Search results for: "Concentration"
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- Testing Karma… As when you practice concentration: As I said this morning, you’re pushing the envelope on those three characteristics. You’re trying to develop a state of mind that lasts. You stitch mental moments together with mindfulness, remembering to stay with one object again and again and again, because the mind can so easily forget and slip off to other things. So you have …
- A Special Time… This way, you develop two other qualities that are important for concentration. The first is directed thought. You keep thinking about what you’re doing. You’re actively engaged. The other is evaluation: You judge how things are going. This is how the mind settles in. Sometimes we think meditation means not thinking, but actually it means learning how to use your thinking in …
- Survival Tactics… Observing the precepts, practicing concentration, developing discernment: those are the tactics. The meditation we’re doing right now: that’s a survival tactic for the mind. Both on the everyday level and at the moment of death, the tactics you learn, the techniques you learn while you’re meditating, are going to stand you in good stead. The steps we have here – focusing on …
- Right & Right… having a sense of enough—this is not just enough in terms of what you eat, drink, wear, and use in terms of the requisites, but also how much is enough time and effort put into the concentration, put into the practice. Then there’s knowledge of the time, which means both time and place, knowledge of the situation. That’s when your wisdom …
- Obstacles to Full-body Awareness… Otherwise, if—as the breath gets comfortable— your awareness gets very small, you tend to either fall asleep or go into delusion concentration, when the mind is still but it doesn’t really know anything, which is not what you want because nothing gets accomplished by that kind of meditation. The problem is, when you expand your awareness, sometimes there are things that get …
- Looking in the Dhamma Mirror… The Buddha’s descriptions of concentration are also meant as a mirror for you to look at your mind. See how it measures up. There are only four jhanas. Ajaan Lee has a great comment on this. He says, “There are only four jhanas. Yet there are people out there who take charge of corporations and farms: thousands of acres, employing thousands of people …
- Peace on Earth… You’re here to conquer yourself, to overcome any lack of mindfulness, lack of alertness, lack of discernment or concentration that can have a bad effect on your well-being. There’s a passage in the Canon saying that it’s hard for person without merit to do meritorious things. To translate that into more colloquial English, it’s hard for person without a …
- Surveying the World… But before we can reach that point, we have to develop a solid center in terms of concentration—which may not be totally solid, it doesn’t get rid of all our desires with regard to the world; after all we need to eat, we need to have food, clothing, shelter, medicine, in order to practice—but we realize that the real problem, the …
- The Real World Isn’t for Real… The Buddha has you feed on mindfulness, concentration, discernment—finding joy in all these things. When you can find joy in this path, you can look at the pleasures that the world has to offer, and you can see that they’re dangerous, either because they make you complacent or because they sometimes require that you do underhanded things to gain them. So either …
- What Focus? What Breath?… You’re not going to overcome sensual pleasure unless you have a better pleasure in concentration. You’re not going to overcome sensual attachments and sensual desire unless you have a better place to stay inside. Otherwise, you’d be denying yourself up to a certain point, then the issue of frustrated desire will come in, take over, and drive you out. But if …
- What Are You Bringing?… If you’re here to squeeze or force as much concentration out of the mind as you can, that attitude starts affecting the way you breathe. Then the way you breathe gets uncomfortable, and it’s difficult to settle down. So ask yourself, “What are you bringing to the meditation?” It’s always good to stop and take stock, and try to bring the …
- Songkran Blessing… strength of mindfulness, when you keep in mind what’s right and what’s wrong, not only while you’re here at the monastery, but also as you go through life. Concentration, when you focus on what is really important in your life. Give that top priority. And then the discernment to see which ways you’re causing unnecessary suffering and how you can …
- Talking to Yourself… What are you going to say to yourself? What things are worth saying, and what things are not? After all, to get into concentration, you do have to talk yourself into it. Partly, it’s a matter of giving yourself a pep talk. Remind yourself: This is something that human beings can do. Whether you’ve been successful with it in the past is …
- Goodwill & Gratitude… Because when you’re coming out of concentration, your mind is stronger and the force of those thoughts of goodwill will be stronger as well. You’re coming from a place of well-being, and there are people out there who are very sensitive to the fact that someone is wishing them goodwill. So you do this for them. You also make this the …
- Blessings… He found it by beginning with right concentration, getting the mind still, getting it focused on one thing. You begin by talking to yourself about what would be a good topic to focus on. He recommended the breath. That was the topic on which he was focused the night of his awakening. When he taught meditation, this was the topic he taught more than …
- Choose Your Actions Wisely… We’ve got the path here in the concentration we’re doing right now. You’ve got to hold on to your object. Stay with the breath all the way in, all the way out. And learn how to hold on without squeezing it. The image in the texts is of holding a baby quail in your hand. If you hold it too tightly …
- Escape from Inter-eating… Some of the thoughts are actually related to the concentration to get the mind to settle down. Directed thought and evaluation are part of the first jhana as you adjust the breath and adjust the mind so that they fit together. When everything is snug, you can put those thoughts aside. This is when you can be fully on the lookout for anything else …
- One Thing Only… You sensitize yourself to what you’re doing, and then you try to do it in a way that leads to greater calm, to more subtle forms of concentration and more subtle levels of pleasure. You work through this process of sensitizing and refinement step by step by step, which means that you have to be very observant. The Buddha gives you some guidance …
- The Middle Way… The Buddha provides you with the ease of concentration. He often compares it to food. You want to feed the mind so that it’s willing to listen to what your discernment has to tell you: Yes, you’ve been remiss. Yes, you’ve been sloppy. You’ve been complacent. You’ve been self-indulgent—messages we don’t like to hear. You’re …
- Goodwill… There may be a little bit of disturbance as you move your mind out of whatever state of concentration it’s in, just enough to think thoughts of goodwill. But who knows, maybe the person will benefit a lot. In the process of doing this, you’re developing the right attitude that keeps the practice alive, keeps you on the path. There’s another …
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