"When we meditate, we're working with the process of perception. When we focus on the sensation of the breathing, we're also keeping in mind a particular perception of the breath so that we know what to look for, where to look for the breath. For example, if you have a perception of breath simply as air coming in and out of the lungs, you're going to be looking in one place and seeing one kind of thing. If you change your perception and think of the breath as energy flow in the body, you're going to be looking other places, seeing other things.
~
Perception is also used in gaining insight. Sometimes you hear that concentration basically deals with the perception or the mental label of something, whereas when you're developing insight you're dealing with the actual experience, but that's not the case. The two go together, the perception and the experience, both in concentration practice and in insight practice. When you're trying to concentrate, you use the perception of the breath to direct you to the experience of the breath and to keep you there. When you're starting to develop a sense of dispassion, you use the perception of inconstancy, or the perception of stress, or the perception of not-self. These are mental labels and you're applying them to things you're experiencing.
~
One of the important lessons you learn from meditation is the power of perception, how it can shape your experience: what you sense in your world of experience, both inside the body and around you; where you're going to focus your attention and what you're going to do with it; your sense of your possibilities, of what can be done. Again, if you think of the breath as simply the air coming in and out of the lungs, there's a limited range of possibilities for what you can do. The idea of allowing the in-and-out breath to stop gets kind of scary. But if you think of the breath energy flowing throughout the body, extending out to all the pores, then the idea of the in-and-out breath stopping is not so scary.
~
If you think of yourself as starved of breath, you have to keep gulping it in. You're going to breathe in a way that's not very conducive to getting the mind to settle down. But if you develop a perception of the body being filled with breath energy, then the in-breath is just connecting with what's already there, energizing what's already there, and you're going to breathe in a different way, with a lot less desperation, with a greater sense of fullness and ease. What's called the bodily fabrication aspect of the in-and-out breath has an impact on the movement of energy in the body, and the way you feel the body is going to get more and more subtle, more conducive to the mind's settling down.
~
All these perceptions are true to some extent, it's just that some of them are more useful than others, more beneficial, for some purposes and not for others. For the purpose of meditating, you want to hold onto a perception that's right for what you're doing right now. In this way, the perceptions you hold in the mind are a kind of mental chatter, a kind of inner speech--the words that go into the sentences of your directed thought and evaluation--and the same principles apply to inner speech as the Buddha applies to outer speech. In other words, before speaking, you have to ask yourself three questions.
~
The first question is, is it true? There are all kinds of things that are true. So, the next question is, is it beneficial? Is it really good to say these things? Is it really good to hold these perceptions? What use do they have? What impact do they have on the mind? Even though they may be true, if they're not having a beneficial impact on the mind, you might want to let them go. But even if they're beneficial, the next question is, is this the right time and place for them? Is this the time for comforting perceptions or is this the time for perceptions that crack the whip?--the ones that say, "Hey, you've got to get to work." These are the sorts of things you learn through experience..."
❀❀❀
Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Encouraging Perceptions
No comments:
Post a Comment