Search results for: "Perception"
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- The Time & Place to Let Go… So for anything that would pull you away or adds extra burdens to the mind that are unnecessary, the thinking or the perception of not-self is a useful tool to have to cut them away. You can say, “Well, it’s really not myself, it’s not really mine.” Even your own body: At some point, you’re going to have to give …
- Fears… form, feeling, perceptions, thought-fabrications, and consciousness. You look to see where these things are inconstant. Where they’re inconstant, you realize they’re stressful. There’s stress right there in the inconstancy. Then when you look at stress, look at suffering — although at this level it’s more stress than suffering — you ask yourself, “What am I doing to cause that stress, to …
- A Healthy Attitude Toward Happiness… We feed off our perceptions, the labels we put on things. We feed off the thoughts we put together. We feed off our awareness of these things. And simply the fact that we have to be feeding all the time creates a lot of stress, because the things we’re feeding on don’t last. So we have to keep looking for new sources …
- Time & Place… But something, say, like the three characteristics, or more properly the three perceptions of inconstancy, stress, not-self: There are cases in the Canon where people try to apply those teachings, and the Buddha reprimands them, saying that this is not the place to apply that teaching. One case is of a young monk who is asked by some sectarians, “What does the Buddha …
- Getting Back on Your Feet… Hold that perception in mind. In other words, instead of allowing lust to do the looking, you have these thoughts do the looking. Or if there’s somebody you really dislike, you can focus on their good side. Maybe they’ve done something good in the past. The Buddha compares this to a monk who’s looking for rags to make his robe. He …
- Mastery… As long as you find that you can control things like form, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, and consciousness—the five aggregates—you do exert control over them. You do develop a sense of self around them on the path: the self as its own mainstay, the self as its governing principle. But you try to develop it, not in the sense of trying to …
- Right View Comes First… You’ve got feelings, you’ve got perceptions, thought-constructs, consciousness—and you cling to these things. That’s the suffering. Suffering is not something that you’re passively receiving. You’re actually doing the action that constitutes suffering. Think about that. And why do you do that? Because of craving: either craving for sensuality, craving for a state of becoming, or craving to …
- The Triple Training… There has to be a certain amount of insight into how you’re fabricating your mind-states—the way you talk to yourself, the perceptions you use, the feelings you focus on—if you want the mind to settle down. If you don’t see these things happening in the present moment, it’s going to be really hard for the mind to settle …
- The Dhamma Eye… Understanding that suffering is clinging—clinging to the body, clinging to our feelings, clinging to our perceptions of things, clinging to the way the mind fabricates and puts together its experience, and even clinging to our awareness of things. That’s what suffering is. It’s not an intuitive definition. He starts out by talking about the suffering of aging, illness, and death, of …
- Worldly Narratives… When you get more and more firmly established in the state of concentration, then you can use your perceptions and thought-constructs to start taking even that apart, to see what attachment there is to this state of quiet, this state of calm, this open, spacious state that comes with the concentration. Start taking that apart as well. Then you finally get to a …
- The Buddha’s Basic Therapy… They get the mind in the right position, a healthy position, so that it can handle the four noble truths, the three perceptions, and all the other, more advanced teachings. So don’t overlook the foundation. The foundation is important; without it, you can’t build a house. If you try building the house without the foundation, then, when an earthquake comes, it’ll …
- The Graduated Discourse… So it’s not that he’s denying the fact of the pleasures, but as he says, it’s because of the pleasures of form, feeling, perceptions, fabrication, and consciousness that we’re stuck on them—that’s the problem. But still, he wants people to have a sense that, yes, he does appreciate that there are pleasures in life. Then, when he gets …
- Victory over Death… The things we take to be really solid in the world, when you look at them carefully, are just instances of form, feeling, perceptions, thought constructs, and consciousness. And when you look carefully at these aggregates, seeing how ephemeral they are, you begin to realize: How could you construct anything really reliable out of them? The one reliable thing you can construct out of …
- Rivers of Craving… There’s the pleasure of concentration.” Even better than that, there’s a joy that comes when you can learn how to see that “Oh, I’m seeing the pain as the same thing as my leg, but if I change the perception, either the pain goes away or at least it doesn’t weigh the mind down.” You wouldn’t have learned that …
- Unskillful Thinking… But if you learn to be really mindful, you can see the whole process of sensory perception: how sights come in, what the mind does with the sights, how sounds are sensed, and what the mind does with the sounds. You begin to see what an artificial process the whole thing is. You realize you wouldn’t want to build the happiness of your …
- Reclaiming the Breath… It’s like tuning in to a different radio station, or those old magic eye pictures where you first look at them and there’s just a crazy quilt of two dimensional designs, but then something switches in your brain and you see it as a three dimensional shape—same pattern, but your perception of it is different. It’s the same with this …
- Honest & Observant… And this is how we develop those qualities so they get more and more perceptive, more and more true. The truth of the Dhamma is not the sort of thing you learn by simply reading books and understanding them or remembering the steps. You listen to the Dhamma—and here reading the Dhamma would count as listening to the Dhamma—and then you ponder …
- Desires Have Their Reasons… A lot of our desires are focused on a very narrow perception of things— blocking out huge areas of our experience. We take it for granted that there’s going to be a lot of stress and a lot of pain in our search for pleasure, and we learn how to turn a blind eye to it. But the Buddha’s basically saying, “No …
- Antidotes for Clinging… We feed on the form of the body, we feed on feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, and sensory consciousness. When these things are pleasant, they’re not too heavy. But they can turn around and turn unpleasant very quickly. They gobble us up, for we’ve opened the way for them to get to us. Once you start clinging to the good ones, you start …
- The Taste Is Release… by the way you breathe, by the way you talk to yourself, by the feelings you focus on, and by the perceptions you keep in mind. These are the processes by which you fix your food. It’s not as if the food just magically appears. You play a role in finding it and fixing it. The question is, is it worth the effort …
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