Search results for: "Perception"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Truths That Are Noble… Suffering is the clinging-aggregates—the passion and desire you have for form, feeling, perceptions, thought-constructs, consciousness. It’s like an addiction. We lay claim to these things. We construct our idea of who we are out of those things. We search for food using these activities. So we think they’re really good, that we can’t do without them. But the …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Admirable Intentions… You see perceptions simply as events in and of themselves, part of a causal chain, before they coalesce into a state of becoming—in other words, the act of taking on an identity in a world of experience. If you can see things in this way, you begin to gain some distance from your other cravings. This is how the path helps you abandon …
- Balancing the Bases for Concentration… You can end up with distorted perceptions. Even though they seem to fall right in line with what the books say, they can still be wrong. The Buddha’s way is to have you ask questions. It’s as if he were organizing a treasure hunt, saying that there’s something really valuable over in the yard next door, and it has these general …
- Laying the Infrastructure… Because the sensitivity involves not only very clear perception, but also continuity. If you really want to be sensitive to something, you’ve got to watch it continuously and not go skipping around. Think of a needle on a record: When the needle stays in the groove, you hear the music on the record. If the needle goes jumping around, then all you get …
- Training in Commitment & Reflection… But the important thing is that you try to observe on your own as much as you can so that the observer in the mind, the part of the mind that reflects, becomes more and more perceptive, more and more reliable. For many of us, the observer inside is way too judgmental, which is why—to compensate—some people will tell you, “Don’t …
- The World Is Swept Away… Even your body, your feelings, your perceptions, your thought constructs, your consciousness: You can’t take those with you, either. These first three Dhamma summaries provide an interesting point to reflect on — that the Buddha’s teaching on the three characteristics may have come from the simple facts of aging, illness, and death. Aging — inconstancy; illness — stress and suffering; and death — not-self. The …
- Anapanasati Day… Then you notice how those feelings, together with the different perceptions that go along with the breath and the feelings, have an impact on the mind. These are mental fabrications, the Buddha calls them. Then you learn how to calm the mental fabrications. In other words, where there’s pain, you try to turn it into rapture; where there’s rapture, you might want …
- In Training… You train yourself to be sensitive to how feelings and perceptions are having an impact on your mind, and how to calm that impact. At the same time, you’re calming the breath and training yourself to be sensitive to the state of your mind, and then adjusting it to get it to settle down: gladdening it to make it happy to be here …
- Audacious & Undaunted… We cling to our perceptions, our thought constructs, our consciousness. And in that clinging is the suffering. Why do we cling? We cling because of craving. If you can comprehend the suffering to the point where you go beyond any passion, aversion, and delusion around it, and if you can abandon the craving, that’s the end of suffering. That was the third noble …
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