"The Power of Perception" long extract

"You hold a label in your mind and apply it to what you’re experiencing. The label can be a mental picture, a feeling, a word, or even just a kinetic sense that you have of the breath in the body. In other words, you might have a mental picture of how the breath goes into the body. Or you may create a particular feeling through the breath. You can focus on a point someplace around the middle of the chest and find a quality of feeling there that feels nice. You try to maintain that niceness, that pleasant feeling, so that nothing in the in- breath and nothing in the out-breath touches it or disturbs it.

This is where the Buddha’s image of holding a baby chick in your hand comes in handy. You gently hold that nice feeling all way through the in-breath, and all the way through the out-breath, adjusting your breathing so that it doesn’t disturb the feeling. Or you can just keep in mind the word “breath,” ”breath,” “breath,” as a way of reminding yourself not to leave the breath, when something else comes up. Or the general feeling you have of the breath coursing through the body: That can be your perception, your mental label. But to stay with the breath, you need a label of some kind. It can be one of these, or something else.

Your ability to keep that labeling in mind is where mindfulness comes in. At the same time, the label is what mindfulness needs as a sign to remember. That’s how mindfulness works together with the perception. These two qualities of perception and mindfulness help each other along.

As you get them more and more stable, you can stay more consistently with the breath. This gives you an important lesson: the power that perception has in shaping your experience. The English word, “perception,” is an awkward word to use, because it has two very distinct meanings. One is just basically registering sense data, as in being able to register data at the senses. The other is the label you put on something, identifying something, such as perceiving a dog to be a dog. The second meaning is what’s meant here. When there are feelings in the body, you can perceive them as breath feelings or you can perceive them as solid feelings. Your choice of perception will have an effect on what you can actually do with those sensations. There are things you can do with breath sensations that you can’t do with solid sensations. So perceiving them as breath sensations expands your range of possibilities.

This is why it’s useful to hold in mind the idea that whatever you’re experiencing in your inner sense of the body is related to the breath, either the in-and-out breath, or else the breath energy field that’s more in the background. If you think of the body as being a solid lump and you’ve got to pump the breath into it, that’ll affect the way you breathe, affect the level of pleasure you can get out of the breath. It restricts a lot of your possibilities. But if you think of the whole body as a breath energy field, you can breathe in and out of various places that you might not have thought of before: breathing out of the sides of your rib cage; thinking of the breath coming in from the left and the right as you breathe in and going out the chest you breathe out. Or you can breathe in and out of the shoulders, in and out of the eyes.

See if there’s someplace in the body that you’ve never thought of as breath before, and experiment with it: As you breathe in, think of the breath energy coming in right there. You don’t have to pull it from anywhere else. It just comes straight in through the skin. Notice which parts of the body, when you do this, have an especially good effect on how you experience the breathing, so that it feels more fulfilling, as opposed to struggling to get the breath in or to move the breath around. The breath energy is already there, and it’s simply a matter of nourishing it, filling up a little bit. You may find that you have a tendency to over-define where the different parts the body are, or over-define the edges of the breath, so loosen that up a bit. Think of the body as a field of energy and the breath can move around in places you might thought of being impossible before.

Now, you might say, “What’s all this playing around doing here? Aren’t we supposed to be here just accepting things as they are?” Well, part of learning about things as they are is beginning to realize that you’re shaping a lot of what you thought was just “as they are,” just a given in your experience. If everything were already given, already determined, you’d really be hampered. You’d really be constricted. You’d have no effect on the present at all. But that’s not the way things are. If you perceive things that way, you’re going to miss out on a lot of what you’re actually doing. A lot of mental actions are happening behind the scenes that you might be missing.

Open up the mind to the idea that you’re actually shaping things here. The best way to actually see that in action is to consciously work on shaping the way you perceive things, these labels, these images you hold in your mind as they relate to the breath. You begin to see in action what the Buddha was talking about, which is that if you’re going to have an actual perception, an actual feeling of the form of the body, or the feeling tones of pleasure or pain, you have to fabricate them from the raw material coming from your past. These things exist in a potential form, coming in from your past kamma, which places some limitations on the range of your choices. But to actually have a feeling, actually have a perception, requires an intention, a sankhara, a fabrication that occurs in the present moment.

These aggregates the Buddha talks about are activities. There’s an intentional element in them. Really to accept what’s going on doesn’t mean just accepting them as a given. It means accepting the fact you’ve had a hand in shaping them. You want to see that in action."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Power of Perception"