Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. Make the Most of What You’ve Got
     … But if your concentration is solid and still, and there’s a good sense of well-being in the concentration, you can look at these other states of becoming and have a sense of dispassion for them. They don’t have the pull that they would normally have. If you’re feeling hungry and depleted, it’s very easy to come up with a … 
  3. The Making Of
     … You’ve got your intention to stay with the breath, and the act of attention, where you’re actually paying attention to what’s going on, asking questions to help solidify your concentration. And there are more perceptions and feelings. So you’re learning how to think in terms of dependent co-arising as you get the mind into concentration. This gets you more … 
  4. Negotiating with the Committee
     … And for the sake of concentration practice, that’s often enough. Just put them aside. While you’re practicing concentration, you’re developing a really important skill, so that you can learn how to negotiate with all the voices in the mind. That requires learning how to give rise to a sense of immediate pleasure, rapture even, here in the present moment, using very … 
  5. Analyzing the Breath
     … This is the kind of concentration that has discernment as one of its integral factors. In terms of the bases of success, it’s the fourth one: concentration based on the powers of analysis. So give it a try. Explore what’s actually happening as you just sit here. The breath comes in, the breath goes out, the breath spins around in place, gets … 
  6. A Meditator’s Environment
     … The Buddha talks about how a good background in virtue is important for concentration, because it keeps your concentration honest. There’s so much that can happen in a quiet mind. Sometimes you get the idea that anything that arises in a quiet mind can be trusted, but that’s not the case. A lot of people go crazy through their concentration because they … 
  7. Look at Yourself
     … So there is concentration that comes from thinking, concentration that comes from insight. That moment of tranquility when you see, “Oh, this is not really worth going after,” and you get the mind to settle down: That’s tranquility and insight working together to get the mind in concentration. Then, of course, once the mind is concentrated, your insight is sharper; the tranquility is … 
  8. Toward Release
     … And then the next question is, what do you do with that calm? What do you do with the concentration and equanimity that go along with it? The Buddha talks about developing the factors for awakening even further. He says that, based on seclusion—by which he means the mind secluded in concentration—you try to develop dispassion. You do that by looking at … 
  9. Calm & Insight into Pain
     … He says if you want to develop tranquility and insight, you’ve got to work on getting the mind into deep concentration. The concentration itself is calming, but the ability to understand your mind is what allows you to get into deeper concentration, and that’s the insight. Then, once you’ve got deeper concentration, it develops even more tranquility and calm, and the … 
  10. The Path of Giving
     … Learn to use whatever pleasure you can muster to developing concentration, as nourishment for the mind. Use feelings of pain as things to analyze, to understand, because you begin to see the mind in action right around the pain. You see the perceptions that you place on pain, saying, “This is the pain. It’s located right here. It has these characteristics.” If you … 
  11. The Particulars of Your Suffering
     … This is the way the mind gets into stronger and stronger concentration. From there you can move it even to more subtle levels of concentration. When the breath energy is still, your sense of the definition of the body, the surface of the body, begins to dissolve. It’s like you’re sitting here with a cloud of little dots of feeling. You have … 
  12. The Fortress
     … It’s in this area where the qualities of mindfulness, ardency, and alertness, which are associated with mindfulness practice, turn into the factors of jhana, or right concentration. You’re evaluating the breath and then, once the breath is comfortable, you evaluate how to make use out of that comfort. In other words, you’re developing both concentration and discernment at the same time … 
  13. Disenchantment
    One of the traditional principles of the teaching is that when the mind gains concentration, it’s able to see things as they are. Actually the Pali term means “seeing things as they’ve come to be.” There’s an interesting passage where the Buddha makes a distinction between bhava and bhuta. Bhava means a state of being, becoming, the process of becoming, which … 
  14. Breath Meditation: The First Tetrad
     … He got into a state of concentration that he later recognized as the first jhana, the first level of right concentration. And the question came to him, “Could that be the right way?” And something inside him said, “Yes.” So he started taking food again to regain the strength he’d need to get into that concentration. Then, on the night of his awakening … 
  15. Fully Here
     … The insight is there to ferret out where the disturbances are that, one, prevent you from getting into concentration and, two, prevent the concentration from deepening. And then three, they get you stuck on the concentration, so that you can’t gain the kind of insight that really cuts through the defilements. But even that—cutting through the defilements—is with the purpose of … 
  16. Respect Opens Possibilities
     … So you want to gather your mind around one topic, which when you do concentration, is the theme of the concentration. When you listen to a talk, it’s the topic of the talk. Finally, you apply appropriate attention. Appropriate attention means asking the right questions. This is where we can see that the Buddha is not asking you to simply believe everything he … 
  17. The Goldsmith
     … The hour of meditation becomes fifty-five minutes of wandering and then five minutes of concentration. You want to make it a full hour of training the mind with as little wandering as possible. That’s when you’re emphasizing the effort. Concentration is once the mind has settled down, you do your best to keep it there. This is like blowing off the … 
  18. The Brahmaviharas Are Not a Complete Practice
     … So, goodwill is a preliminary practice for getting the mind into concentration focused on the breath. But there are also passages where the Buddha talks about it as a topic of concentration in and of itself. He doesn’t say how you do it. You simply develop the thought, “May all these beings look after themselves with ease,” an interesting way of expressing goodwill … 
  19. Equanimity After Victory
     … So use the concentration to fight off the hindrances and then use it to develop other, subtler forms of discernment. When the mind has come to discernment—the discernment that comes as you peel away layers of fabrication on the mind—then you can arrive at equanimity. But you don’t stop with equanimity in the practice of concentration. You use that equanimity to … 
  20. Sensitive to Fabrication
     … So you want to hold on to a good state of concentration; hold on to the pleasure that comes from the concentration so that you can look at your other forms of clinging and see that they’re really not worth the effort because you’ve got something better here. There’s clinging to sensuality: the mind’s fascination with thinking about how good … 
  21. The Missing Truth
     … Otherwise, they’ll eat away at your concentration. As for skillful qualities, those start with the factors for awakening: mindfulness, your analysis of what’s going on in the present moment, your persistence, a sense of rapture, calm, concentration, equanimity. Those are things you try to give rise to when they’re not there. When they are there, you try to maintain them. This … 
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