Meditation - The gates of perception.

Buddhists, like Western science, recognize the five senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste. In Buddhism, the five sensory abilities are called the gates of perception - the etymology of this metaphor is related to the entrance of the house.

Most of our feelings and perceptions are our experience through one or more of these doors. But as the five faculties of feelings - or sense of consciousness as they are called in the Buddhist texts - can detect only sense perceptions, the Buddhist science adds a sixth sense - the mental consciousness. In this sixth consciousness is nothing mystical or occult. It has nothing to do with extrasensory perception or the ability to communicate with spirits. This is simply the ability to distinguish between the mind and evaluate what we see, hear, we taste, smell and palpable.

Traditional metaphor for the six consciousnesses is the house with five entrances - one on each side and another one on the roof. The five inputs correspond to the five sense consciousness. Now imagine that someone has let the house monkey. The monkey symbolizes the mental consciousness. Suddenly finding themselves at liberty in a big house, a monkey, of course, starts quickly, jumping from one log to another, examining things, trying to discover something new, different, interesting. Depending on what it finds, this crazy monkey decides whether the detected object pleasant or unpleasant, good or bad, in some cases simply boring. Passers-by can see the monkey in each window and may think that the house tossing five monkeys. Although in reality there is only one monkey: a restless, not trained mental consciousness.

Just like any other sentient being, crazy monkey just wants to be happy and avoid pain. Therefore, we can teach the unruly monkey in your mind to calm down, deliberately focusing its attention on one or the other sensory perception.