Search results for: "Perception"

  1. Page 79
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. To Free You from Clinging
     … That’s when the Buddha has you apply the perception of not-self. Some people say that awakening is seeing that there is no self. But for a lot of people, the question of self was not the issue in their awakening. And it’s hard to see what kind of experience would guarantee the truth that there is or is not a self … 
  11. Four Steps for the Heart & Mind
     … Then you want to be sensitive to how these feelings have an impact on your mind, together with the perceptions that go along with them. Then you want to calm that impact. That’s the second tetrad. The third tetrad is dealing with the mind. As you’re sitting here, the Buddha says, first be sensitive to the mind. In other words, what is … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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