Search results for: "Concentration"

  1. Page 140
  2. Sorting Yourselves Out
     … That way, when greed, aversion, and delusion do come up, your allegiances are more on the side of the quiet, the stillness, the concentration, the mindfulness. The Buddha does give you lots of tools to deal with these seeming friends inside, but the important factor always is that you try to identify with the parts of the mind that really do want the tools … 
  3. The World of the Noble Truths
     … He offers the practice of right mindfulness and right concentration as a way of feeding the mind’s need for pleasure. It’s your nourishment on the path. In this world of the four noble truths, your views, of course, are shaped by the four noble truths themselves. And the duties they give go into our clinging to habits and practices. These are the … 
  4. Can All Beings Be Happy?
     … That’s why we develop more mindfulness, more alertness, try to be more concentrated, so that we can develop more discernment that can catch harmful actions on more and more subtle levels. So when we wish that all beings be happy, part of the reason is that we’re trying to develop the motivation that we don’t want to harm anybody in our … 
  5. If These Walls Could Talk
     … The Buddha talks about the fact that we’re training the mind in virtue, concentration, discernment, or what he calls heightened virtue, heightened mind, heightened discernment. Even though to some extent the Buddha is our trainer, he’s not here right now. You have to internalize his instructions, internalize his values. Which means that part of your mind is the trainer, and part of … 
  6. Nobility Is the Best Policy
     … He used his concentration to heal himself so that he could continue practicing and teaching. So you look after your wealth; you look after your health. And you look after your relatives. You take good care of them and try to engage with them as best you can. If they’re junior to you, you try to teach them. If they’re senior to … 
  7. Rites of Passage
     … bottom line is how you’re training your mind — a place where we try to give space to one another, to show respect for on another’s need for quietude, for concentration. But there’s still the problem that when we come out to a place like this, we don’t leave our thoughts behind. Even though we may be surrounded by physical seclusion … 
  8. Creativity & Play
     … The people who aren’t inquisitive are the ones who get stuck in concentration and don’t want to move. Or they blindly want to follow a method where everything is spelled out for them, but all they get is pre-packaged meditation product — like the packaged foods that contain so little actual food that they have to be labeled as “food product.” But … 
  9. Perfection in an Imperfect World
     … That includes right mindfulness and right concentration. As he notes, as you develop the mind in those directions, you’re helping the people around you. So the path is not a selfish path. It’s simply focused. You realize that what you can do for the world, the success with which you try to help the world, depends on a lot of things besides … 
  10. The Need for Agency
     … Pursue this as a skill because it’s through pursuing these skills—the skills of mindfulness, the skills of concentration—that you really get to know the principle of kamma. After all, we’re working on a type of kamma here that’s really special. The Buddha says there’s bright kamma, there’s dark kamma, there’s a mixture of the two, and … 
  11. Pleasure from the Body
     … So you see the power of perception, the labels you put on things, and if you start training yourself to use the proper labels and can maintain enough mindfulness and alertness and concentration to keep them in mind with the right amount of effort—not too much, not too little—then you can touch whole new levels of pleasure in the body that are … 
  12. Anxiety
     … Either that, or you lose your focus and get into what’s called delusion concentration. So you’ve got to do something with that comfort. The act of evaluation tries to figure out what that is. Mindfulness helps. You’ve heard the directions about spreading the comfort around. Think of the breath energies going down the spine, out the legs, down the arms, out … 
  13. Limitations
     … The same with concentration practice: Think about Ajaan Lee, working with his breath, not only when he was in the forest, but also when he came out again. You read his Dhamma talks after he wrote Method Two. He keeps coming up with new ways of thinking about the breath, to deal with the problems that were coming up in his body. And of … 
  14. Faith in the Buddha’s Awakening
     … After he brought his mind to concentration where it was bright and malleable, he inclined it to the question: Is this life the only one or have there been lives before this? And he found himself remembering many, many lifetimes, way back. There is one place where he says, many thousands of eons, many hundreds of thousands of eons, knowing what he was, what … 
  15. Mindfulness of Death
     … They said, “Yup, that’s the man.” So she went back to Ajaan Fuang and asked him, “What do I do now?” He said, “Well, try to get back into concentration and see if you can get that vision again,” and she did. He said, “Okay, now look inside the envelope.” She saw the spirit perched there, hovering right next to its body, not … 
  16. The Politics of Arising & Passing Away
    One of the reasons we develop concentration is to see things clearly as they happen. In particular, we do it to gain discernment which, in one of the passages, is defined as right discernment into arising and passing away. As the mind gets more and more centered, you begin to see things just coming up. If you don’t run with them, they dissolve … 
  17. In Line with the Dhamma
     … The same with working on developing mindfulness, concentration, and discernment: Develop enthusiasm for these things because they’re good things. They’re useful in all kinds of activities, and especially the activities that lead to awakening. The Buddha talks about this kind of desire as being an important element in right effort. It’s the kind of desire you have to generate. You have … 
  18. Not-self, Not No Self
     … This is why we develop concentration: to give you something better to hold on to. So right now, while you’re here meditating, any thoughts that relate to the breath, any thoughts that relate to the mind staying with the breath, are going to be useful. You can lay claim to those. As for thoughts that would pull you away, for the time being … 
  19. Fabricating the Present
     … This is why we practice concentration. We’ve got to get the mind still and engaged in mastering a skill: the skill of being still. That’s when it’s easiest to see the mind, when the mind is clearest: when it’s aware of what it’s doing and of what the results are. Even if it’s not doing anything at all … 
  20. Noble Treasures
     … If you stick with it long enough, you’ll find that you can get deeper and deeper into concentration. It requires some intelligence. You can’t just say, “Well, just stay with the breath and force it down.” You have to use your ingenuity. You have to use your powers of observation to notice what kind of breathing you like, what kinds of changes … 
  21. All-around Eye
     … Or that Ajaan Lee had really great powers of concentration: There was a lot more to Ajaan Lee than that. Look in the Dhamma talks of the different ajaans. Ajaan Chah, for example, talks about one of the points that really struck him when he went to listen to Ajaan Mun: Ajaan Mun’s saying that your practice has to be in the shape … 
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