Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. The Humane Quality of the Path
     … But otherwise, you develop your discernment and concentration by working on being with the breath and then maintaining your concentration. It requires discernment to maintain concentration. It’s not simply through force of will, it’s also through understanding what’s going on in the mind, understanding the ways the mind tends to hide things from itself, the ways it suddenly slips off seemingly … 
  3. Fire Escapes
     … What we’ve got here is the map of the noble eightfold path, the map about right concentration and its seven supports, its seven requisites. In addition, there are instructions on how to use right concentration, how to analyze what’s going on in the concentration, so that we can begin to understand how the mind puts suffering together and how we can start … 
  4. Negative Emotions
     … His concentration was strong enough so that he could focus on the feeling of the fear until the feeling of fear dropped away, and he dropped into a very deep, deep state of concentration, standing there in front of the tiger. When he came out of that concentration, the moon had moved quite a ways. He realized he’d been in that concentration for … 
  5. The Strength of Heedfulness
     … But concentration gives you an alternative: You can have a sense of well-being, a sense of intense well-being throughout the body simply by the way you breathe, by the way you relate to the breath. That’s one way in which concentration teaches you not to get stuck on pleasure. Another way, is that it requires that if you’re going to … 
  6. Willing & Observing
     … Those are the two sides to the concentration practice. You want to stay with one spot in the body as your central focus. But you find as the concentration develops that, say, the sensation of breathing at that central focus is going to get more, and more subtle, harder and harder to keep track of. This is where your ability to keep your whole … 
  7. Heeding the Deva Messengers
     … And if you’re heedful about what you’ve learned from the past, you realize you need to get the mind into concentration because that’s the best of all possible states of becoming, both as a pleasant abiding now and also as a source of knowledge about becoming. If you’re heedful about your concentration, you have to realize, okay, it’s not … 
  8. The Breath Soufflé
     … This is how the breathing moves from mindfulness of breathing into concentration based on the breathing. Actually, it’s concentration from the very beginning. The Buddha doesn’t make any clear distinction between concentration and mindfulness practice. After all, mindfulness has the role of remembering to do what’s skillful and to abandon what’s unskillful. If something unskillful comes up, you’re mindful … 
  9. Change Your Perceptions
     … So we work to overcome sensual desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and anxiety, and uncertainty or doubt, to bring the mind into concentration. And we get the mind into concentration by changing our perceptions. When the mind is in concentration, then you can apply the four noble truths. Ask the questions of the four noble truths: “Where is the suffering right now … 
  10. Knowing & Acting
     … The Buddha said that right concentration forms the center of the path. There are eight factors all together in the noble path, but right concentration forms the heart. All the other seven factors, he said, are requisites to help look after concentration to give it the right balance, give it the right tone, give it the right level of alertness. The concentration, though, is … 
  11. Getting into the Body
    One of the Buddha’s terms for concentration is adhicitta, which can be translated as “heightened awareness” or “the heightened mind.” It can also be translated as “heightened intentness.” In other words, you really do pay careful attention to what you’ve got here, the object you’re focused on—in this case, the body, the breath. Give all your attention to how the … 
  12. Not-self in Context
     … And even though the Buddha doesn’t have you apply this teaching across the board until after you’ve developed some pretty strong powers of concentration, still he teaches it ahead of time so that you can apply it to other things that would pull you out of the concentration. If any distracting thought comes up, you realize, “Okay, it’s there, but it … 
  13. The Mirror Inside
     … It’s one of the nice things about concentration practice: The purpose is to create a sense of well-being. Some people don’t like the word concentration because it sounds too tense, but it’s precisely the quality that you’re trying to develop: You give the mind a center, and everything you’re doing is gathered around that center. And it’s … 
  14. Right Mindfulness
     … There’s the feeling associated with the breath, there’s the mind state trying to maintain concentration, and then there are the various mental qualities: either the hindrances that are coming in to interfere with your concentration or the factors for awakening that are helping it along. You want to be able to make use of all four. Staying with the body helps you … 
  15. Pain & the Middle Way
     … the mind in concentration. From that perspective, you can start understanding what’s going on as the mind gets involved in pleasure, in sensual pleasure, and as it gets involved in pain. It’s not impossible for the mind to be concentrated even though there’s pain in the body. This is something that a lot of us misunderstand. The texts do describe pleasure … 
  16. Afraid of Inner Pleasure
     … So having both this energy from the concentration—that sense of well-being from the concentration—and right view about what we have to be wary and heedful of: That can help us go more easily through the world.
  17. From Compunction to Release
     … Then you apply the same principle as your mind gets deeper and deeper into concentration. You learn to appreciate the deeper states of concentration. You compare them with the shallower ones and you see that the deeper ones are a much more worthwhile, a more satisfying place to be. Even though some of the deeper ones don’t have the bells and whistles of … 
  18. Insight Is Seeing What’s Worth Doing
     … What’s worth doing? When you’re working with your concentration, the concentration is what’s worth doing. The distractions are not. And you want to learn to see them as inconstant, stressful, and not-self as a way of getting some dispassion for them so you can see that they’re not worth it and free yourself from them. As the concentration develops … 
  19. Take Time to Evaluate Your Life
     … This is where mindfulness practice slides into concentration practice. The Buddha never made a clear distinction between the two. As mindfulness moves toward concentration, that element of mindfulness turns into directed thought. You remember to stay with one object that you’re thinking about. Your alertness and ardency combine into another factor that the Buddha called evaluation. This is where the concentration also involves … 
  20. The Focus on Suffering
     … As you develop these factors, you bring the mind to concentration. As the mind gets into good deep concentration, your tranquility and insight can do more refined work. This is when you really learn how to discern suffering, even on very subtle levels. The more advanced stages of insight, when they’re talking about emptiness: It basically comes down to this ability to get … 
  21. Calming the Breath
     … If your concentration is too one-pointed, then when you move the point, you’ve lost your concentration. If the object of your concentration is broad—like the whole body—then thoughts can move in, thoughts can move out, and it’s as if they go through a screen on the window. The screen stays in place. The wind goes through the screen, but … 
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