Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. Asalha Puja
     … This is how you get the mind into concentration. Concentration is part of the path. When you practice the path, that’s called paying homage through the practice—patipatti-puja—the kind of homage the Buddha preferred. Tonight’s Asalha Puja. We’re paying homage (puja) in the full moon in the month of Asalha to remember the day when the Buddha first set … 
  3. Timeless Dhamma
    When we’re practicing the Dhamma, observing the precepts, developing concentration and discernment, we’re following a path that was set out more the 2,500 years ago. The reason we’re still following it is because it addresses a problem that hasn’t changed. It’s not as if what was designed to deal with a particular problem that came up in one … 
  4. Established in Full
     … This is what we provide as we practice mindfulness leading to concentration. For some people the word concentration seems to evoke images of getting the mind in a very narrow focus. This is a different kind of concentration, though. The mind is centered, which is why we call it concentration, but your awareness fills the body the same way as when you look at … 
  5. Do Jhana
     … If it’s going to be curious, have it be curious about the concentration itself. What’s going on in your concentration? The Buddha gives an analogy of a person standing watching someone who’s sitting; or a person sitting watching someone who’s lying down. In other words, you’re slightly up and above what you’re observing. You’re observing the mind … 
  6. Working with Fabrication
     … And in the course of creating this sense of concentration, you become more sensitive to the processes of fabrication involved in concentration itself. You use these processes until they’ve done their service and, as with right view, you then learn how to take them apart. Then you’re free. But don’t be too quick to take them apart. A lot of people … 
  7. A Trained Observer
     … which level of concentration it’s going to happen in, and whether it’s going to happen in the concentration as you move from one level to another, or as you leave concentration. There are also stories in the Canon where people are washing their feet, they gain concentration, and then from the concentration they gain insight. So all kinds of things can spark … 
  8. Success with Breathing
    In one of the lists of teachings that the Buddha said was most important to remember, he listed four qualities for succeeding at concentration. There’s desire: You have to want to do it. There’s persistence: You put in effort. You do your best. There’s intentness, where you really give it your whole heart. You pay full attention, try your best. Then … 
  9. Accepting the Way Things Function
     … It’s simply a matter of learning how to bring your concentration and your discernment together, so that your discernment makes your concentration easier to attain, because you understand what’s going on in the mind, so that when there are obstacles you know your way around the obstacles. At the same time, your concentration makes your discernment more subtle, because the more still … 
  10. Mindfulness of Breathing: Four in One
     … right concentration, which the Buddha said is the heart of the path. The other factors, he said, are its requisites—things that help nurture right concentration—but the right concentration is the central factor. You can read about the Dhamma, and have all kinds of ideas about the Dhamma, but if the mind hasn’t gotten into good concentration, you don’t see clearly … 
  11. Appropriate Attention
     … What are the reasons for doing something that leads to stress? And if the stress is unnecessary, what can you do to stop? One of the things you can do is to get the mind in concentration. The teaching keeps coming back to concentration. Insight without concentration doesn’t work all that well. You can gain certain levels of insight into things, and develop … 
  12. The Message of Mindfulness
     … That’s why we practice concentration. The Buddha compares concentration to food. You’re a soldier in a fortress at the edge of a frontier. You need food in order to fight off the enemy—in other words, your defilements of greed, aversion, and delusion. Your mindfulness needs food, too. Your mindfulness is the gatekeeper of the fortress, watching whoever might want to try … 
  13. Even Animals Can Be Trained
     … The Buddha talks about trained animals—trained horses, trained elephants—as images for what we’re doing as we practice, especially as we’re practicing concentration. A trained horse. It’s well bred, so it’s beautiful, but it’s also fast and strong. The beauty represents the beauty of a monk’s virtue. The strength represents the right effort that’s needed for … 
  14. The Raft
     … As Ajaan Lee said, when we’re practicing concentration, we’re actually going against the three characteristics. We think about the three characteristics or the three perceptions to give rise to a sense of dispassion. While you’re in concentration, you use them, you apply them, to your distractions. Anything that would pull you away right now, you try to see how it’s … 
  15. Practicing from Gratitude
     … Then you find, further, as you protect this state of concentration, that as the mind goes off into its ordinary pursuits, you begin to see more clearly which of those pursuits are actually skillful and which are not, which give rise to needless suffering and which are actually part of the path. This is where discernment begins to grow out of the concentration. As … 
  16. Insight in Concentration
     … In the Buddha’s teachings on concentration, when he talks about how you can bring the mind to more and more refined levels of concentration, he says to delight in it, let the mind settle in it, get absorbed, really appreciate that level of concentration. Only at the very end do you let go. But until you’ve gotten to that point, you want … 
  17. Train Your Hunger (The Sea Squirt)
     … After you’ve fed the mind well on concentration, you begin to look at all the other things that would pull you out of concentration, and you see that there’s greed or aversion or delusion involved in going after those things. So, to get past them, the first step is to see, when the greed or the anger comes, how does it come … 
  18. Again & Again
     … doing right mindfulness, doing right concentration, like we’re doing right now, trying to make sure that it’s right. That’s a lot of the doing again and again: How *right *is your mindfulness? How *right *is your concentration? How really observant are you? After all, it’s your powers of observation that are going to make the difference. They’re going to … 
  19. The Pleasure Principle Made Noble
     … Later on, when he was talking about the different factors of the path, he talked of right concentration as being the heart and the other factors as being supports. So this is the central factor, what we’re doing right now: trying to get the mind into right concentration. Of course that involves right mindfulness, right effort, and all the other right factors of … 
  20. Your Hair Is on Fire
     … So, what are they? What’s a good way to find them? This is one of the reasons why we practice concentration. Some people complain that concentration is a diversion, that you should go straight to insight to get rid of those problems. After all, we don’t have much time. Still, how are you going to see which movements in the mind are … 
  21. Indulge in the Pleasure of Jhana
     … You may be afraid, “Are you going to get stuck on the concentration?” Actually, it’s nothing to be afraid of. If you’re not stuck on the concentration, there’s no way you’re going to be able to do it well. There’s healthy attachment to concentration and unhealthy. The unhealthy is when you want to go off and don’t want … 
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