Search results for: "Attention"
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- Training in Happiness… Make up your mind you’re going to pay attention to something, and you really pay attention, really observe, really watch. Don’t be a traitor to yourself. There are so many undependable things in life, and if your own mind is undependable, then you’re really in bad shape. This is why the Buddha said the difference between a wise person and a …
- Breath Meditation: The Fourth Tetrad… You breathe in and out paying attention to inconstancy. You breathe in and out paying attention to dispassion. You breathe in and out paying attention to cessation. Then you breathe in and out paying attention to relinquishment. Now, you can interpret those steps as applying to a very advanced level of the practice, and they do. But it’s also useful to apply them …
- Take Nothing for Granted… The things you really have to focus attention on are the causes: directed thought, evaluation, and singleness of preoccupation. Now, directed thought and evaluation are nothing mysterious or mystical. They’re things you’re doing all the time. To direct your thoughts means you choose a topic to think about. To evaluate means you make comments on it, you ask questions about it. The …
- A Home & a Mobile Home… And as you don’t pay attention to them, they lack their food. Because this is what feeds them: when you pay attention. So even if you just pay attention to them enough to chase them away, they’ve got you. It’s worth noting that that sutta where the Buddha talks about the various techniques of dealing with distractions is named after this …
- Breath Meditation – The Four Tetrads… perceptions you’re using for the breath, and the feelings associated with the breath that you’re creating through your act of attention right now. What effect do they have on the mind? What can stimulate the mind or gladden the mind, as the Buddha says? Does the mind need to be made more steady and concentrated? If so, which perceptions and feelings make …
- Factors for Stream Entry… Then when you’re heard the Dhamma, the next factor is appropiate attention. This is where you have to put a lot into it. Appropiate attention means basically looking at things in terms of the four noble truths, seeing how whatever teaching you’ve learned from the Dhamma applies to the problem of suffering in your life: Where are you suffering? And what are …
- Clear of Defilement… After all, lots of different desires are thronging for your attention, and they have their ways of attracting your attention to them. At the same time, they try to disguise the results of where they’re going to lead. Often we’re in collusion with them. That’s what you’ve got to watch out for. In fact, a lot of overcoming delusion comes …
- Meaning & Purpose… As he focuses our attention to meditate, he wants us to focus attention on that first kind of contact, our immediate sense of the body as we feel it, unmediated. The breath is the most obvious of the different elements, so focus there. It’s the element you can most easily control. You can make it longer, shorter, faster, slower, deeper, more shallow. So …
- Control… There is a potential for real comfort in the breathing, but you have to pay attention if you’re going to see it. This is what you want to make grow: a good foundation here for the mind to stay in the present moment, for the body and the mind to feel on good terms with each other. Think of the breathing is a …
- Generating Good Energy… If you don’t pay attention to it, it’ll simply come in and go out, sometimes in good ways, sometimes in ways that are not so good. You want to learn how to be sensitive to when the breath is good and to when it’s not. When it’s not good, you want to figure out how you can make it better …
- Focused on the Breath… You don’t have to pull your attention back to the breath. It comes naturally. But be on the lookout, because parts of the mind will want to wander away again. You have to figure out who they are, what their agenda is. They’re very good at being very quiet, behind the scenes. To see them, one, be alert that they’re there …
- Balancing the Bases for Concentration… So have a sense of this focused awareness in the present as being something very precious, something you want to maintain, something that requires all your attention, like a bowl filled with oil, and you don’t want to drip any of the oil. Again, don’t tense up around it. If you tense up around it, you’re going to spill the oil …
- Large Perspective, Small Focus… What are you doing right now, what are your intentions, and what is your *attention *doing right now? What are you paying attention to? What are your views? When you find yourself suffering from something, the Buddha says to look at it with right view and with right resolve, i.e., look out for wrong views around the suffering, the views that say, “You …
- The Good Side of Kamma… The reason the larger cycles are so full of suffering is because our actions are unskillful, and our actions are so unskillful because we’re not paying attention to what we’re doing right here, right now. So this is why we meditate, to pay more attention, to be clear about what’s happening and in particular about what we’re doing. As you …
- Opening Your World… It’s because there’s a sense of dis-ease inside that our attention goes out to begin with. We’re looking for a way to counteract that. Often the going out is a way of diverting your attention from the real problem. To realize that gives you a different frame of values right there. You see that the problems are not outside. And …
- Fabrication… You realize the reason it’s not going away is because you’re paying attention to it. Even if you don’t like it, paying attention to it is enough to keep it going — like a tar trap. You touch the tar with your hand and you get stuck. You try to pull yourself loose from the tar with the other hand and you …
- Befriending the Breath… You can sense it, and it feels comfortable to focus your attention there. Then allow the breath to stay comfortable. After all, it is a flow of energy. You can’t bottle it up. If you try bottling it up, it makes things tight and constricted in the body. Just keep tabs on the energy. Think of it as watching a river. The river …
- Yes & No… Yes, of course, means giving your full attention to the breath, your full attention to what the mind is doing with the breath: watching the breath; watching the mind, making sure they stay together. That’s the Yes. The No applies to anything that has to do with the world of the senses, the world of sensual pleasures, your issues with the world outside …
- Wearing the Breath… The slightest little thought that comes in to pull you away, you’re not going to pay attention to it. And you have to figure out how for yourself. In some cases, you can give it a karate chop and that gets rid of it; in other cases, paying any attention to it at all, even to the extent of trying to cut it …
- Your Inner Teacher… Still, they don’t lie beyond your power as a human being to observe them, if you take the time, if you pay attention. The Buddha once said of people that it takes time to know them—and not just time. You also have to be observant. As he said, if you want to know a person’s virtue, you have to live with …
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