Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. How to Leave Meditation
    We hear so much about how to get the mind into concentration that we tend to forget the skill of how to leave it. Because these talks come at the beginning of the period, the skill in how to leave doesn’t often get mentioned, although how you leave concentration is relevant to how you get back into it. This talk basically is about … 
  3. Between Right & Wrong
     … As your concentration gets more solid, the things you can see get more refined. As you see more refined things and solve more refined problems, the concentration goes deeper still. The concentration and discernment help each other along. It’s not the case that you wait until your concentration is perfect before developing discernment. To begin with, discernment doesn’t develop that way. It … 
  4. Off the Continuum
     … For example, the duty with regard to right concentration is to develop it. You want to work on it. It’s not something you just watch arising and passing away. There’s a special kind of pleasure that comes with that concentration, because part of what makes the concentration right is that it’s endowed with all the other factors of the path, starting … 
  5. Success by Approximation
     … You’re making concentration: creating a state of concentration in the mind. You’re creating a state of becoming, in which you take on the identity of someone doing concentration in the world of the mind. That, too, requires desire. It’s simply a matter of learning how to refine your sensitivity as to what’s skillful and what’s not. Which kinds of … 
  6. Good & Independent
     … Right now you’re trying to work on your concentration. That means developing mindfulness, keeping in mind this quest for what’s skillful and realizing that, for the mind to maintain its strength to be skillful, it’s going to have to find a source of nourishment inside. That’s what the concentration is for. Try to be with the breath in a way … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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