Question Your Perceptions
December 01, 2021

When you study the rules in the Vinaya, you see the huge role that perception plays in determining offenses. Say you see a little black spot on the sidewalk, you think it’s just a little black spot, and you step on it. You perceive it as just a black spot. If it turns out it was a bug, the fact that you didn’t perceive it as a bug means that there’s no offense.

But the Vinaya cautions you: Your perceptions are not necessarily reliable. You want to look carefully.

As we train the mind in meditation, we find that perceptions are really important here as well. You want to learn how to perceive things as correctly as possible. The problem is that our perceptions are like cartoon sketches. There’s no way they can replicate all of reality. As the Buddha said, they’re like mirages. They emphasize a few aspects of what’s out there, but there’s very little substance there. And there are a lot of things they miss, a lot of things they can distort.

So as you’re focusing on the breath, try to notice what kind of perceptions you use. What do you perceive of the process of breathing? How does it happen? And what kind of perceptions help you settle down? As the Buddha said, perception is a mental fabrication. It has an impact on the mind. What ways of perceiving the breath have a good impact on the breath and a good impact on the mind? You want to test them.

Ajaan Lee’s explorations of the breath energies in the body are very helpful. He approaches them in many different ways. First there’s the description in Method Two, which talks about the breath energies doing certain things. But then you go through his Dhamma talks, and you find he has the breath doing other things as well. Which means that he continued to explore and to try things out to the end of his life.

So try out different perceptions. Perceive the breath as originating outside, coming in. Perceive it as originating in the body and then radiating out in such a way as to pull the air in as you breathe in. Perceive it as originating in different spots of the body and see which spot is best for right now. Or you can perceive every cell in the body as breathing. Try to give them all equal weight, equal attention. See what that does.

Admittedly, these are sketches, but they’re sketches with a purpose. As you’re practicing concentration, you want to get really clear about what your perceptions are, and what purposes they serve, because as you develop insight, perceptions will play a huge role as well.

The forest ajaans talk often about how, with all the five aggregates, you don’t have to analyze all five at once. Choose one. As you really get to know that one, that knowledge spreads to the others. I think it was Ajaan Chah who said that his own efforts at gaining discernment really got going when he started looking into this issue of perceptions and seeing how arbitrary they are and how much they depend on our desires.

When Ajaan MahaBoowa said that he was able to really get a handle on body contemplation, again it was an issue of perception. He’d gotten really good at seeing the body as unattractive, taking it apart, thinking of all the blood flowing through the body. He’d look at a human body, and the first thing he would see was that it was falling apart. He got so that it seemed to be automatic, and there was no lust at all.

But then the question came: Was lust really gone, or was it just hiding? There had been no single event that had let him know that lust was done with for sure. So he tested it. He decided to switch his perceptions: Try to imagine a beautiful body. So for four days he worked and worked and worked at getting this perception of a beautiful body right next to his. There was no sign of any interest, no sign of any lust—until the fourth day. Then there was just a little bit of a stirring. It wasn’t physical, it was just a mental stirring, that he liked this beautiful body—which was a sign that the lust was still there. What was he going to do now?

He decided to go back and forth: to perceive it as ugly, unattractive, falling apart, oozing, all kinds of horrible stuff, filled with diseases, and then going back to attractive. He saw that the issue was not the body, it was the perceptions and the desires that those perceptions served. That, he said, finally led to the insight that got him past that issue.

So look at your perceptions, look at your labels, look at your images, and realize that your view of reality is pretty sketchy. When you have a perception of things, ask: What purpose does it serve?

Now, you have some perceptions in the mind that got lodged in there from events in the past that are really unhealthy. So you have to learn how to question them. Try to use other perceptions in their place and see which parts of the mind fight, resist, try to hold on to the old perceptions. That’s one really good way of getting to see where your defilements are.

As the Buddha said, craving, when it arises, has a location, and often we’re confused as to what the location is. We may think we’re attracted to a particular person, but it often turns out that we’re attracted to a perception, and the perception is attractive because it serves a particular purpose: It fits in with a particular fantasy we may have. So you often find that the craving is actually three or four removes, or its location is three or four removes, from what you think the object is.

The best way to fight your old, unskillful perceptions is to apply some new ones. This is why the Buddha has you analyze the body into those 32 parts, or to think of all the diseases you have in the body. Ajaan Funn has an interesting analysis. He says that when there’s a reference to eye-disease, cakkhu-rogo, the Buddha’s not just saying that there’s a disease in the eye. He’s saying that the eye is a disease. Your ear is a disease. All the different parts of your body are a disease. They’re all ready to malfunction.

