Search results for: "Concentration"
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- Permission to Play… Every factor of the noble eightfold path, from right view through right concentration, is something put together. It’s a fabrication. It’s something you will through bodily fabrication, verbal fabrication, and mental fabrication: i.e., through the breath, through directed thought and evaluation, and through feeling and perception. But to will skillfully, you have to bring these fabrications together in a way that …
- Protection Through Mindfulness Practice… So ardency here also has to develop concentration, a sense of non-sensual well-being, working with the breath. We’ve talked for the last couple of days in the Q & A about different ways of working with the breath energy, and it’s important to take some time to explore this aspect of your relationship to your body. What kind of movement of …
- Indecision… Like the state of concentration we’re working on now: That’s actually a form of renunciation. We’re putting aside all thoughts about the food we might eat tomorrow or fix tomorrow or the other pleasures we might get when we leave the monastery. We put those aside and we’re just here with the breath coming in, going out. This is called …
- Less is More… That’s what the directed thought and evaluation at the beginning of right concentration are all about. If you find the mind slipping off the breath, you can get it back right away. If it slips off in another direction, you get it back right away. You keep regaining your balance no matter how much it wobbles. After a while, things finally settle down …
- Noble Happiness… It may not seem like much right now, but as you develop your skills in mindfulness, alertness, concentration, and discernment, you find that they lead to a really special kind of happiness. This is why we bow down to the Buddha, because he teaches us of this potential. He teaches us to respect within ourselves things that are really are worthy of respect. And …
- Happy for People You Don’t Like … What this means is that you should develop them with strong concentration and also use your discernment to analyze what you’re doing, to analyze what you’re wishing in a way that leads to dispassion. A good example is the development of empathetic joy. Of the brahmaviharas, it’s the one that gets discussed the least—and actually it’s one of the …
- Enlightenment is Not a Hot Dog… Ajaan Fuang, my teacher, had a student whose powers of concentration were very strong. She was a schoolteacher. And she complained to him that she didn’t see any effect in her life from the meditation. She’d get into meditation, the mind would settle down and be very still. And then she’d come out, and she’d go back to her old …
- Deconstruct Your Emotions… That helps get you into concentration. Two, it sensitizes you to things going on in the mind that you might miss otherwise. Some people think of concentration as being a blocking out—and even though there are certain things that you’re blocking out right now, you do have to become very sensitive to the energy in the body. And that’s directly related …
- Look Around… This is why even the concentration we’re practicing is a full-body awareness. If you get too narrowly focused on your one spot, then there are a lot of things in the mind that get hidden. What you see in that one spot may be very clear, but a lot of other things connected to it can get hidden. As with any spotlight …
- Maintaining Goodwill… That’s the best use for this concentration, because when you stop creating suffering for yourself, you don’t feel inclined to create suffering for anybody else. The reason we make life miserable for other people is because we feel threatened, along with this attitude: “As long as I’m suffering, let everybody else suffer too.” Or: “If I’m suffering, I don’t …
- Unskillful Habits… You don’t have to wait before your concentration is really, really good before you can do this. It’s good practice in advance. It’s like going down to the gym. As you exercise bit by bit by bit, you get stronger. If you’ve got work that needs to be done, you use the body you’ve got. You don’t wait …
- Feeding Frenzy: Dependent Co-arising… Take the sensations you feel in the legs and the arms, etc., and try to fashion them into a basis for concentration, a place where the mind can stay, that you can take as your dwelling. The sense of ease and fullness you can develop through the breath can help to alleviate your thirst. It gives you something good and nourishing to feed on …
- Facing Your Responsibilities… You develop a greater sense of unity, not only in getting the mind to stay with the breath in a state of good strong concentration, but also in getting more and more of your mind on the side of wanting to do this. That’s what right effort is all about, learning how to generate desire to do what’s skillful and to drop …
- Learning from What You Do… So you want to work on the concentration. This kind of desire is part of the path because it leads to good results. It’s something to be developed. Each of the four noble truths requires not only knowing about the truth but also developing a skill in how to handle that particular truth. Stress is something you want to comprehend. Its cause is …
- May All Beings Be Heedful… virtue, concentration, discernment; heedfulness, ardency, resolution. Developing happiness through these qualities doesn’t take anything away from anyone else. No one else is deprived by your happiness. In fact, it’s the responsible way to look for happiness in the world. As for the other extreme, that’s more like the gospel of wealth, the gospel of prosperity. The old belief was that God …
- The Path to the Top… Conviction is like one of the rafters, as are persistence, mindfulness, and concentration. Only when you have discernment, which is the ridge pole, is the frame for the roof secure. So the only way you can know the truth of the teaching is to put it to the test until discernment arises—and it has to be a rigorous test. As Ajaan Lee once …
- Looking at Your Life… There’s a passage where the Buddha compares bringing the mind to the breath, bring it to concentration, to taking the mind up to a tower where you’re above the ordinary turmoil of things. You start seeing the larger picture. In terms of the body, it’s good place to check out how the body feels inside, because the breath is the main …
- Be Bigger Than Your Pains… developing those skills—the mindfulness, the concentration, and the discernment. This larger state of mind allows you to be bigger than your sufferings, bigger than your pains, so try to keep this enlarged perspective in mind. One of the Buddha’s terms for the mind in concentration is mahaggatam cittam, the expanded mind or the enlarged mind. You can see things from a larger …
- Appropriate Attention… It takes concentration, it takes mindfulness, it takes alertness, all of which are qualities we have to develop. Everybody goes through the process of finding that you focus on the breath and then all of a sudden you’re someplace else—as if someone had come up with a big sack and put it over your head, dragged you off, and then dumped you …
- Virtuous Beginnings… But when combined with concentration, discernment, all the other factors of the noble eightfold path, virtue turns into a noble quality. It turns into one of the aspects of the path that leads us outside of the circle, to true freedom. So it’s a good beginning. And even though all of us here practice the precepts to some extent, there’s always more …
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