Search results for: "Concentration"
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- Worries & Regrets… Ideally, they should go together, insight and concentration. Your insight develops your concentration; your concentration develops your insight. Remember that you need both, so that the concentration can strengthen the insight and the insight can help protect the concentration. It’s when the path has all its factors functioning together that it can really do its work.
- Fabricating Around Pain… We’re trying to bring the mind into a state of concentration with as much mindfulness and alertness as possible. And the mind finds it easier to stay concentrated when it’s with something that’s pleasant, so that instead of feeling a need to send your awareness outside, you can allow your awareness to fill the whole body where you’ve created a …
- Timeless Practice… This kind of insight helps get the mind in concentration. And then the concentration, of course, gives you more solid states of mind where you can see things more subtly, so that your insight into other, subtler unskillful states gets more precise. This combination of tranquility and insight based on concentration, and concentration based on tranquility and insight is what’s going to undercut …
- Consciousness, Awakened & Not… Then it gets subtler in the practice of concentration. Obvious forms of harm have been cleared away, but there’s still the burdensomeness of the fact that concentration has to be fabricated. You’re very conscious of this fact in the beginning as you’re trying to get the mind into concentration and you find it difficult. But as you get more and more …
- Pleasant Practice, Painful Practice… conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. “Concentration” in both cases means the jhanas, but the theme leading you to develop those jhanas, and from there on into discernment, is something that varies. Some people can just work with the jhana itself. You look at whatever state of concentration you have settled into and you examine it to see: Where is there still any stress …
- Reflections… What’s going on in the process of concentration? What are you doing? The first question you have is: Is there still some disturbance here? There are many levels of concentration, some less disturbed than others. Those are the ones you’re aiming for. If you see that there is a disturbance, you try to drop whatever’s causing it. The Buddha says it …
- The Dhamma Wheel… Then all the other factors of the path are aimed at getting the mind into right concentration. You try to let go of thoughts of sensuality, ill will, and harmfulness. Bring the attitudes of the mind in line with the precepts. In other words, you’re going to be honest with yourself, truthful with yourself. And then, to get the mind into concentration, you …
- Pushing the Three Characteristics… But then here we are, sitting and meditating, trying to get state of constant concentration, a sense of ease, pleasure, bliss even in the concentration, and to get the mind under our control, to get the results of our concentration under our control. So in a way, we’re pushing against the three themes of what are often called the three characteristics. It’s …
- The Graduated Discourse… This, of course, would be the pleasure of right concentration. That right there gives you some idea of how the singleness of mind that you have focused on the talk gets converted into right concentration. After being focused, you’re now focused on something that’s not sensual, and you’re beginning to develop right view. We talk about the graduated discourse leading from …
- Goodwill for the Breath… This is how concentration work goes together with insight work. Or how tranquility and insight work together to develop concentration and deepen it, at the same time bringing more insight about. So the two qualities go together, insight and tranquility. The concentration deepens them and is deepened by them. Many of the forest ajaans make the point that when the path comes together in …
- Training Heart & Mind… Some people think that concentration practice is different from insight practice, but as the Buddha pointed out, you need both stillness and insight to get the mind concentrated, and if you want to get insight, the mind has to be solidly concentrated. So all these qualities go together. It’s a unified practice; we’re developing many qualities at once. The first question of …
- Mindfulness the GatekeeperThe Buddha’s instructions for getting the mind into concentration are in his descriptions of right mindfulness. For example, the body: You keep focused on the body in and of itself—ardent, alert, and mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. The “body in itself” here means the body simply as its sitting here right now. You don’t think …
- Toxic Environments… We’re trying to develop a state of concentration that’s strong—full-body awareness, full-body breathing—so that energetically nobody can invade your space. You see some people defining samādhi, the Pali term for concentration, as calm. And calm is part of it, but calm is a separate factor for awakening from concentration. Calm in Pali is passaddhi. Concentration is stronger. It …
- Dethinking Thinking… Why is it that in some of the lists you have discernment coming first, then virtue, then concentration, and in others you start out with virtue, then concentration, then discernment—or mindfulness, discernment, then leading to concentration? What’s going on there? And what patterns are consistent? You’ll find that one pattern is always consistent: that mindfulness comes before concentration. In some cases …
- The Desire for Things to Be Different… That’s one of the big lessons in concentration practice, one of the most important lessons: that you can change things. Think of how Ajaan Lee discovered this method: He’d gone into the forest, walked with another monk for three days to a very out-of-the-way place. They were going to spend the Rains retreat there, depending on a hill tribe …
- The Skill of Stillness… You have little moments of concentration and you try to stitch them together, because deeper concentration comes from momentary concentration. When I first started out meditating with Ajaan Fuang, I’d hear other people talking about the visions they had in their meditation, or else intense feelings of rapture. I wasn’t getting any of those, so I was assuming that I wasn’t …
- The Pleasure of the Middle Way… Right concentration is what provides that alternative: this pleasure of form. This is how it’s a middle pleasure in the sense that it doesn’t get caught in those two extremes. But it’s not out on the midpoint between pleasure and pain. Actually, the pleasure of concentration can be very intense. It can saturate the body, permeate the body, permeate your awareness …
- Noble Ardency… These qualities are listed under right mindfulness, but they apply to concentration as well. In fact, there’s no real clear line between mindfulness practice and concentration practice. If you’re very mindful and alert and ardent, the mind’s going to settle down. Right mindfulness is how you get the mind to settle down, and that’s how you get it to stay …
- Dhamma Books & the Actuality“One who is ardent with respect for concentration” – one of the passages we chanted just now. Those are the two qualities you want to bring to your concentration practice: ardency and respect. The respect is in the motivation, realizing that there’s a lot to be learned right here, and the only way you’re going to learn from it is to respect it …
- Defilements with Their Bambi Eyes… Some of the lists have discernment coming before concentration, such as the noble eightfold path and the seven factors for awakening. And even in the lists where discernment comes after concentration, conviction comes first: conviction that your actions do matter. And where do your actions come from? They come from the mind. This means that you’ve got to get the mind under some …
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