Search results for: "Perception"

  1. Page 78
  2. Two Guardian Meditations
     … He had found something unconditioned, which didn’t depend on perceptions or thought constructs or any of the aggregates. It was totally independent. He came from there, he came back from the deathless, which is a grand achievement. So there was no reason for him to fear anything that anybody might say about how he was teaching wrongly or hadn’t attained the deathless … 
  3. Part I : Basic Instructions
     … In this way, you get more and more sensitive to the way you shape your experience by the perceptions you hold in mind, by the way you think about things, the questions you ask. You can ask questions about the breath: Where is it coming in right now? Not the air coming in and out the nose, but where does the feeling of energy … 
  4. Lessons for New Monks
     … Ask yourself, where does the line get drawn as to whether something’s attractive or not? And why do you draw the line there? In learning to look at the details in different ways, you learn an awful lot about perception and the desires that go behind the way you perceive things. It also means that you’re fencing the mind in: Instead of … 
  5. Start with Goodwill
     … You can change your perception, and that changes the way the breath flows, where it flows, what direction it flows. Can you think of all the breath energies in the body flowing in together, flowing out together, all in harmony? Realize that if this is going to be good for your body, it’s like an ointment you put on a wound. You don … 
  6. Actualizing Your Potentials
     … Your awareness can step back and look at it, realizing that the perceptions and feelings of that world, if you pull them into the mind, can cause you to suffer. But you don’t have to pull them into the mind. When you keep that sense of distance, you can deal with setbacks a lot more effectively, remembering that the most important thing is … 
  7. Creating a New Self
     … But as I pointed out to him, the Buddha was very perceptive. He saw that in each of those worlds, there is some suffering—there’s always something wrong in that world. If you can admit to yourself that there’s something wrong in this world, that by inhabiting this particular world or taking on this particular identity, there’s going to be suffering … 
  8. Mature Strategies
     … Form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, even sensory consciousness: They all break down. But we’re strongly addicted to this approach, to hanging onto them as ends in themselves. Which is why, again, we spend so much time misinterpreting what the Buddha said. “The Buddha says there is no self,” we think, “but he can’t be right.” We’re not looking at what he … 
  9. Catch Yourself Lying to Yourself
     … There has to be something spurring you on, and it’s the perception of the fact that whatever pleasure you’ve got is inconstant; some of the things you’re doing are causing stress; you’re trying to control things that you can’t really control: That’s what not-self is all about. You’ve got to be able to detect these things … 
  10. Happiness is a Skill
     … the form of the body in the breath; the feeling of pleasure that comes when the breath feels good; the perception—the mental image of the breath being the energy going throughout the body—that holds the breath in mind; fabrication, the conversation you hold with yourself about the breath as you’re evaluating it; and then consciousness, which is aware of all these … 
  11. Start with Yourself
     … Then finally there’s another element which is more basic, which are your feelings of pleasure and pain together with your perceptions, the way you label things, the things you notice. When you’re working with the breath, you begin to realize that no matter what’s happening outside, you can change the way you breathe so that you feel ease inside, so you … 
  12. Birth Is Suffering
     … We get hands-on experience with bodily fabrication in the breath, verbal fabrication in the way we talk to ourselves, and then mental fabrication—feelings and perceptions—seeing how we put these things together to create a state of concentration. Then, as the concentration deepens, some of them will peel off. That’s how you see that they are distinct. The first one that … 
  13. The Middle Way
     … specifically, the suffering that comes from craving, the suffering in clinging to the five aggregates of form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness. All the different kinds of suffering in world that really weigh on the mind come down to clinging to any one of these five aggregates or any combination of them. So when you see the suffering simply as that—an example of … 
  14. Inner Voice Lessons
     … Finally, when all other conversation is stilled, you can turn to question the more subtle voice of the perception in charge of your concentration: “Who’s talking here? Who’s it labeling for?” That’s when things really open up in the mind. Of course we all want to jump to that spot, where you find the transcendent, but to get there it takes … 
  15. A Handful of Leaves
     … They come to the waterhole, commenting on it—“I don’t like this; I hate this; I’m afraid of this”—creating perceptions about what this pain is, thinking about how long it’s been there, how long it may be there, and what it means in terms of the future of your health. The mind can create all kinds of narratives around it … 
  16. Therapy for the Mind
     … the little blips of perceptions or feelings that are used to justify going with a particular defilement—your lizard brain’s contribution to the whole conversation. The lizard brain may not be articulate, but it is powerful. Still, there will be a conversation going on in the mind. You have to learn how to run that conversation in such a way that you’re … 
  17. Why the Breath
     … But as the Buddha said, that’s where you find purity, in really getting perceptive and intelligent about how you look for happiness, observing how you’re looking for happiness, and being careful to make sure that your actions are in line with your most skillful intentions. So the quest for happiness is not a bad thing. I was talking yesterday with someone who … 
  18. Examine Your Happiness
     … You focus instead on the fact that some aspects of form, feeling, perception, mental fabrication, and consciousness are actually pleasant, and you want to pursue them for that pleasure. There’s the pleasure of the precepts, the pleasure of generosity, both of which are conditioned things. There’s the pleasure in concentration, which is also conditioned, and you want to motivate yourself to develop … 
  19. Ingenuity
     … Your perception of the breath, the feelings that come from the way you breathe: You take these things that are said to be stressful and you make them as comfortable as possible. These things that are ultimately out of your control, you see how much control you can exert over them. It’s only when you flip things around like this that you get … 
  20. Right View
     … The aggregates of form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness come in a potential form and then—based on which things we’re interested in, which things we want to create, which things we want to destroy—we actually create our experience of the present out of these different potentials. So we need to do a lot of digging down into our experience of the … 
  21. Wisdom for Dummies Revisited
     … All they get are perceptions, labels in the mind. They don’t actually see where these teachings are useful and why they’re useful tools. The Buddha didn’t teach these things just to show off how smart he was. Everything he taught was for a purpose. And when your mind is ready, then you see, “Oh, this serves that purpose.” When you’ve … 
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