Search results for: "Attention"

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  2. Giving Ballast to the Mind
     … But when you get it trained, you see these movements happening, because your attention gets quicker, your mindfulness, your alertness become quicker. You catch the mind in the act, and you can bring it back. This is how you learn how to trust the mind. You get quicker than it is. In other words, the skillful qualities of attention, alertness, and mindfulness get quicker … 
  3. Factors for Stream-entry
     … appropriate attention—learning how to ask the right questions. In particular, the Buddha said the test for true Dhamma is when you put it into practice and it leads to certain results. That’s what appropriate attention is: looking at things in terms of cause and effect as they play out in your actions. If you take a particular viewpoint and apply it in … 
  4. Whole-Hearted Concentration
     … If you really want to know this, give it your full attention. As you go through the day, you have to split your attention between the breath and the things you’re doing outside. But right now, while you’re sitting here, there’s nothing else you have to pay attention to. You can give your all to the breath. This connects with the … 
  5. Character
     … being on top of what’s happening and not drifting off and paying attention to other things. You want to pay attention to what you’re doing right here, right now, and especially paying attention to keep the mind with the breath. If the mind wanders off, you notice that, so that you can bring it right back. And that’s done by the … 
  6. Keep Things Simple
     … Give it ninety-nine percent of your attention. Leave only a sliver of attention for the talk. The whole purpose of the talk here is not to distract you from the meditation but to act as a fence so that when the mind leaves the breath it runs into the talk and turns back to the breath. If anything in the talk is relevant … 
  7. Where You Set Your Heart
     … So you don’t just wander around, gazing at whatever captures your attention. You set your heart on being right here and you do everything you can to pull away any threads of thoughts that extend out into the world, that would connect you to the world. **During my years over in Thailand, I came to accept the fact that people would come to … 
  8. Mental Stirrings
     … You start out in that process by actually not paying attention to the thought and by paying attention instead to the breath, focusing on the breath as your object of concentration. The thoughts that come into the mind you leave aside. Just don’t pay them any attention. As soon as you’ve noticed that you’ve paid attention to them, come right back … 
  9. The Noble Path to Happiness
     … As long as you’re alive, there will be another breath to come to, to be more attentive to, to be more sensitive to. And unlike, say, an artist in his studio who may have piles of mistakes he has to throw away, you don’t have to throw away the past breaths where you weren’t all that attentive. They’re already gone … 
  10. The Path Converges Right Here
     … Other ideas may come jumping at you and demanding your attention, like little dogs, but you don’t have to pay them any attention. If you don’t pay them attention, they see there’s no food there and they go away. Those three factors are the causes. The other two factors—pleasure and rapture—are the results. Now, it helps to have the … 
  11. Not Resolved on Self
     … Find something else to become the center of your attention. This is where the Buddha raises the issue of skillful and unskillful actions. It’s one of his categorical teachings—the teachings that he says are true across the board, the ones that he wants to make the center of your attention: How can you develop skillful qualities and how can you abandon unskillful … 
  12. Where to Look in the Present
    Take a couple good, long, deep in-and-out breaths, and establish your attention right there: right at the sensation of the breathing. Notice where you feel the breath. Notice the quality of that feeling. You can feel it anywhere in the body, in the same way that they can measure your brainwaves in any part of the body. The breath has an effect … 
  13. The Search for Something of Substance
     … But you don’t sit here with one eye on the breath and one eye further down the path to see, “Well, when are all the great things going to happen?” It’s by focusing full attention on the breath—really getting involved with it—that you get fully involved in the present moment, and the mind settles down. And the qualities you want … 
  14. Free to Do the Right Thing
     … They demand so much of our attention because there are times when they’re useful fabrications but they’re not useful right now. You have to develop a very strong sense of that. See the importance of the present moment. See the importance of what you’re doing right now, and learn to get sensitive to what’s skillful and what’s not skillful … 
  15. Adbusting the Mind
     … They throw too much information at you—too many things for you to take in—to shorten your attention span. As your attention span gets shorter, you can’t think straight. And when you can’t think straight, you buy their stuff. Of course, the same principle applies to your greed, aversion, and delusion. They try to distract you, and because you’re distracted … 
  16. Off to a Good Start
     … It’s very easy to go thinking about other things, paying attention to other things and not really being alert to what we’re doing. So, to counteract that tendency, we focus on the breath because it’s very close to the mind. Sometimes an intention will go through the mind and you may not even know that it’s there. But if you … 
  17. Breath Meditation, Step by Step
     … The point where they meet is at the breath, so bring your attention to the breath. When it comes in, know it’s coming in. When it goes out, know that it’s going out. Keep reminding yourself to stay there with the breath. It doesn’t do any good to be with the breath for a few minutes and then wander off other … 
  18. Analysis of Dhammas
     … In the factors for awakening, the discernment faculty, called analysis of dhammas—which can mean either analysis of qualities or analysis of actions—is fostered by paying careful attention to what’s skillful and what’s not skillful. Which thoughts side with the dark side of the mind? Which ones side with the bright side of the mind? Here again, there’s an assumption … 
  19. One Hand Clapping
     … But you want to pay continuous attention to the breath in the midst of all that. As for anything else that comes up, put it aside. The problem is that many of us think that when we’re getting the mind into concentration, there shouldn’t be any other thoughts, anything else aside from that one object. In the very high levels of concentration … 
  20. Adult Education
     … So listen to the true Dhamma and then, as the third step, apply appropriate attention, which means asking, “How can this be used to understand stress? How can this be used to understand the nature of the actions of the mind, to see where they’re causing stress, where they’re not?” This is so that you can identify the cause, and then learn … 
  21. Bewildered
     … Then the question is, what do you pay attention to? Are you paying attention to how much the pain hurts, or are you paying attention to what the mind is doing to fabricate ideas and other things around the pain? Here again, there are questions you can ask yourself: Where is the harshest part of the pain? Where is the point of the most … 
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