Yet we think we’ve gotten such a good thing when we’ve got this body. And it is useful for certain things, but you’ve got to be very clear about what it’s good for, and what other ways it may be actually bad for the mind if you hold on to the body.

We’ve talked in the past about negative body images and positive body images, and both kinds can be either healthy or unhealthy. A healthy negative image is seeing that every body is made of these same things. That way, any craving to come back and have another human body has to be called into question. The unhealthy negative image, of course, is when you see that other people have beautiful bodies but yours is an ugly body. This is why it’s good to think about all possible bodies, all the things they have inside, all the diseases they’re subject to, what happens to them as they age, what happens to them as they die and decay. This way of thinking is a great leveler. It makes you question whether you’ve got such a good deal after all, getting this body, but it also makes you wonder if anyone has gotten a good deal.

As for the positive image: The unhealthy positive image is that you’re attractive and you can use your attractive features to get other people to do what you want. There’s a lot of pride that goes with that, but it’s a very unstable pride. As you get older, you need to have people keep reaffirming that you’re still as attractive as you were. And when you think that you’re attractive, it’s very easy to get seduced.

I was reading one time about a conversation between a French actor and a French actress on the topic of seduction. The actor was saying that beautiful women are a lot easier to seduce than women who are ugly, because they believe already that they’re attractive and seductive, but they half believe that they’re not, so they like having their attractiveness reaffirmed. Whereas with women who know that they’re not attractive, if you come on to them, this actor said, they think you’re being ridiculous. So that’s a case where having a positive body image of that sort can really get you into trouble.

The healthy positive image is that the body is useful for doing good things. What makes human life good is the goodness we can do, and here we’ve got a body that can do those forms of goodness. When you see that that’s the value of having a body, then the question of what food is good to eat, what’s a good exercise regime, what’s a good way to take care of the body, gets a very different response from what it would have been if you said, “I want the body to be attractive.”

So realize that the Buddha teaches a healthy positive image and a healthy negative image, and realize what the purposes of those images are. Take some of his strong medicine—to fight the negative unhealthy images and the negative positive images—because these attitudes are firmly entrenched. After all, this is why we got born in the human realm.

In the Buddha’s analysis, the reason we’re attracted to other people is because we’re first attracted to ourselves. When we die and we still have that issue of attraction, it’s going to lead us to who knows where. It’ll be a big obstacle. So look at the drawbacks of having a body, all the diseases that bodies have, the diseases they are, what happens to them as they age, how they’re subject to accidents. It’s really a precarious thing, having a body.

Use those thoughts to develop some heedfulness. Turn around and look at your perceptions and ask yourself: “How many times have you been fooled by your perceptions?” Learn to see them as arbitrary. Learn to see them as cartoon sketches. We’re often so impressed by how accurate our perceptions of the world can be, and yet there’s so much we don’t know.

We were talking today about birdsong. With many birdsongs, we hear only part of the song, because our ears are not quick enough to hear how quick a birdsong can be. What sounds like a squawk of lots of different notes all at once is actually an arpeggio. That’s just one little thing. Then, of course, there are the frequencies outside of the range of our hearing. So even our perception of birdsongs is pretty skewed.

That doesn’t apply just to birdsongs. It applies to everything that we do in life. We’ve got perceptions that rule our opinions on things, but they perceive only a part. They serve certain purposes, and they serve some purposes well. But they can get in your way of better purposes.

Take, for instance, the question of your mind right now. What direction is your mind facing? Because our eyes face forward, we have the idea that our minds are also facing forward. But when you close your eyes, there’s no need to think that the mind is facing any direction at all. We know we have a body. But you could also perceive that there’s just space here. You’re not using the body to move around right now. Things can be very still. If you get the breath really, really still, the sense of the outline of the body can begin to disappear. That is a perception you can let go of.

That perception is useful for some things, as when you’re working on a manual skill, but it’s also good to learn how to put perceptions aside when that helps the mind settle down to deeper and deeper levels. That allows you to question the perceptions that give rise to greed, aversion, and delusion, and the perceptions that serve the purposes of greed, aversion, and delusion. As you call them into question, you find that you open up a lot of understanding inside.

So perception is a good aggregate to focus on, because it’s key to a lot of our defilements. There are perceptions that provoke the defilements, and there are defilements that provoke certain perceptions. When you can call the perceptions into question, you can call those defilements into question as well.