Search results for: "Attention"
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- Skillful Effort… If you spend all your time focusing your desires on what you want to gain out of the meditation, without paying any attention to the causes, it’s like driving down a road toward the mountain. If you spend all your time looking at the mountain on the horizon and forget to look at the road, you’re going to drive off the road …
- Respect for the Breath… In other words, you want to pay careful attention to what you’re doing. You want to be very observant and very honest. Those are the two qualifications that the Buddha asked for in a student: Is the student observant? And is the student truthful, both to other people and to him or herself? Once you’ve reminded yourself of the importance of what …
- To Certify Yourself… Focus your attention there. Then try to stay there. If you notice the mind wandering off, just bring it right back. Ask yourself, “What kind of breathing would feel good now?” The breath is one of the few processes in the body that you can control. So, why not make use of that ability to make it a good place to stay? Choose some …
- Factors for Awakening… Let your attention settle there. Then you can allow the breath to find a rhythm that feels comfortable. If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If not, you can change. Short in, short out; or short in, long out; or long in, short out. Heavy, light, fast, slow. Coarse or refined. Deep or shallow. Get a sense of what the body needs right …
- For the Survival of True Happiness… So this is where you focus your attention: on the things that you choose to do and say and think. In particular, train the mind through meditation. We use the breath as a way of anchoring our attention in the present moment so that we can observe the mind. We work with the breath both because it provides us with a comfortable place to …
- Two Types of Dukkha… The Buddha has you focus attention on this second kind of suffering because you can do something about that. When you do something about that, then you don’t have to suffer from the other kind of stress. After all, arahants live in the same world we do. Their experience of the six senses is fabricated, so there will be that stress, but their …
- Everything Gathers Around the Breath… So try to keep your attention focused here. Everything else you need to know, and everything else you need to deal with, is going to gather around. It’s like putting a salt lick in the middle of a forest. You’re going to get all the animals eventually. They’re all going to come there because they all need the salt. So you …
- Defilements at the Door… Where’s the craving here? What’s the craving based on? What feelings? What intentions? What acts of attention? When you look at dependent co-arising, you see that the really interesting factors are the ones that come before sensory contact: name and form, or fabrication. What perceptions fuel your greed, anger, and delusion? What intentions fuel it? What ways of paying attention to …
- Things that Arise & Pass Away… Do you want a happiness that comes and goes? Most of us pay attention to the coming. You get something you like, you meet somebody you like, things just seem to be going in a right way, and you let yourself get excited about it, lifted up by the prospects for the future. Then these things turn around and crash, and your mind crashes …
- The Meaning of Insight… So use appropriate attention. Ask the right questions. Look at your actions. Train the mind so that it can see its actions and their results really clearly. That’s why we’re here right now. The breath is here to train the mind. We train the mind for the sake of true happiness. These are all means to a goal, although you don’t …
- Working from the Inside… They get sometimes so deeply involved in their own suffering that they can’t pay attention, even when they want to pay attention. So you have to work on what you’re responsible for. You can hope that the good energy that comes from that, the insights that come from that, can be spread out. But your first priority is what you’re doing …
- Different Minds, Different Bodies… Or you can move your attention around. Once, when Ajaan Fuang was really sick, we had to set up a schedule for the monks to look after him. The other monks in the monastery were very quick to find other duties they had to do, and I ended up doing the 2 a.m. to 8 p.m. shift. I usually found around 3 …
- New Eyes… This is why the Buddha said that one of the most important aspects of the practice is something called appropriate attention. Appropriate attention involves asking the right questions, learning to look with the right eyes. When you look with the right eyes, you see that fascinating things are happening right here, right now. The mind is engaged in the process of creating suffering and …
- The Power to Transcend Suffering… Again, it’s just one of those things that’s part of life, but if you turn your attention to the breath and really focus on it, you begin to realize that there are comfortable breaths and uncomfortable breaths. And why on earth would you want to breathe an uncomfortable breath? Nobody’s forcing you. It’s just something you take for granted. But …
- Happy About Kamma… As the causal factors are ordered in dependent co-arising, your present acts of attention and acts of intention actually come prior to your experience of whatever the results of past kamma may be coming in. Intention and attention come under name and form. Based on name and form, there are the six senses, and with the six senses there’s contact. And it …
- Doubt… The cure for doubt, he says, is to look into the mind and apply appropriate attention to the question of which events in the mind are skillful and which are not. This means watching what’s going on in the mind when you give rein to certain states of mind. Or if you think in terms of the committee of the mind, what happens …
- Motivation… Which are the issues that are really worth paying attention to and which are the ones you have to put aside?” That’s a huge part of the Buddha’s teachings on discernment and wisdom. You probably know the story of the man shot by the arrow. There was a monk who once came to see the Buddha and demanded the answers to some …
- Home Schooling Your Inner Children… But you don’t have to give your full attention to the Dhamma talk. In fact, the more attention you give to the breath, the better. In this way, you learn how to deal with all those inner children. The whole point of dealing with your inner children is that you don’t leave them as inner children. You help them grow up. Meditation …
- Nourishing & Interesting… So they were paying very careful attention to the ballgame. It turned out that someone in a gorilla suit walked behind the people playing the game. Most of the people watching the video didn’t see the gorilla because they were so intent on the game. Think about that: That’s how we lead our lives. We’re focused on certain things, and other …
- Hold a Mirror to Your Mind… He’s got a whole list in Majjhima 2 of questions not worth paying attention to: “What am I? Who am I? Do I exist? Do I not exist? What was I in the past? What will I be in the future?” People have noted that those last questions call into question the whole idea of wanting to look into your past lives. But …
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