish. If it’s …
- Breath vs. Distraction… Keep that perception in mind, and see how it helps you relate to the body in a new way, and how it helps you relate to your mind in a new way as well. See the drawbacks of thoughts that would pull you into greed, aversion, delusion, or sensual desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and anxiety, uncertainty. Have a strong sense that …
- Heedful of Death… When you yourself are going to have to face death, what skills are you going to bring with you? Because it is possible to die without suffering, but it requires strong mindfulness, strong alertness, and a good understanding, where you’re able to separate the mind from its objects, separate it from its feelings, perceptions, thought constructs. There’s a famous passage where Anathapindika …
- The Good Fight… So you have to turn around and look at these perceptions about who you are—and particularly, the greed, aversion, and delusion that stoke that sense of who you are, because they’re the real problem. I was reading a while back, someone saying that our problem is that we have the wrong map of reality. We think that there’s a permanent self …
- As Days & Nights Fly Past… It just takes you to some weird place where your awareness gets snuffed out, your perceptions get snuffed out. Then, depending on how strong that desire was and how strong your concentration was around that desire, you can stay there for a long time. When you come out, you imagine what it’s like: Someone who hasn’t been thinking and hasn’t been …
- The Dhamma Wheel… Feelings feel, perceptions perceive, fabrications fabricate, consciousness cognizes. And we cling to these activities—in other words, we feed off of them. That’s where the suffering is, so that’s what we’ve got to focus on. Knowing the suffering or knowing that first noble truth is one level, then there’s knowing the duty with regard to it, which is to comprehend …
- You Can Make a Difference… When the mind gets solid enough, you can start investigating its perceptions around the pain: what it pays attention to, what it doesn’t pay attention to, how it pays attention, what’s the skillful way to pay attention to pain? In other words, look for the cause. Particularly, look for the cause of pain that’s felt in the mind. So, what we …
- Talking Among Your Selves… Where are the intentions? Where are the perceptions? What exactly are the feelings right now? Are the feelings the same as the breath? Is your awareness the same thing as the breath? There are times in the meditation when it’s actually helpful to think about the breath and the awareness going together as they spread through the body. Other times, you have to …
- To Strengthen the Path… Don’t let the perception of a solid block get in the way. If there’re places where there’s tension in the body, allow the tension to relax. The relaxation of muscles in the body helps to get that sense of energy flow more constant, smoother, more pleasant. And as you get this sense of well-being, this becoming that you’re creating …
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