Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. Getting Your Head Around the Goal
     … We’re developing concentration. Instead of focusing on our ideas of awakening, we’re focusing on the actual sensation of the breath. Instead of trying to figure out the goal, we keep coming back to the breath, exploring and figuring out what we’ve got here. It’s through these exercises of mindfulness and concentration that the mind’s powers of perception can grow … 
  3. Inner Discontent
     … That’s what’s going to make your concentration more solid, your mindfulness more continuous. Once you’ve developed that mindfulness, developed that concentration, then you try to develop it even further. You find in the beginning that it comes in phrases. There’ll be little phrase of concentration, and then it disappears. Then you start up again, it’ll go for a while … 
  4. Dethinking Thinking
     … This is why when the Buddha gives us instructions for concentration—which are actually in the description of right mindfulness, which tell how you do the concentration—there are two activities. One is to stay focused on one thing in and of itself, and the other is put aside greed and distress with reference to the world. This is going to require you to … 
  5. A Becoming Critic
     … A good part of the skill of concentration is learning how to stay centered no matter what the circumstances are around you. Now, we try to create an ideal environment here, or as close to an ideal as we can, making it quiet, promoting a set of values that recognizes the worth of this practice. But for concentration to be really good, you have … 
  6. Single-minded
     … Whether your concentration fits into jhana yet or not, that’s not the issue. The issue is, can you see when you’ve settled in and feel secure and feel solidly here? Is there anything in the concentration itself that is still a disturbance? After all, the directed thought and evaluation are necessary at the beginning, but after a while they do become a … 
  7. Skillful Fears
     … And that leads to concentration, which is where you get your real nourishment. The Buddha compares concentration to food for the mind: the sense of well-being, the sense of rapture that can come when the whole body is permeated by breath, and the breath flows smoothly. It’s nourishing to all the parts of your body and mind. That gives you a place … 
  8. A Gift of Strength
     … This leads ultimately to concentration, keeping the mind focused, keeping it intent on one thing for long periods of time. This is nourishment for the mind. Of the various qualities along the path, the one the Buddha consistently compares to food is just this: concentration—staying with one object, like the breath, or whatever object you find comfortable, effective, at any one time, staying … 
  9. Sensuality Is a Fetter
    The path factor of right resolve is very directly related to the path factor of right concentration. The beginning of the formula for right concentration says that being excluded from sensuality, secluded from unskillful qualities, you enter the first jhana. “Unskillful qualities” here are the wrong versions of the factors of the path, everything from wrong view down through wrong concentration. You have to … 
  10. Sensuality
    In the beginning phrase in the description of right concentration—vivicca *kamehi vivicca akusalehi dhammehi—*secluded from sensuality, secluded from unskillful mental states: What does it mean to be secluded from sensuality? I’ve read a couple of different explanations. One is that you’re secluded from sensual pleasures. But that’s impossible. Just sitting here in the cool evening: That’s a sensual … 
  11. The Karma of Not-self
     … Ultimately, when the concentration has done its work, and you’ve let go of everything else that would destroy your concentration or knock it off balance, then you can start turning around and looking at the concentration itself, seeing that it, too, has limitations. You start applying the perception of not-self to this as well. That’s one way that you can break … 
  12. Slings and Arrows of Ordinary Fortunes
     … Mindfulness leads naturally into concentration this way. The concentration gives you a sense of well-being. And if you find yourself getting worked up about how the mind is not settling down tonight, tell yourself there must be someplace inside here where things are at ease. If you don’t like focusing on the breath, if the breath is getting all tangled up—the … 
  13. The Right Touch
     … We’re not here to do only “right” mindfulness or “right” concentration; we’re trying for “just right” mindfulness or “just right” concentration. Think in *those *terms. Think in terms of balance. The image in the Canon is of a person holding a baby quail in his hand. If he holds it too tightly, the quail’s going to die; if he holds it … 
  14. Doing the Right Thing
     … And if it’s not there after you leave concentration, maybe it wasn’t that important to begin with. That’s how the concentration helps you to see clearly, and how it gives you some insight already just in learning how to wrestle the mind down to get still. You’ve learned some things about your mind right there. Then there’s the issue … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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