Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. Calming Mental Fabrication
    When the Buddha teaches concentration practice—breath meditation practice—he gives you a physical fabrication to focus on, i.e., the breath coming in, going out, and then he gives you a verbal fabrication, the instructions, “Keep track of the breath; remain focused on the breath—ardent, alert, mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world.” So you keep reminding yourself … 
  3. Analysis of Dhammas
     … That’s one of the ways in which it manifests itself as you’re doing concentration practice, because these factors for awakening start with mindfulness and end with concentration. They basically show you how to use your discernment, when you start out being mindful, to get it into concentration. The key is basically learning to adjust the mind and the object of the mind … 
  4. Discerning the Middle Way
     … And as Ajaan Fuang pointed out often the “right” in everything from right view all the way through right concentration means just right view, just right concentration. And finding that point of just right requires that you use your powers of observation, along with your ingenuity. Sometimes the point of just right doesn’t lie halfway between two extremes; it lies outside the continuum … 
  5. Acceptance
     … If you’re mindful and alert as you try to develop skillful qualities and let go of unskillful ones, the mind comes to concentration. And concentration is characterized by pleasure, rapture, equanimity, a strong sense of wellbeing. This is what gives us energy on the path. When the Buddha gives analogies for the different factors of the path, he often compares concentration to food … 
  6. Switzerland Inside
     … In fact, the Buddha said, without generosity, if you really are stingy, there’s no way you’re going to get the mind into good solid concentration, or if it is in concentration, it’s not going to be for your own good. It would be the kind of concentration that gets focused on all the wrong things. So you want to make a … 
  7. Feeding Instructions
     … But what is insight practice? It’s getting to get the mind into a good state of concentration and then being able to observe the mind in concentration. So you’re not going to move anyplace else. But first you need to feed the mind, because this is the nature of the mind: It feeds. The problem is, it feeds in all the wrong … 
  8. Above the World
     … It specifically refers to concentration practice but then beyond concentration to discernment and then ultimately to release. That’s the mind that’s really heightened. In other words, instead of spinning around after the world, we lift our minds up above it, so that no matter how the world spins, what direction it spins, whatever its ups and downs, the mind isn’t effected … 
  9. The Hedgefox
     … You learn how to get the mind into a state of concentration where it can drink the well-being, drink the sense of refreshment that comes when the mind can settle down and, at the very least, be secluded from its sensual desires. It has a chance to rest in seclusion. As it gets more concentrated, the concentration becomes then the basis of the … 
  10. Moral Intelligence
     … This is how concentration is related to virtue. In other words, externally you may follow the precepts but if your heart is still killing and stealing and having illicit sex, then it’s not a virtuous heart. You have to bring its preoccupations into line, which is what we do when we concentrate. We use mindfulness to remind ourselves that this is where we … 
  11. Relationships
    Meditation, concentration practice, gives us a chance to put down our burdens and responsibilities. Even if we can’t let go of them for good, at least it gives us a chance to rest. You focus on your breath and that’s your only responsibility. Be with the breath. The breath is already happening. There’s nothing much you have to do. You don … 
  12. The World of the Body
     … That’s your foundation in concentration practice. That’s the foundation of insight. At least you’ve got something to keep you grounded. If you get into more formless types of concentration, it’s very easy to slither and slip around, because all you have is the perception of space or of knowing to keep you in place. But if you’ve got the … 
  13. Dispassion Is Freedom
     … Without any passion for the path, it’s hard to develop virtue, hard to develop concentration, hard to develop discernment. So you do concentrate passion on the path. As it says in that chant we have from the Ariyavamsika Sutta, you develop a passion for developing and a passion for abandoning: developing skillful qualities, abandoning the unskillful ones. You want to take your pleasure … 
  14. Anapanasati Day
     … But you can’t help but spend some time in the fourth, which means looking at things as dhammas and then noticing how inconstant they are, regardless of how steady or glad you can make the mind or how, through the practice of concentration, you can release the mind from, say, a factor of a lower level of concentration or the things that keep … 
  15. No-Tech Meditation
     … I was teaching in Malaysia once to a group of people who had seen many teachers coming through, and I talked about doing concentration, doing mindfulness practice. One of the questions after the talk was, “You talk about meditation as if it’s something you do, but we’ve been told that you don’t do anything. Mindfulness is just allowing things to arise … 
  16. A Matter of Life & Death
     … Sometimes it can be a difficult place, conducive in the sense that it’s helping to test the meditation, helping to test your concentration, helping to test your insight. The texts often talk about how important it is when your concentration is still weak that you find a good place to meditate that’s very quiet, very conducive, very comfortable. But then when it … 
  17. Seeing Danger in Birth
     … heedful in our virtue, heedful in our concentration, heedful in our discernment. Heedful in virtue means realizing that whatever we might gain by even the slightest infraction of the precepts isn’t worth it. Those little gains get washed away, and then you’re left with the kamma. Heedful in your concentration means trying to be as careful as possible in your efforts to … 
  18. A Snare of Death Laid Out
     … This is one of the reasons why we practice concentration. We try to learn how to sit through pain and maintain our concentration because we’re going to need the concentration when the body and mind are in pain, so that we’re not pained along with them, so that we’re not driven by desperation to jump for whatever appears. But at the … 
  19. Remembering Ajaan Suwat
     … The same with concentration: The Buddha sets out the pattern for right concentration, and it’s amazing that, of all the factors of the path, this is the one that’s most often cut out. People say, well, we really don’t want jhana. Or maybe, we can do with just the first seven factors of the path. Yet this was the factor of … 
  20. The Second Noble Truth
     … This image applies both to mindfulness and to concentration. The Buddha doesn’t make a clear distinction between mindfulness practice and concentration practice. In fact, the establishings of mindfulness are, in and of themselves, the themes of right concentration. You stay, for instance, with the body, in and of itself, as you’re ardent, alert, mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to … 
  21. Images for Right Effort
     … what things you’re supposed to develop; what things you’re supposed to abandon—like knowing that concentration is something to be developed and not just something you just watch come and go. There are people who say, “Concentration is inconstant. If you see it come and you see it go, you’ve learned a lesson of insight.” But you haven’t done what … 
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