Search results for: "Perception"
- Page 9
- A Cocoon of Energy… It may not count as that formless attainment, but it is a perception of formlessness. It’s good to get the mind used to that perception so that you don’t feel cast adrift. The more steadily you can hold on to this perception, the better. This way, you learn how to replace your preconceived notions with the Buddha’s perceptions. Now, some people …
- The Path is Fabricated… You still have mental fabrication, feeling and perception—the perception is the perception of breath that holds everything together—until you reach the fourth jhana, where there’s just mental fabrication, the feeling and perception. The in-and-out breathing has stopped, leaving just a feeling of equanimity, what the Buddha calls “purity of equanimity and mindfulness.” This, too, is something you do. There …
- Obstacles to Full-body Awareness… Then gradually work from that position of strength—and look into your perceptions. There’s one perception that’s very common, which is that the parts that are tense or tight or painful tend to be the parts that you use a lot to bring the breath in because of your subconscious thoughts about what needs to be tightened up for the breath to …
- What’s Relative, What’s Constant… So it’s good to look at perceptions as pretty arbitrary, pretty random, and then ask yourself: “To what extent am I driving myself crazy by holding on to certain perceptions? I could change them to other perceptions that are just as true, but actually more useful.” So you look at your perceptions, not so much based on the term you’re used to …
- How the Breath Helps You to Die Well… Mental fabrication covers feelings—in this case, you’re focusing on the feeling of pleasure or neither pleasure nor pain—and perceptions. The perceptions are the real instigators, as Ajaan Lee would say. How you perceive the breath, how you perceive the mind, how you perceive the things that are coming in to disturb you will have a huge impact on where your mind …
- Breath Energy… Which perceptions help with getting the breath more nourishing? Which perceptions help the breath permeate throughout the body, so that everything feels connected, everything feels coordinated? Work on those perceptions, because you want to deal with perceptions, ultimately see how far can you make the state of your mind constant, easeful, and under your control. Then you run up against the areas where you …
- Fabricating with Awareness… There’s that perception in the back of the mind that colors everything you’re going to do and say in that situation. If the perception will lead you to do something unskillful, change the perception. Or if somebody insults you: Do you perceive that your honor has been besmirched, that you’ve got to fight back? The Buddha gives you another perception: Someone …
- Feelings of Pain… This helps you see that your perception of the pain as solid was a false perception. In this way, you take these old perceptions and you question them. You see that they don’t hold up to the light of your examination. You replace them with better perceptions: perceptions that don’t make the pain stab the heart. This is how you calm mental …
- A Message for the Universe… And one of the lessons you’ve got to learn is that if your perceptions are causing suffering, you’ve got to change your perceptions. No matter how real they may seem, no matter how true they may seem, they’re not what you want. You should try to find perceptions that help put an end to suffering. We talk often about seeing things …
- Square One… Finally, the third type of fabrication, mental, consists of feelings and perceptions. Feelings are feeling tones: pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. Perceptions are the labels you put on things that identify what they are, what they mean, how important they are. As with a red light: You can identify that the light is red, you can tell that it means “stop,” and you …
- Fabrication at the Breath… It’s another perception and it’s a very unskillful perception. So here’s a perception coming along, coming out of who knows where, but just because it comes into your mind doesn’t mean you have to believe it. You have to remember: The mind is like a committee. Some members of the committee like to meditate, and other members of the committee …
- Endurance… feelings and perceptions. This is the stage of the practice where you look into the perceptions you hold around things, like the perception that the quarantine is going to be endless. That’s not a very calming perception. So, you replace it with something else. When the Buddha is talking about physical pain, he has you remind yourself that the pain is something separate …
- The Wisdom of Wising Up… faulty intentions, faulty perceptions, or paying attention to the wrong things. Ask yourself: “What was my perception of the situation? Why or how was it wrong? What signals were coming my way that I didn’t pay attention to?” Sometimes you may have read the situation and signals very accurately, yet you still proceeded with what you wanted to do. That was your intention …
- Cheating the System… You have other perceptions around it. One of the reasons we practice breath meditation is to get really sensitive to how our perceptions affect things. One of the steps, as the Buddha said, is to become sensitive to mental fabrication, which includes your feelings of pleasure, pain, neither-pleasure-nor-pain, and the perceptions around them. But before you do that he says try …
- The Path of Giving… You use your perceptions to help you focus on the breath throughout the day. Or when things get more refined, focus on space throughout the day: space all around you, in between the atoms of your body. You can make that your perception. And on up through the levels of concentration. Thought constructs: You have feelings and perceptions, you have directed thought and evaluation …
- Imagine Your Breath… You can use it as an example for how to test your perceptions. Sometimes the effects will be quicker than you might imagine. So you ask yourself, what if the breath goes up?—and the breath will start going up. What if it goes down?—and it starts going down. If you’re not sure of your perceptions, you can drop them. The trick …
- Lessons in Fabrication… Then there’s mental fabrication, which is composed of perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the images you have in mind to name things, identity things, recognize things, remember things. Feelings are feeling-tones, not emotions so much as just the tone of the feeling: pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. It’s through these activities that we shape the present moment. It’s also …
- Calm… But if you tell yourself the breath is waiting at every pore, happy to come in if you just let it in, that perception changes things. So you calm the mind with your perceptions, sometimes thinking about reasons why you should be glad to be here, sometimes using perceptions of what’s going on in the body, what’s going on in the mind …
- Angry… And change the perceptions: in particular, the perception that anger is what frees you. Anger is actually what ties you down and skews your perceptions. All this falls under the principle that we tend to fabricate our experience of the world—including our emotions—out of ignorance. As a result, we suffer. The problem with anger is that it blames that sense of suffering …
- Strategic Thinking… The same with your feelings and perceptions. The perception here is like the durian example. The Buddha teaches a lot in terms of similes, to provide you with good perceptions for thinking about things. If you’re angry at somebody and all you can think of is how much they’ve harmed you, he reminds you to remind yourself that you when you’re …
- Load next page...
