Search results for: "Concentration"
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- Undomesticated Happiness… We start with the perception of earth as a beginning foundation for endurance and equanimity, but we need to give the mind a more solid foundation than just a perception by getting it deeper into concentration. You need an equanimity based not just on holding on and making yourself determined and resistant. You’ve got to possess some well-being inside that’s independent …
- Diagnosing the Mind… And the preparation will come from where? It’ll come from developing mindfulness, alertness, concentration, and discernment here in the present moment. As for moods that you like or don’t like, as the Buddha said those are off the path. You want to get the mind right here watching, to pull out of those moods. We tend to think of our moods, especially …
- Shifting Your Paradigm… In this way, the way you play around with the breath, the way you explore the breath, leads you into concentration in one of two ways: One, after a while the mind just gets tired of playing around and really wants to rest. So it settles in and just stays with the breath. The other way is when you realize that you’ve taken …
- Respect for Happiness… the training in virtue—in other words, learning to abstain from things that harm yourself and harm other people; and training in concentration like we’re doing right now—learning to be mindful and alert, developing your strength of mind to stay with one thing consistently, to really learn from it, to really observe it, both so that you gain knowledge and so that …
- The Uses of Fear… If you develop your mindfulness, your alertness, your concentration, you can do this. So fear isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s an important part of wisdom, recognizing that there are dangers in life. It’s a necessary function of the mind, anticipating that dangers are going to happen. The important thing is not to let the fear get tied up in greed …
- The Buddha’s Eight Principles… The mind is not going to get into concentration unless you want it to. Even just being mindful, you have to want to be mindful. So, strategically, you have to develop some passion for the path, but realizing that the qualities you’re developing will eventually take you beyond the need for passion. As long as you understand that, then you can follow the …
- Dhamma Warrior… What are your strengths, what are your weaknesses, what are you capable of? If you’re in a group of people, what’s your position in the group? What’s the appropriate behavior for someone in that position? What work do you still need to do in training in virtue, concentration, discernment? In other words, be very realistic about where you are, not getting …
- A Recipe for Jhana… And it is possible to attain strong states of concentration and to feel at home in them. But make sure that you’re selective in which instructions you keep in mind, and which descriptions to leave for another time. This is one of the paradoxes of the Buddha’s teachings. He says that the teachings are timeless. And they are. But at the same …
- Question Your Defilements… Once you’ve met up with too hard—you know you’re strung out, not sleeping enough, you can’t really concentrate—then you back off. But if you haven’t reached that point, you don’t really know the middle of the middle way. Ajaan Maha Boowa has a nice passage where he talks about how, for most of us, the middle of …
- Endurance with a Purpose… Right now, goodness would be getting the mind into concentration. So you don’t take the pain as part of your way of constructing the present moment. After all, the present moment is something do we construct. There’s an input that comes in from the senses, but we also have our intentions and our skills in how to put things together. Meditation is …
- Free from Buddha Nature… This was one of the reasons why the meditation technique the Buddha taught most frequently was breath meditation, to bring some awareness to the breath and particularly, bring awareness to whether the breath is comfortable or not—whether it’s a cause of suffering or a part of the path leading to right concentration with a sense of ease, a sense of fullness, rapture …
- Mindful of Death… The whole point of concentration practice is to settle down with a sense of well-being, so you try to figure out how to adjust his instructions in a way that gets the results, at the same time is not just simply falling in line with your laziness. That requires a proper balance. Luang Pu Khamdee, one of the forest ajaans, said that the …
- Path & Raft… In fact, one of the main elements of the path is right concentration with its sense of ease, well-being, refreshment, and even rapture to keep you going. It’s your food and your shelter along the path. As with any path, on the one hand you want to make sure you’re headed in the right direction. But on the other, you can …
- Right Next to Ignorance… This is why we concentrate, taking the Buddha’s definition of right mindfulness as our frame of reference. In other words, you’re going to stay with the body right here, in and of itself. You’re not going to think about the body in the world, either your imaginary worlds or in the actual human world. You focus on: This is what it …
- Generosity First… At the same time, the spaciousness that comes from generosity gives you the right mindset for the concentration practice, gives you the right mindset for insight practice — because when you sit down and focus on the breath, what kind of mind do you have? The mind you’ve been creating through your generous and virtuous actions. A spacious mind, not the narrow mind of …
- Training Your Minds… We try to develop our mindfulness, our alertness, concentration, discernment, our sensitivity as to what’s really going on in the mind, so that we can train all of the members of the committee to see where true happiness lies, and what we can do to gain it. Because this is one thing that all the members of the committees have in common: They …
- Training for Dispassion… Like right now, as you’re getting the mind into concentration: There will be thoughts that come up that wander away from the breath. For the time being, nothing but thoughts about the breath are relevant, so with any desires that would pull you away from the breath, you’ve got to say No. It’s in saying No that you learn about them …
- Thinking Seriously about Happiness… You can develop your concentration, develop your discernment. At the very least, you can spread thoughts of goodwill. Goodwill is a wish for happiness. The Buddha calls it “a monk’s wealth.” In other words, when you become a monk, everything you have is somebody else’s gift. If you’ve been a monk for a couple years, every cell in your body is …
- The World Is Swept Away… The reason you don’t see it yet is because your powers of mindfulness, concentration, and discernment are too weak to detect it. But these are powers that can be developed, so that when the world gets swept away, you don’t get swept away with it—so that things of real value within you don’t get swept away. Sure, the body is …
- Customs of the Noble Ones… As for qualities of the mind that need to be developed—mindfulness, alertness, concentration, discernment—you try to be up for the challenge. That’s how you maintain the customs of the noble ones so that you can become a noble one as well. That’s what this is all about. All the noble ones of the past: They didn’t start out as …
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