Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. Bojjhanga: Discernment Fosters Concentration
     … This is one of the ways in which discernment leads to concentration. You see this in the different sets of the wings to awakening. In some of them, concentration comes before discernment. But in others, like the seven factors for awakening, you’ve got discernment first and then concentration. The discernment there is analysis of qualities. Now the analysis here doesn’t have to … 
  3. Learning by Doing
     … And try to protect the concentration as much as you can as you go through the day. We’ve got a lot of people here right now, which means that we have to be especially careful both of our own concentration and of other people’s concentration. That phrase “respect for concentration” applies not only to your own practice. All too often we bring … 
  4. Virtue, Concentration, Discernment
    There’s a passage in one of his books where Ajaan Lee blurs the distinctions between virtue, concentration, and discernment. Concentration, he says, is a developed aspect of virtue: As you’re sitting here, you’re not only observing the five precepts outside, but as you get the mind into concentration you’re observing them inside. You’re not killing your good qualities; you … 
  5. Concentration Nurtured with Virtue
    Concentration Nurtured with Virtue July 23, 2009 The Buddha once said that concentration, when nurtured by virtue, has great fruit, great reward. Now, he wasn’t saying that you can’t do concentration without virtue. There are many examples around of people who have very strong powers of concentration but very little virtue at all. What he was saying is that if you want … 
  6. Be Precise
     … Now, sometimes, something seems like a disturbance but if you drop it you’ve lost your concentration, which is a sign you’re not ready to drop it yet. Go back and pick it up again. In other words, don’t let your concentration be overly ruled by the texts or by what you’ve heard about concentration. Focus directly on what you’re … 
  7. Concentration Work
     … A psychological test recently found that people who tend to go into deep concentration are very unaware of themselves psychologically. Of course, the test results didn’t say what type of concentration those people were doing. There is a concentration that actually allows people to run away from the present moment, having no sense of the body at all. This type of concentration attracts … 
  8. Keep Your Options Open
     … So, right now we’re working on concentration, we’re working on expanding our options, expanding our possibilities, keeping in mind the connection between the practice of concentration and the rest of the path, and the relationship between the path and the end of suffering. Part of the purpose of being on the path is to create concentration as an alternative to other forms … 
  9. Clearing a Space
     … The times between its visits are your times to practice straight concentration. When the issues come back, you take whatever concentration you’ve got, whatever discernment you can develop out of that concentration, and deal with them again. Ultimately there will come a time when these issues get cut at the root. Up until that time, you just have to keep learning to live … 
  10. At the Door of the Cage
     … So you burn your bridges behind you and hold onto concentration as your only true happiness in life. Only then, when the Buddha has you cornered like that, does he have you think of the drawbacks not only of the things you’ve already left behind but also of the concentration you’re holding to. Only when you see the drawbacks of concentration can … 
  11. Focus on Your Intention
     … He talks about respect for the triple training, and then he adds respect for concentration. Now, concentration is part of the triple training. But apparently, he wants to emphasize the point that you really do want to work on your concentration because that’s how the dynamic of the practice works. The other stages, the higher stages, work because your concentration is solid. So … 
  12. What Makes Concentration Right
    As you focus on the breath, remember that there’s right concentration and wrong concentration. There’s a passage where the Buddha defines right concentration as “any singleness of mind, endowed with right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness”—in other words, the first seven factors of the path. It sounds like an awful lot. In the … 
  13. Eyes in the Back of Your Head
     … You can apply this principle either in the concentration itself or when you’ve come out of concentration and are looking at things in terms of the five aggregates. In the concentration, the Buddha recommends developing the ability to step back from your concentration a bit. The image he gives is of a person sitting who’s watching a person lying down, or a … 
  14. Normalcy
     … This is why the forest ajaans would say again and again and again, the practice is not a case of working on your virtue and then waiting till your virtue is perfect before working on your concentration, and then waiting till your concentration is perfect before you start working on discernment. You have to work on all three together: Virtue fosters concentration, concentration fosters … 
  15. The Tools of the Path
     … This is going to be a lesson for concentration, because once the mind gets into concentration, you don’t just stay there. The whole point of getting into concentration is that, in the process of getting it into concentration, you begin to see for yourself what the Buddha saw: what is suffering, what is the cause of suffering, and the fact that there is … 
  16. Centered on Concentration
     … But if you work on that insight from a base of concentration, it works in a very different way. It’s not discouraging at all. It encourages you to keep going deeper and deeper into the concentration, exploring this area of the body that you’re in, in the present moment, getting more established there, getting more at home in the concentration. As you … 
  17. Respect for Emptiness
    Respect for Emptiness November 15, 2003 Respect for concentration. It’s interesting that of the factors of the path — virtue, concentration, and discernment — the Buddha singled out concentration as something worthy of respect. At one point he called it the heart of the path. And yet the reason he needs to remind us to respect it is because we tend to overlook it, to … 
  18. Withstanding Pleasure & Pain
    There’s a traditional way of talking about the stages of concentration in three levels. It doesn’t come in the Canon, but it’s very pervasive. And you hear lots of different ways of explaining it. The three levels are momentary concentration, access or neighborhood concentration, and then fixed penetration. The way of explaining them that’s made the most sense to me … 
  19. Bases for Success
     … There’s the base of success which is concentration founded on desire and the fabrications of exertion. There’s the base of success which is concentration founded on persistence and the fabrications of exertion. The fabrication of exertion is there in each case; it basically means right effort. The other two bases are concentration founded on intent and concentration founded on circumspection. That makes … 
  20. Truth with Boundaries
     … When you’re trying to get the mind into concentration and you’re thinking about how things are inconstant, stressful, not-self: If you apply those perceptions to the concentration itself, it’s hard to put forth the effort to really make the concentration as constant as possible. Yet you need that state of mind to be constant in order to see things clearly … 
  21. Tranquility, Insight, & Concentration
     … These are the basic steps in right concentration. This is *the *central practice the Buddha taught. His instructions are contained both in the section on right mindfulness and right concentration. As he said, the themes of right concentration are the four establishings of mindfulness. For example, the body: “Keep focused on the body in and of itself—ardent, alert, mindful—putting aside greed and … 
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