Search results for: "Perception"

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  2. Directly & Indirectly to the Breath
     … And then rearrange your perceptions around that, so if it feels like the breath begins in the navel, okay, focus on its beginning in the navel. You don’t have to think about the air coming in and out of the nose. Or if it feels like it’s coming from around the area of the heart, think that breath energy is flowing from … 
  3. Less is More
     … See how long you can maintain that perception. It’s an act of balancing. If you’ve ever noticed people walking across a tightrope, you notice that they don’t stay perfectly balanced all the time. They shift a little bit to the right, a little bit to the left, and then they correct, like those old-fashioned scales that swing back and forth … 
  4. A Connoisseur of Happiness
     … Anything that excites a very strong addiction, that dulls the mind, dulls your perceptions: That’s a kind of pleasure to be avoided. The pleasure of jhana, though, is neither harmful nor intoxicating. Sometimes modern Dhamma teachers will warn you about the dangers of getting attached to the pleasures of jhana, that somehow they’re a major peril to be avoided and feared, but … 
  5. Diagnosing the Mind
     … They’ve done studies showing that decisions often get made in the mind very early on in the perception process. Yet the conscious mind, coming in slightly later, thinks it’s making the decision. Actually what it’s doing is ratifying decisions that it’s already made. This doesn’t mean we don’t have free will, that everything is on automatic pilot, although … 
  6. A Rite of Passage
     … Try to hold that perception in mind and see if it helps you settle down and, at the very least, helps you get into the kind of concentration the Buddha taught, which is to have a full-body awareness. If you can see the breath as being simply air coming in and out through the nose, it’s hard to relate that to the … 
  7. Blessings
     … As you work on your perceptions and the actual mechanics of the breathing, and as the mind begins to settle down more and more, you find there’s less and less need to breathe. You don’t suppress the breath, but you just don’t need to breathe in and out. Your oxygen needs are met one way or another, and the mind comes … 
  8. Working at Home
     … And even though you may not be directly applying the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self to the five clinging-aggregates, you’re learning to take a problem-solving approach to issues in your life, which is precisely the Buddha’s approach. The four noble truths are a problem-solving approach, focused on the problem of stress and suffering as a whole, and … 
  9. Respect for the Precepts
     … Then concentration and discernment will help make your practice of the precepts even more solid and perceptive. One of the distinctive principles of the forest tradition is its understanding of the interplay among virtue, concentration, and discernment. Usually, outside of the forest tradition, they’re taught three-in-a-row like that: You start with virtue and then, when that’s good, you learn … 
  10. The Ennobling Path
     … It starts with the breath, starts with your own awareness, your feelings, your perceptions, your consciousness, and turns them into something that can take you to another dimension entirely. In that way, it could be called an ennobling path. It takes these normal things that we use to create our experiences, create our sense of self, and it turns them into something better, gives … 
  11. Practicing for Dispassion
     … for what?’ The answer is, ‘the end of passion for the aggregates.’ Why would he teach the end of passion? Because when you have passion for the aggregates of form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness, and then those things change, you suffer. If you have no passion for them, then even though they change, there will be no suffering.” It’s interesting: Sariputta didn … 
  12. Pride in Your Craft
     … You’ve got to straighten out your perceptions: “What are the duties I’ve got to do right now? What am I faced with right now? And which duty is appropriate right here?” If you’re unclear about what’s happening, try to see if you can comprehend: “Where is the stress right now?” And develop whatever mindfulness and continuity of awareness is needed … 
  13. Stop Squirming
     … But if you learn how to be with your pain and not feel threatened by it, seeing the distinction between your awareness and the actual sensation of the pain, seeing the way the mind uses perceptions to create a bridge from the pain into the mind itself, and learning how to cut that bridge, then you can be with pain and not suffer. And … 
  14. Fear of Death
     … The Buddha calls these strategies the process of “I-making” and “my-making.” Whatever way you form a sense of self around form, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, or consciousness, it’s all just fabrication. In the process of fabrication there’s stress. If that’s all there were in life, you’d be willing to put up with the stress, for without your self … 
  15. The Buddha’s Questions
     … find true happiness there, it’s going to be stressful.” “If it’s inconstant and stressful, is it worthy of being called your self?” He asked the same questions of feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. The asking of the questions is meant to open up your attention to an area where there’s been a gap, where there has been something missing in your … 
  16. Learning from What You Do
     … But the Buddha was more perceptive. He saw that those weren’t the real problems. The real problem was this issue of suffering, stress. He saw the target and he hit it. That’s why he’s still the ultimate admirable friend. As he said, if it weren’t for him, we’d still be just mucking around in our suffering. We’d have … 
  17. Path & Raft
     … You’re identifying with form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness—all the five aggregates—building a sense of self around them. Either you identify with a particular aggregate or group of aggregates, or you feel that they belong to you. You have a self that owns these things, or your self is in these things, or these things are in yourself. Any of these … 
  18. Looking at Your Life
     … As the Buddha once said, we often suffer from aberrant perceptions, seeing constancy in things that are not constant, pleasure in things that are painful, we identify with things that really can’t really identify with, and we see beauty in things that are really not beautiful. It’s all very strange what we hold dear. He says this doesn’t apply just to … 
  19. Adjusting the Flame
     … There’s perception, there are feelings, there’s directed thought and evaluation, there are intentions, there are acts of attention, where you frame questions, look into things. Where you’re going to see all those factors most clearly is as you’re getting the mind to settle down. When the Buddha talks about dependent co-arising, it’s not something he just thought up … 
  20. Training for Dispassion
     … form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness.” Then the next question those people would ask would be, “Why? For what purpose?” The answer is that if you haven’t abandoned desire and passion for those things, then when they change, there’s going to be sorrow and lamentation. But if you have abandoned desire and passion, then when those things change there won’t be any … 
  21. The Dhamma Wheel
     … khandha, means “heap” or “pile.” Five categories of activities: Your sense of the form of the body as you feel it from within. Feelings of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. Perceptions, where you put labels on things, identifying what they are, what they mean. Thought constructs or fabrications, where you put thoughts together. And then consciousness, which is aware of all these things … 
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