Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. The Lightness of the Concentrated Mind
     … Just focus on the fact you’ve got the body here, and make that an important part of the concentration. Otherwise, once you start thinking about the body, it connects up with a thought about this and a thought about that, and the thoughts begin to spread out to create a web of all kinds of different meanings—how the body fits into a … 
  3. Attached to Concentration
    Sometimes you hear in meditation instructions that concentration is okay as long as you don’t get attached to it. That begs the question: How are you going to develop concentration unless you have some attachment, unless you enjoy it? There’s a refrain in the Canon where the Buddha says that once you find an object you like, you take pleasure in it … 
  4. Square One
     … You’re not here to get other people’s concentration. You’re here to get your concentration. Your concentration is going to be different from theirs. Some people have visions. Some people have experiences of light. Other people don’t. That’s not a measure of progress of concentration. Some people go through the different levels of concentration very quickly. Others go more slowly … 
  5. Acceptance & Equanimity
     … In some cases, the Buddha says first you develop joy through concentration, and in others you develop it through insight. In the third instance, you develop it through cultivating both qualities at once. With the concentration, of course, it means getting the mind into jhana. You don’t go straight to equanimity. Get the mind focused in such a way that it’s feeling … 
  6. Changing the Pleasure Equation
     … I can change the equation.” This is why it’s so important to develop powers of concentration. Even stream-enterers have to work on their concentration, because they still haven’t seen deeply enough as to what’s really worth the effort and what’s not. The concentration, though, is worth the effort. All the elements of the path are worth the effort, because … 
  7. A Thread into Awareness
     … So one of the ways of reinvesting that energy as you get extra energy in the practice is to turn around and try to see how much more concentrated you can get. When they talk about the higher levels of concentration where the breath grows still, or your sense of the body begins to dissolve: If you want to get *to *the mind, this … 
  8. Tranquility & Insight Together
     … That’s what we’re trying to provide with the concentration. The only problem with concentration is that once you get there, you might get lazy and decide that it’s good enough and not want to go any further. This is why you’re encouraged—once the mind has settled down and you’ve gotten really good at the concentration—to start looking … 
  9. Truth in Action
     … Even when the mind gets deep into concentration, you have to look at it as an action. Once it’s stabilized there, as the Buddha says, you settle in and even indulge in the pleasure of the concentration. Don’t be afraid of the pleasure of the concentration. It’s part of your nourishment on the path, but as with eating food, you can … 
  10. Sensitivity & Skill
     … They’re all right here in concentration. But concentration is only as good as fabrication can be, and fabrication still has its drawbacks. It comes and it goes. It requires that you maintain it. That involves a lot of the stress or disturbance right there. It requires constant looking after. As Ajaan Lee once said, nibbana is what’s easy; it’s the pleasures … 
  11. False Friends
     … That’s because the quality the concentration we’re working on here is not a lockdown or clampdown concentration. The Buddha described right concentration as developing a sense of ease in some spot in the body and then, as you would knead a ball of dough to make bread, you knead that sense of ease throughout the body. That’s not a lockdown, clampdown … 
  12. Mental Movements
     … A good part of that time was spent on concentration practice. It wasn’t until toward the end that Ajaan Mun sort of gave him a kick and said, “Okay, now it’s time to work on developing discernment.” Now, you do develop discernment to some extent as you’re practicing concentration. You can’t develop concentration without it. There’s a certain level … 
  13. The Path is Fabricated
     … With right mindfulness and right concentration, we’re developing what’s called the concentration aggregate of the path as we abandon the hindrances. All of these activities are a kind of fabrication. The Buddha once made a distinction, saying that the highest Dhamma in terms of fabricated or unfabricated, taking both sides into consideration, is dispassion. The mind finally has a sense of disenchantment … 
  14. An Ennobling Pleasure
     … If you’re going to wean yourself away from other more irresponsible pleasures, you’ve got to have the sense of well-being that comes from right concentration. And when the texts describe the mind as it’s entering into right concentration, they say that you settle down and you indulge in your stillness. In other words, you learn to enjoy it. You look … 
  15. Mindfulness, the Gatekeeper
     … The more skillfully you relate to the breath, the easier it is to get the mind into concentration. The more skillfully you relate to these feelings of pleasure and ease that can arise in the body through the breath, the easier it is to get into concentration. In that same passage where the Buddha compares mindfulness to a gatekeeper, he compares right concentration to … 
  16. Developed in Body & Mind
     … As you do that, the mind will get concentrated naturally without you having to think about concentration. There’s a passage where the Buddha mentions that when he was a young boy he spontaneously got into the first jhana, sitting under a tree. And he probably wasn’t thinking, “jhana,” and wasn’t even intending to get the mind into concentration. He just got … 
  17. The Challenge
     … You take it in stages, using whatever concentration you can develop. It’s not that we don’t have any concentration before we start. There is such a thing as momentary concentration, the kind of concentration that allows you to listen to this talk and make sense of it, allows you to read a book, follow a thread of argument, follow the thread of … 
  18. Ready to Evacuate
     … As you sit and meditate, getting into concentration, you have to put a lot of things aside, even though it’s just for the time being. But it’s good practice, because you learn an important principle: that the mind is not made wealthy by holding on to lots of things. It actually puts itself in better shape by letting go. There’s a … 
  19. To Know the Unconditioned
     … This is why we do concentration and then look at our other attachments. We see that they’re nowhere near as peaceful or satisfying as a state of concentration. Then we see that even the different states of concentration have their drawbacks. So we pursue stillness even more, to the point where there’s nothing the mind will hold on to. That’s when … 
  20. Take Nothing for Granted
    The Pali word samādhi that we translate as “concentration” in English, is translated into Thai by the phrase, tang jai man, which means to set your mind firmly on something. In this case, set your mind on what you’re doing, what the mind is doing. Set your mind on one thing. Give it a purpose. That’s one of the reasons why we … 
  21. Imagine
     … To master concentration, it has to capture your imagination, just as with any other skill. When you practice concentration, what are you doing? You’re creating a state in the mind. That requires imagination. The noble eightfold path as a whole is something fabricated, something put together. It brings you into the present, but when you get into the present you discover how much … 
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