Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. Balancing Effort & Patience
     … This is one of the reasons why we practice concentration: to block these unskillful things from coming into the mind so that you give rise to skillful states in their stead, and then you try to maintain and develop them. This starts with mindfulness and goes up through the other factors of awakening, which basically are a recipe for doing concentration practice, getting the … 
  3. Judging Mindfulness & Concentration
     … As you do this consistently, the mind is going to get into concentration. Sometimes we’re told that mindfulness practice is one thing—you’re alert to what’s going on in the present moment without trying to change anything—whereas concentration practice is something else: They say you try to change things so that the mind gets fairly narrowly focused, to the point … 
  4. Breathing Easy
     … So if you find yourself shrinking back from concentration, think of the dangers you’re in for if you don’t have this concentration to depend on. And if you find other thoughts getting in the way of the concentration, remind yourself, you’ve got the breath right here. It’s not destroyed by any thought that comes in the mind. So you want … 
  5. The Allure of Sensuality
     … While we’re working here on concentration, one of the prerequisites for concentration is that you put aside sensuality and get your mind secluded from sensual thoughts. This doesn’t mean that you’re secluded from sensual pleasures. The pleasures themselves are not the problem. The problem is the fact that the mind keeps thinking about these things and planning how it would like … 
  6. Potentials for Awakening
     … That ability to say No is what allows you to develop concentration, because now you’re going to look for pleasure someplace else. And here the Buddha opens the field wide. Whatever pleasure you can get from concentration is going to be a good thing, because unlike sensual pleasure or the pleasures of sensual fantasies, the pleasure of concentration puts you in a state … 
  7. Large Perspective, Small Focus
     … It’s so much easier to blame things outside, so much harder to look inside and see “What am I doing right now that’s weighing down the mind?” But if the mind is in concentration, then it’s in a much better position to do that. One, it’s because to get the mind in concentration you have to deal with those forms … 
  8. A Refuge Inside
     … How did he find happiness? By developing mindfulness and alertness to give rise to concentration in the mind. He used the concentration to develop discernment that led to release. So you take his example and follow it in your own life. You try to develop mindfulness and alertness as well, to gain a sense of being centered and at home in the present moment … 
  9. Pleasure & Pain
     … You see what kinds of pleasures are really worth avoiding because they get in the way of the pleasure that comes from concentration. Then you learn to maximize that pleasure from concentration so that you can understand pain. You see these things as part of a causal network. You develop the pleasure of concentration so that you can understand the fabrication that goes into … 
  10. The Choice Not to Suffer
     … If you really stick with this, you can bring the mind to states of concentration, the concentration you need in order to maintain this stance of being able to step outside your thoughts. In the factors of awakening, this concentration is described as four of the factors: rapture, serenity, concentration, and equanimity. These are the qualities you need to gain the strength not to … 
  11. Learning from Sensual Desire
     … What do they do to fool you every time they appear and you go for them? This will require good concentration. The irony is that you need to get the mind past these hindrances to really get into good concentration. But that’s just an irony in theory. In practice, what it means is that you fight them off and work on your concentration … 
  12. Self-starting
     … Then as your mindfulness develops, it moves into right concentration. As the Buddha said, the factors of the different establishings of mindfulness are the themes of right concentration. So as you go through those last three factors of the path, you find that right concentration contains right mindfulness, and right mindfulness contains right effort. They’re all part of one another. So what do … 
  13. Trust in Heedfulness
     … Once you can maintain a good state of concentration, the next step is to look at what’s going on. In what way is this concentration empty of prior disturbances? In what way is there still disturbance in it? And where? If you look carefully enough, you find that the disturbance is related to something you’re doing: the way you’re creating that … 
  14. Single-minded Determination
     … That’s what concentration is for. As things keep coming up, you realize, “This isn’t really an intention I want to abide by, and that’s not either.” So you cut them away, cut them away, until you run into the really big defilements, the really important ones. Sometimes they’ll knock you off base again, which is a sign that your concentration … 
  15. Four Determinations in One
     … When the Buddha discusses it, it’s primarily in the context of meditation—developing concentration and discernment at the same time. All this comes under the heading of not neglecting discernment. He discusses the six elements, or six properties, as topics of concentration. In getting the mind focused, on the one hand, you develop the focus of the concentration, and then you contemplate each … 
  16. Learning How to Learn
     … Now, we can compare these instructions to the four bases of success, which are basically four ways of giving rise to concentration, but they apply to success in any activity. There’s concentration based on desire, concentration based on persistence, concentration based on intent, and concentration based on powers of analysis. Actually, all four of these things have to be present in any state … 
  17. When You’re Discouraged
     … In other words, whatever mindfulness you have, whatever concentration you have, you don’t throw it away. You don’t treat it with disrespect. You protect what you’ve got. And protecting what little concentration you have, what little mindfulness you have, it grows. After all, where does concentration happen? It happens right here, right where you’re aware of your nose, aware of … 
  18. Focus on the Precepts
     … These are the qualities you need to develop mindfulness and concentration. Of course, when you get the mind into concentration—the Thai translation of samadhi is “firm intent”—you’re firmly focusing your intention on one object, and you’ve been getting to know your intentions through following the precepts. One aspect of the precepts that’s not widely appreciated is that they are … 
  19. The Buddha’s Wisdom
     … The Buddha talks about the main obstacles to concentration as being the five hindrances: sensual desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and anxiety, and doubt. The factors of right concentration, the first level of right concentration, are also five: directed thought, evaluation, singleness of preoccupation, rapture, pleasure. That’s the state you’re trying to create through right mindfulness. The texts talk about … 
  20. The Role of Attachment
     … I know some people who, when they go to meditation retreats and their minds get into good deep states of concentration, they’re afraid to tell the teacher for fear the teacher will tell them to let go of it—which, of course, aborts whatever they might get from the concentration. There’s a rhythm; there’s a season for letting go. But until … 
  21. Purifying Gold
    The Buddha gave several discourses where he compared training the mind, getting the mind into concentration, to refining gold. In the first step, you have to wash the gold. The gold has gravel, little bits of grit, and then tinier bits of grit. So first you have to get the really gross stuff out. That, the Buddha said, means getting rid of any misbehavior … 
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