Search results for: "Perception"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. Focus on What’s Important
     … It was clinging to the five aggregates of form, feeling, perceptions, fabrication, and consciousness. Its cause was the three kinds of craving: for sensuality, for becoming, for non-becoming. Sensuality is your mind’s fascination with thinking about sensual pleasures. Becoming is the act of taking on an identity in a world of experience. You see something that you want, you see the world … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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