Search results for: "Perception"

  1. Page 78
  2. Mindfulness, the Gatekeeper
     … How do these things have an effect on your mind?—the pleasure and rapture together with your perceptions of those feelings. Ideally, you want to get the mind in a state where it feels calm and at ease, so if you find certain ways of perceiving the breath or perceiving the pleasure or rapture to be disturbing, you let go of them. Try to … 
  3. Determined to Make a Difference
     … And perceptions of self and no-self don’t apply there. You get there by looking at your experience in terms of not-self, but the experience itself is something other. Which is why it’s a good goal to choose, the most discerning goal to choose, the goal that’s most worthy of being truthful to, to make sacrifices for. It’s a … 
  4. Stepping Out of Truth Games
     … The same with any other really basic perceptions that we tend to hold on to: You want to learn how to put them aside when you need to put them aside, and then take them back on again only when you need to. The skill here is having that part in the back of the mind that can look at different worlds that you … 
  5. The Discernment of a True Person
     … Why do you want the perceptions that give rise to lust? So whatever your problem is, there is an antidote. All too often, our problem is that we don’t like the antidote, so we pretend that it’s not a problem. You need to admit the problem before you can solve it—which is why having a sense of yourself is an important … 
  6. Developed in Body & Mind
     … Why is that? Because you drop the perception of the breath. You were overcome by pleasure. What we’re trying to do here is to give rise to a sense of pleasure, let it spread through the body, nourish the body, benefit the body, but keep our attention anchored with the breath. The pleasure will do its work. The sense of fullness will do … 
  7. Purity
     … There’ll be simply a perception that holds the mind with the breath. Then you’re just thinking, “breath, breath,” or a mental image about the breath flowing through the body. That’s enough to keep you here. Then, as the meditation progresses, other things will fall away as well. The mind gets purer and purer. So it’s a progressive practice. You start … 
  8. Work & Play
     … the breath, the verbal fabrication of directing your thoughts to the breath and evaluating the breath, and then the mental fabrication of the feelings that arise from the breath and the perceptions that you use to stay with the breath—you really begin to see: What is your present intention? Where is it skillful? Where is it not? What can you do to make … 
  9. Reading Your Meditation
     … That’s a skewed perception. Focusing on the mistakes we made in the past and getting depressed about them is really not helpful, because when you start focusing on your own negative activities, after a while you get tired of focusing on your own negative activities, and you start focusing on the negative things that other people have done as well. That puts you … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
  22. Load next page...