Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. The Importance of Being Truthful
     … Sometimes people get critical of being stuck, say, on concentration, or stuck on the comfort of the meditation. But it’s a useful place to be stuck, it’s a useful way to be attached—because if you’re not attached to this, you find yourself going back to your old habits. It’s like having new food to eat. There’s no way … 
  3. A Confident Ego
     … And although there’s no analogous term for sublimation, the practice of concentration, which you’re doing right now, is a kind of sublimation. You’re trying to find a healthy pleasure—a pleasure that’s harmless. It doesn’t harm you, doesn’t cloud the mind, doesn’t harm anybody else. You’re sitting here just breathing, but you’re able to find … 
  4. Free for the Time Being
     … Toward the end you say, “Okay, now, a little time to meditate.” You get only a few minutes of real concentration. Well, scrap all that. Just remind yourself: this breath right here, right now. Make it as good as you can; as satisfying, as gratifying as you can. You don’t have to worry about the breath you had just now, or the breath … 
  5. Goodwill as Right View
     … Your mind has greater strength when you’re coming out of concentration, and whatever you can think of that would be good for other people, you wish it for them. And some people can actually pick it up. I’ve known of a couple cases where people asked me, “Were you spreading thoughts of goodwill in my direction last night?” And it turned out … 
  6. Peace of Mind
     … exercising your mind in the same way you exercise your body to make it strong. You use the qualities that you need and you find that, with use, they get stronger. Concentration develops; discernment develops. All these things get stronger with use. And even though it may seem like a simple thing, being focused on the breath, still the qualities you develop around it … 
  7. Meditators at Work
     … And what is the work? As Ajaan Lee says, the work of concentration is directed thought and evaluation. When you focus on the breath, that’s directed thought. And then you evaluate the breath. When we hear the factors of jhana explained, it sounds like something new we have to do: We’ve got to start engaging in directed thought and evaluation. But actually … 
  8. Becoming Capable of Happiness
     … They provide training in mindfulness, alertness, ardency, and all the other qualities you’re going to need to get the mind into concentration. You have to remember the precepts. You have to watch your actions to make sure you’re following them. And you have to want to do this well, realizing that you need to develop the discernment that sees how to hold … 
  9. True Honesty
     … Rather than simply sitting where we are, we see how much better we can get in terms of developing mindfulness, developing concentration, developing discernment, how we can skillfully work at that process of understanding what it means to act. Reflect back on whatever skills you’ve learned in the past and what attitudes you needed in order to be really good at the skill … 
  10. The Karma of Self
     … We don’t like to think about it, but we’re often complicit with the very things that are going to destroy our concentration. The Buddha has all kinds of techniques for dealing with sensual desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and anxiety, uncertainty—all of the hindrances. And they’re perfectly good tools. Yet if you’re siding with your defilements, if … 
  11. On Human Nature
     … And where does it lead? It leads to meditation, it leads to trying to develop concentration and discernment, so that you can uproot even the roots, the potential for any kind of unskillful action through either greed or aversion or delusion. In this way, you embody qualities appropriate to the Buddha. After all, those three qualities—discernment, purity, and compassion—are the three virtues … 
  12. Imagine
     … Then you use your powers of evaluation, your powers of analysis to figure out if what you did got good results—and if it didn’t, what could you do to get better results? The Buddha relates these four qualities to how you get the mind into concentration. Sometimes you emphasize the desire. You really want to do this. Which means that if the … 
  13. Learning by Doing
     … Someone once asked one of the Thai ajaans, “Shouldn’t Westerners have a special path, given that Westerners find concentration difficult?” He replied, “It may be difficult, but it’s not impossible.” You can’t have a path tailor-made to fit in with your defilements. You’ve got to change yourself. And this is how you do it: Change the way you relate … 
  14. Choices
     … Whereas here he teaches you right concentration: the pleasure of being settled inside the sense of the body, working with the breath in the body to give rise to a sense of ease, a sense of rapture, and spreading that ease and rapture throughout the body. And you realize, here’s a different alternative. This is the different choice you can make. Otherwise, you … 
  15. Duties
     … right speech, right action, right livelihood; you develop the desire to abandon unskillful mental qualities and to develop skillful ones in their place. The mind gets established in mindfulness and alertness. Concentration grows with a sense of rapture and ease. These are all good things to develop. They may not be easy but they are good. And they’re certainly a lot easier than … 
  16. New Feeding Habits for the Mind
     … If you’re observing the precepts, practicing concentration, and developing discernment into what the mind needs to feed on, what it doesn’t need to feed on, what kind of feeding is good for it, what kind of feeding is bad for it, and then feed it in such a way that ultimately it gets so strong that it doesn’t have to feed … 
  17. Respect as a Sign of Intelligence
     … That’s why the chant just now endorses respect for the Dhamma, respect for the training, respect for concentration. Respect for heedfulness: That means the realization that there are dangers out there in the world, but you can avoid those dangers if you develop skills, and so you want to learn those skills. If you try to pretend that there are no dangers out … 
  18. Goodwill All Around
     … Try to develop its concentration in that way, to develop its discernment into what’s going on in the mind: what you choose to do, what you choose not to do. And you gain insight also into this whole question of what does it mean to intend, what is an intention, what is this karma we are doing all the time? Once you see … 
  19. Break Things Down
     … Well, this is why we practice concentration: to strengthen the mind. Sometimes you say, “I can’t visualize myself doing this path.” Well, you’ll find out that your sense of who you are and what you can do is going to change as you do the path. You focus, again, not on your self but on specific habits, specific qualities: what should be … 
  20. Reclaim Your Breath
     … This is why right concentration is such an essential part of the path, because it provides you with the skillful pleasure you need to counteract these unskillful influences. You need the sense of rapture or refreshment that comes when the mind settles down and there’s a sense of balance inside the body and in the relationship between the mind and the body. That … 
  21. In Accordance with the Dhamma
     … That’s the karma that gets you out, starting with right view going on through right concentration. These are things he discovered. These are not the things that accorded with his preferences, but he realized that this is the way it’s going to have to be. And in acting in accordance with them, he was rewarded with a happiness that was far beyond … 
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