Search results for: "Attention"
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- The Gift of Discernment… That’s our protection, which is why appropriate attention, as opposed to bare attention, is *the *essential factor as you go through life. Now, there are times when you simply try to notice what’s happening. But there are other times when you realize you’ve got to shape things so that you won’t suffer. You’re not stuck with whatever’s coming …
- Learning by Doing… He began to notice the simple act of attention. Some people, when they start paying attention to the breath, get all tight. Simply the thought of paying attention to something makes them think they have to tense up around it. If that’s what you do, you have to sort that out. There’s the act of attention, but then the tensing up is …
- Fully Here… But ideally, you want to have both going, and that requires a lot of attention. This is why we say you have to give it your full attention. When everything is really balanced and fully engaged like this, it helps to prevent the mind from wandering off. It helps to prevent you from going on automatic pilot where the breath just comes in and …
- Always Looking Inside… All these things require the mind to do some work, and the process of putting together a path is what we should focus our attention on inside. Our issues are our views, our resolves. To make them right, we have to pay attention to them. And where do they happen? They happen right here where the body in the mind meet at the breath …
- Potentials for Rapture… It all depends on where you pay attention and how you pay attention. We start with the breath, because that’s one of the easiest things to focus on. It’s also one of the parts of the body that’s most malleable. In other words, you can do the most with it. You can make your breath longer or shorter, faster or slower …
- Alighting on the Dhamma… You’re not paying attention to anything else; your mind is not scattered in other places. It’s right there with the talk. And finally, appropriate attention: This means that you bring the questions of the four noble truths to bear on noticing, “Where is the stress in my mind as I am listening to the talk? What’s the cause of stress? How …
- The Power of Choice… Just pay very careful attention to what you’re doing right now and to the effect that it’s having on your mind. This is one of the reasons why we meditate: to train the mind to realize how important it is where it chooses to focus its attention. As for things right now that are not useful to focus your attention on, you …
- Name & Form… In the same way, the properties inside the body get provoked by your perceptions, by what you pay attention to. The two of them feed each other. When you think of warmth, you look around to see, “Where are the sensations that are warm?” You pay attention to those. The attention and the perception will then magnify each other, and you’ve learned an …
- Admirable Friendship… The inside factor is appropriate attention. The outside factor is admirable friendship. And the two go together. Appropriate attention is seeing where you’re suffering, what you’re doing that’s causing the suffering, and trying to figure out what you might do in order to stop that. In other words, you look at things in terms of the four noble truths and their …
- Stay… This is what attention is all about. In the Buddha’s vocabulary, the word “attention” relates to which questions you pay attention to. He never taught bare attention, because there are no bare questions. If you’re thinking about trying to put an end to suffering, there are either questions that are appropriate or questions that are inappropriate. Inappropriate questions have to do with …
- Controlling… What are you paying attention to? How are you are paying attention? As the Buddha said, there’s such a thing as appropriate attention and inappropriate attention. Appropriate attention is when you look at things in terms of the four noble truths or in terms of the question of how to develop what’s skillful and how to abandon what’s not. These are …
- Fear of Missing Out… You also have acts of attention. What are you paying attention to? How are you framing the issue? These are things you should know. All these steps prior to sensory contact are things on which you should cast some light. This is what we’re doing as we meditate. As we noted just now, the three forms of fabrication at the immediate level are …
- The Quality of Your Awareness… This is why the Buddha defined appropriate attention as attention to the proper questions. It’s like looking for certain kinds of mushrooms in the forest. You can look and look and look in an area where there are lots of mushrooms, but if you don’t have the right image in your mind, you won’t see them. But if you suddenly get …
- Changing Your Default Settings… This is what attention is about. When the Buddha teaches attention, he doesn’t teach bare attention; he teaches appropriate attention, which means that you learn how to ask the right questions. For the sake of the meditation, the questions are: “Where are you focused? How is the focus going? Could it be stronger? Is it too strong? How is the breath? Is it …
- Happiness Without Conflict… The Buddha said, “All phenomena are rooted in desire.” Everything we experience is shaped by our desires, which come out both in terms of our intentions, what we want to do, and in terms of our attention, what we want to look at and pay attention to outside, what’s important to us. These are the things we’ve got to train, because if …
- Respect… As you pay more and more attention to this process of trying to stay with the breath, you begin to notice that there are warning signs for when the mind is about to leave. It all happens very quickly, but the more carefully you pay attention, the more respect you have for this process, then the more you can see the signs that let …
- Learning by Doing… It’s through what’s flowing out—in terms of your intentions, in terms of the way you pay attention, what you pay attention to—that you’re going to have a big influence on what you’re going to experience. I was talking to group of people this afternoon who were talking about how to listen to Dhamma. As I pointed out, they …
- Dealing with the Hindrances… In the factors for awakening, it’s developed by appropriate attention. So let these two qualities provide some guidance to your directed thought and evaluation as you’re dealing with the hindrances. Appropriate attention is when you look at your actions and their consequences. In other words, when you see there’s a problem, something’s weighing down the mind, you don’t go …
- Jhana: Responsible Happiness… The reason these blockages build up is because we’re not paying attention to them. Our attention is off someplace else. And so we miss a lot of what’s going on right here, right now, in the body and in all the connections between the body and the mind. So wherever you focus on the breath in the body, keep in mind that …
- A Path of Skills… You really focus your full attention on what you’re doing. So, try to do this well and give it your full attention. We go through life knowing that we’re breathing, but for the most part we don’t pay much attention to it. As a result, we don’t get as much out of the breath as we could. The same with …
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