Search results for: "Attention"
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- Solidly Established… Other thoughts may come into the mind, but you have to learn how to pay them no attention. Think of them as people passing by when you have work to do. You don’t have to identify with the thought, thinking that it’s your thought or something you have to look into. What you’re here to do right now is to stay …
- Space for Sustained Contemplation… So whatever way you can think of why the body is not worth all that attention, or all that pride, or all that shame, or lust, or whatever, use your ingenuity until you can see that this is nothing to feed on. Sometimes it involves thinking about the unattractiveness of the different parts of the body. Sometimes you have to actually focus on the …
- Bases for Success… You give your full attention to this one topic. Then finally, you bring in vīmamsā, which refers to the mind’s discursive, discerning faculties. Ajaan Lee translates it as “circumspection.” It can also be translated as your analytical qualities and your ingenuity—the active part of the mind that’s looking, thinking, and evaluating. This, of course, is related to evaluation as a factor …
- A Flammable Mind… If you see that something suddenly sweeps through your mind and takes up all your attention, takes up all your active time, you’ve got to do your best to put out the fire and then watch out for the topic from then on in. It’s a spark. But still, we can’t go around simply watching out for sparks all the time …
- Consciousness, Name, & Form… feelings, perceptions, intentions, acts of attention, and contact among these things. Learn to be with these things on their own terms. Instead of thinking of these things as “my body” or “my mind” or “my awareness,” it’s just: “There’s awareness. There are mental events. Physical phenomena.” Just right here. When you look at them on these terms, it’s a lot easier …
- Victory… Then pay attention to whether the mind is settling down or not. If it’s not settling down, what’s wrong? Is it a problem with the breath? Is it a problem with the feelings in the body? Or is it a problem with the mind? When the Buddha sets out those three frames of reference, it’s not the case that you simply …
- Fear & Anger… There’s a widespread misunderstanding that the most important part of the practice is bare attention, simply watching things in a non-reactive way. But that’s not what the Buddha taught. He taught that the most important part of the practice is appropriate attention, where you learn to look at the situation and divide it up into four categories: where’s the stress …
- Freedom through Restraint… We’re here to commit ourselves to a skill, to a narrowing of the focus of our attention to the point where the real problem is. As the Buddha said, all dhammas come from desire. In this case, “dhammas” mean all phenomena, except for nibbana. Nibbana is beyond dhammas. So what is desire doing in your mind right now? Where’s it heading? Where …
- Licking Yourself Clean… You also have to be intent, to pay very careful attention to what you’re doing, what the results are. Finally, you need to use your intelligence, which means using ingenuity and being discerning in what works, what doesn’t, and how you might try to improve on both. These four qualities are called the bases for success. They’re essential to any skill …
- An Auspicious Day… We think of the breath as being the air coming in and out through the nose, but if you pay attention to how the body feels as it breathes, you begin to realize there’s a flow of energy, or many flows of energy, going through the body—as you breathe in, as you breathe out—and those are going to be where you …
- Focus on Your Skill… He said, “If you think about the past, and ask, “What was I? Did I exist? Did I not exist? If I did exist, what was I? How was I?” those are questions of inappropriate attention. Similarly with questions of the future: “Will I exist? Will I not exist? What will I be?” A lot of people, reading this passage, have asked, “But wasn …
- Metta… One of the problems with most people is that they neglect what they’re doing, pay no attention to what they’re doing, and pay a lot of attention to what other people are doing and want to straighten it out. But that doesn’t work. So these are some areas where you have to have some equanimity. That’s what brings some wisdom …
- Faith as a Virtue… Anything influenced by those factors—your intentions, your perceptions, your acts of attention—can always be called into question. But he was somebody who stepped out of space and time entirely, gained knowledge that was not subject to those things. It’s up to you to decide whether you want to believe in that or not. So in some cases, our conviction in what …
- Meditate Because You Have To… But it’s going to appear right at this point where you’re paying full attention to the path, where you’re putting together all the right causes, being mindful to stay with the breath, being alert to how the breath feels all the way in, all the way out, this breath and then this breath and then this breath. Each breath. Treat each …
- Steps in Concentration… You pay attention to the breath; you look at the mind. Is the mind staying with the breath? Is it happy with the breath? If it’s not, turn around and look at the breath again. What can you do to make it better? This desire to make it better: That’s the ardency. That’s what turns ordinary mindfulness and ordinary alertness into …
- Drowsiness… Sometimes drowsiness comes on because an important insight is about to come to the surface, and there’s a part of the mind that doesn’t want to deal with it, doesn’t want to see it, and it’ll divert your attention by making you drift off. So as signs of sleepiness or drowsiness come on, remember that you can’t always trust …
- Selves with Skills… You really want to pay careful attention to what you’re doing. It is possible to follow the Buddha’s instructions without really paying careful attention, but you’re not going to learn much. The Buddha never said that you can gain awakening simply by following steps A, B, C, D. The path requires that you put in your own willingness to really observe …
- Look after Your Baby… In the beginning, it’ll require lots and lots of attention. We’d like to think that once we hook onto the breath, we can put everything on automatic pilot and just coast through the hour. But concentration, especially the kind that fosters discernment, doesn’t have automatic pilot. It requires alertness. It requires mindfulness. Just as when you drive, you have to be …
- Trust in Heedfulness… In other words, if your actions did not make a difference, then it wouldn’t matter how careful you were or how careless you were; how much you paid attention or how much you didn’t pay attention. Everything would just happen in accordance with some outside force. So your basic trust is your trust in the power of action; your trust that through …
- Potentials for Awakening… to find where they are and then to apply what’s called “appropriate attention” to them—in other words, seeing them in terms of what you can do with them that’s skillful, what you can do with them that would not be skillful, and particularly, how you can use them to help put an end to suffering. The Buddha talks about the potentials …
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