Meditation teaches you the power of your perceptions. You come to see how the labels you apply to things, the images with which you visualize things, have a huge influence over what you see, how they can weigh you down with suffering and stress. As the meditation develops, though, it gives you the tools you need to gain freedom from that influence. In the beginning, when you first notice the power of perception, you can easily feel overwhelmed by how pervasive it is. Suppose youre focusing on the breath. There comes a point when you begin to wonder whether youre focusing on the breath itself or on your idea of the breath. Once this question arises, the normal reaction is to try to get around the idea to the raw sensation behind it. But if youre really sensitive as you do this, youll notice that youre simply replacing one caricature of the breath with another, more subtle one. Even the raw sensation of breathing is shaped by how you conceptualize raw sensation. No matter how hard you try to pin down an unfiltered experience of breathing, you still find it shaped by your idea of what breathing actually is. The more you pursue the reality of the breath, the more it recedes like a mirage. The trick here is to turn this fact to your advantage. After all, youre not meditating to get to the breath. Youre meditating to understand the processes leading to suffering so that you can put an end to them. The way you relate to your perceptions is part of these processes, so //thats// what you want to see. You have to treat your experience of the breath, not as an end in itself, but as a tool for understanding the role of perception in creating suffering and stress. ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/deperception.html
Posted on: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 04:16:44 +0000
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