Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. Remember This
     … If your energy level is down and the mind is getting depressed, what can you do to lift your spirits? When the mind is wired and scattered all over the place with lots of frenetic energy, what can you do to calm it down? If the mind isn’t concentrated, what can you do to get it concentrated? If the mind isn’t in … 
  3. Focused on Your Duties
     … The big problem is that, if the mind can’t get into concentration at all, you’re going to go looking for your pleasure in other places and you’ll get blinded by your craving again. It’s only when the mind is in concentration that you can see things clearly. All the background noise has settled down. So don’t be afraid of … 
  4. The Chess Game
     … Then you turn around and learn how it pry loose your attachments to that state of concentration. You let things go in the proper order. Many people are afraid of getting attached to concentration. As soon as the mind settles down for a little bit, feels good, “Whoops, got to let that go.” That aborts the whole path right there. You’ve got to … 
  5. Choosing Sides
    Choosing Sides November 8, 2013 When you read the factors of the path, one of the first things you notice is the word right, which implies that there is also a wrong view and a wrong resolve—all the way down to wrong concentration. And the Buddha doesn’t leave it just implied. There are passages where he talks explicitly about wrong view and … 
  6. A Complete Training
     … This is why the Buddha has you contemplate not only things outside—things that would have pulled you away from your concentration—in terms of the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self, but also the concentration itself. You can think of the five brethren when they listened to that sermon we chanted last night. Here they had already gained some measure of concentration … 
  7. The Pursuit of Happiness & Goodness
     … As you avoid the disturbance, you get into a higher level of concentration, and then things that were part and parcel of the previous level of concentration suddenly become a disturbance. So you’re becoming more and more of a connoisseur of the level of stress in the mind, the level of disturbance in the mind. This, too, develops your discernment, develops your alertness … 
  8. Virtue Fosters Concentration
     … And they’re going to have a huge impact on your practice of right mindfulness and right concentration. So that’s one area of virtue that’s helpful to concentration. Another area is restraint of the senses. This one is obvious: If you go around gathering up images of things you like to look at, or hearing about things that you hate to hear … 
  9. The Kamma of Concentration
    The Kamma of Concentration February 16, 2017 Years back, I was asked to write a review of a book on positive psychology—the psychology of how people find happiness—and to approach it from a Buddhist point of view. One of the things I noticed, as I was reading through the book, was that there was no consideration of what the impact of your … 
  10. Clinging
     … It may be because of this reason that some people object to the idea of calling samadhi “concentration,” because they think concentration has to be tense. It doesn’t. It’s centered. The trick is to focus on something and disperse the energy there at the same time. Wherever you notice there’s tension in the body as you make your survey as you … 
  11. Encouraging Perceptions
     … Sometimes you hear that concentration basically deals with the perception or the mental label of something, whereas when you’re developing insight you’re dealing with the actual experience, but that’s not the case. The two go together, the perception and the experience, both in concentration practice and in insight practice. When you’re trying to concentrate, you use the perception of the … 
  12. Clinging to Karmic Diarrhea
     … But when the mind is well-fed with the concentration, you look at a lot of the activities that held some attraction for you, and you can see that they’re not worth it. As the concentration gets more solid and your discernment gets more subtle, you begin to see areas where there was some stress you didn’t see before. Again the question … 
  13. The Wheel of Dhamma
     … You look for it once you’ve really gotten solidly established in that state of concentration. You ask, “Okay, where is the element of stress here?” The only way you’re going to see it is to see it coming and going. It’s going to flicker even in the steadiness of the concentration. Concentration is not totally set. It’s got its ups … 
  14. In the Present
     … There are states of concentration where things get narrowed down to a very precise time in the present moment, but you’ve got to maintain the concentration. It doesn’t maintain itself—so even there, there’s a duty. Other times, when the mind is not in concentration, you’ve got to figure out, “What do I need to do? What are my duties … 
  15. The Path of Happiness
     … Sometimes you see in modern teachings, vipassana especially, the idea that there’s a danger in right concentration. But the Buddha never said that. It’s always presented as a necessary part of the path. Sometimes it’s easy to get complacent because after a while you find that when you can master this kind of concentration, you can tap into it whenever you … 
  16. Space for Sustained Contemplation
     … Otherwise you can sit here and think about them all the time, and there’s no concentration at all, at least not right concentration. 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 … 
  17. Inner Refuge
     … This is the help that concentration can give you. But the concentration on its own is not enough. You have to have the discernment to realize that once the concentration has given you a sense of ease and well-being, you’re in a good position to look around at the mind’s normal preoccupations, its normal understandings of things, and start calling them … 
  18. A Pervasive Well-being
    When we talk about practicing concentration, we often talk about bringing the mind to oneness, or a state of one-pointedness or singleness. It’s important that we understand what this means and how you do it because there are two ways of explaining the Pali term ekaggatā. One is that the mind is at one point. Eka means one, agga means point or … 
  19. Vitakka & Vicara
     … They serve a real purpose in getting the mind into concentration and keeping it there. They also help take the mind to higher levels of concentration, when you use them to analyze a particular level of concentration to see what’s still causing unnecessary stress in that level, so that you can drop the cause. And they help to protect the mind if it … 
  20. Insight into Pain
     … When you’re practicing concentration, you want to be very clear that this is an action, this is an activity you’re doing. You’re thinking and evaluating one object. You hold a perception in mind. As the Buddha said, the levels of concentration are a series of perception attainments, all the way from the first jhana up through the dimension of nothingness. At … 
  21. Freedom through Restraint
     … We’re disciplining the mind when we practice right mindfulness and on into right concentration. This is a part of concentration some people don’t like. There’s that interpretation of mindfulness as being broad, open, and accepting, whereas concentration is narrow and restrictive. And in one sense it is, because you’re keeping the mind within bounds. But the same thing applies to … 
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