Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. Being a Buddhist
     … When you practice concentration to develop your discernment, you realize that the concentration—even though it’s a better pleasure, a more stable pleasure than you can gain from sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, or thinking about things—is still fabricated. And remember how good fabricated things can be: They can fall apart. You want something that’s not fabricated, something that’s … 
  3. Stubborn Clinging
     … You’re monitoring this at the same time as you’re doing it, creating the sense of concentration inside. Ajaan Lee was once teaching an old scholarly monk in Bangkok how to meditate. At one point the older monk complained. He said, “Wait a minute, we’re supposed to be doing away with states of becoming but when we’re meditating it seems like … 
  4. Sensual Passion
    In the Buddha’s description of concentration practice, he says that you’re aloof from sensuality, aloof from unskillful qualities in the mind. The word sensuality—kāma in Pali—is often misunderstood. Sometimes it’s translated as aloof from sensual pleasures. But the Buddha doesn’t have you search out a really difficult, painful place to practice. You try to find a place that … 
  5. Developing Absorption
     … It might be right view, right resolve, all the way down through right concentration. Like right now, we’re working on right mindfulness, right concentration—and we’re passing judgment. There are certain things that will come up in the meditation that we have to let go. When the Buddha defines right mindfulness, which leads to right concentration, he talks about two activities. The … 
  6. Insight Is a Judgment Call
     … So the pleasure of concentration is one of the ways we keep ourselves sustained on the path. The Buddha, when he was describing the noble eightfold path, at one point called right concentration the main factor, while the rest were the auxiliary or helping factors. Right concentration is where you get to use pleasure in a skillful way, a pleasure you gain while staying … 
  7. Questioning the Hindrances
    There’s an interesting passage where the Buddha says that you need both tranquility and insight in order to get the mind into right concentration. The Pali terms are: for tranquility, samatha and insight, vipassana. You need them both for there to be right concentration. This goes against the idea you sometimes hear that the Buddha taught two very distinct kinds of meditation. One … 
  8. A Good Path to Be On
     … Be creative in your concentration. Be creative in your discernment. You’re going to have to ask questions of the mind about why it’s attached to this thing or that. When there’s pain, physical pain, is there some way you can be with the pain and not suffer from it? When there’s the pleasure of the concentration, how can you learn … 
  9. Inner Wealth Management
     … It’s also one of those things that helps the mind get into concentration. If you have ill will for the people around you, that’s going to carry into your meditation and spoil it. So develop goodwill as wealth. Develop concentration as wealth, and regard the problems that come up in concentration as challenges and not as obstacles. You run into pain. In … 
  10. An Island in the Flood
     … You’re trying to create a state of concentration. There are people who say that mindfulness practice is one thing, concentration practice is another thing, but the Buddha wasn’t one of those people. As he said, it’s through the practice of right mindfulness that you get to right concentration. If you look at the factors of the path, the instructions for how … 
  11. Doing, Maintaining, Using
    Ajaan Fuang once said that there are three stages to concentration practice. The first is learning how to do it. The second is learning how to maintain it. And the third is learning how to put it to use. The doing is not all that hard—focus the mind on the breath. The breath is right there. You don’t have to go scrounging … 
  12. A Safe Haven Through Alertness
    One of the Pali terms for concentration is vihāra-dhamma, “a home for the mind.” It’s a place where you settle in and dwell with a sense of peace, security, well-being. And as we all know, it takes a heap of living to make a house a home. Sometimes it’s easy to settle down with the breath and sometimes it’s … 
  13. Right Resolve
     … There’s a passage where the Buddha says that right resolve, which is one of the factors of the path, finds its highest expression in doing right concentration. In other words, you have to reflect on the fact that your quest for happiness is going to have to depend on your own actions, and you don’t want to harm anybody else in the … 
  14. Grief & Regret
     … They call come down to having this foundation with concentration. Goodwill does lead to concentration—it’s one of the topics that leads the mind to be still—so try to make sure that every day is a day that you have some time for concentration, when the mind can gather itself together and be its own self for a time and get a … 
  15. A Post-goodness World?
     … So as you’re trying to get the mind into concentration and other thoughts come in, you can ask yourself which is going to lead to longer-term happiness: those distracting thoughts, or the state of concentration you can develop if you really stuck with the breath? This is one of the reasons why the Buddha recommends you develop the perception of inconstancy before … 
  16. You’re Doing Something Wrong
     … He was missing an important part of what Ajaan Lee called “concentration work.” We often come to concentration thinking we just get to rest, and there is an element of rest. But there’s also work to be done: first, to get the mind into a proper, balanced state of rest. Sometimes you get so quiet that you fall asleep, which is not what … 
  17. Inner Critics
     … This is why concentration is an important part of the path. But it’s not the whole path. Sometimes you hear the mistaken notion that when you reach a certain level of concentration you automatically attain a certain level of awakening. Well, you don’t. People can go through all the jhanas and all the formless states and still not see anything. They see … 
  18. Freedom, Conditioned & Not
     … So it’s even more skillful to get the mind into concentration. When you’re in the various levels of concentration, getting the mind deeper and deeper into absorption, the level of skill becomes more refined. You begin to notice that certain perceptions weigh on the mind; even the perceptions that keep you in concentration can be a weight. You learn to let those … 
  19. Calm & Insight
     … So those are the questions for insight: “How do I regard fabrications? How do I learn how to view them with insight?” The Buddha says you develop both of these qualities—calm and insight—by trying to get the mind into concentration. And you get the mind into concentration by working with these qualities. The two sides help each other along. In other words … 
  20. Stick to Your Duties
     … We’re focusing on developing right concentration through right mindfulness and right effort—all of the concentration factors of the path. Make up your mind you’re going to stay with the breath and put aside any other thoughts that have to do with the world. Whatever the world is doing out there right now, that’s not your business. Your business is the … 
  21. Dhammacentric
     … When he was able to do that, he was able to get the mind into patterns of skillful thinking, and then from there into concentration, and from concentration into awakening. It was because he was able to put his stories to the side, and to put the center simply in looking at things in terms of cause and effect right there in the present … 
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