Search results for: "Focusing"
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- The Buddha’s Shoulds… What’s interesting here is that when the Buddha presents this introduction to his teaching on kamma, he focuses on two types of good actions to stress their importance: gratitude to your parents and generosity. These things really do have merit; they really do have value. The fact that your parents gave birth to you was not just a set of impersonal processes that …
- Fabricating the Present… One, it gets you really focused on the present moment. Two, it helps make you more comfortable being here. And three, you see the process of fabrication at work. You see how you’ve got raw materials here in the present moment and how the element of fabrication shapes them into experiences. As a meditator you want to see this clearly again, and again …
- Wind, Fire, Water, Earth, Space… single in the sense that it’s the one thing you’re focusing on, and single in the sense that it’s a single sensation filling the body. Of the various elements, the breath is the easiest to manipulate, the easiest to nudge into the different directions to adjust and get it so it’s just right, feeling good coming in, feeling good going …
- Right Resolve in Real Life… And when you’re focused on things outside of the mind—the pains, the unpleasant things—it’s very easy to want to go for sensual thinking. As the Buddha said, if you don’t see any alternative to pain aside from sensual thinking, that’s what you’re going to go for: the sensual thinking. Then you start thinking about people who’ve …
- Invest in the Breath… One, because as things get easy, it’s hard to keep a clear point as to where you’re focused. And two, it’s all too easy to fall into that sense of pleasure and lose the breath. You can’t drop the breath. You have to stay there. So, it’s important that you be able to make a distinction. Here’s the …
- Inconstant, Stressful, Not-self… He doesn’t say why he focused on these three perceptions aside from the fact that they provoke feelings of disenchantment and dispassion. He wants to provoke dispassion because the passion we have for fabricating our worlds of becoming, our sense of who we are and the worlds we inhabit: that passion is what keeps these processes going. It keeps us tied to these …
- Heedfulness… You’re focusing on the breath. You’re focusing on making the breath as comfortable as you can. This is going to require getting interested in the breath. If you see the breath simply as the air coming in and out of the nose, there’s not much to get interested in. It comes in, goes out, comes in, goes out. That’s it …
- Body Contemplation Is Compassionate… Where exactly in the lust is your craving focused? Why is it focused there? Why is there that attraction there that you’re so willing to give into? It’s only through knowing your own mind in this way that you can get past the tricks that it plays on itself—like the equation of affection with lust. So there’s nothing in the …
- The Riddle of Freedom… But as you keep focusing on what you’re doing right now to see if it’s skillful or not, you’re getting closer and closer to what’s actually a mystery or a riddle in the Buddha’s teachings. Why* is* there this moment of freedom? What is it about the moment that allows you to make choices? So you dig down there …
- Strong Through Admirable Friendship… You’re focusing on the state of your mind as your major resource, as your major treasure. An important element in developing that kind of desire is to associate with people who are admirable friends. As the Buddha said, in an admirable friend, you’re looking for four qualities. One, they have conviction in the Buddha’s awakening. Two, they’re virtuous. Three, they …
- Rebirth & Not-Self… This is why the Buddha focused on craving as the cause for suffering. There are three kinds: sensual craving, craving for becoming, craving for non-becoming. Sensual craving is your desire to keep fantasizing and planning for sensual pleasures. You can ask a lot of people what they think about as they go through the day, and a lot of jobs that people have …
- Questioning Your Unconscious Actions… To see them, you have to get the mind really quiet and have it focused in the right places—and ask the right questions. When we think about subconscious acts, we usually think about the subconscious or the unconscious, or as things “in my subconscious,” as if it were a room in the mind, like the basement, whereas we’re up here above, in …
- Good Friends Inside… These are just as important in the meditation as your ability to stay focused for long periods of time: things like your ability to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and just keep on going, finding ways to energize yourself. This is how tasks get done. This is how progress gets made. This is how people really make a change in themselves: by believing …
- Pissing on Palaces… Just that much right there helps tune us in, because it focuses on the point that our actions are the important things in the world. What we’re doing right here, right now: That’s the most important thing—which is very different from the message that we get from everybody else. The news presented by the media is about what somebody else is …
- Square One… From the cessation of this comes the cessation of that.” This is called “this/that conditionality” because it’s focused on things you see immediately in your present experience. We’re not looking for causes behind what you can see. We’re looking for things you can actually observe. You want to see patterns there. We’re going to be observing our mind right …
- Preparing to Die Well… There’s the gross level, which is what you’re focused on, but there are more subtle levels you can tune-in to, like tuning from a radio station playing rock music to one that’s playing something very quiet, peaceful, and soothing. So even though the waves of the rock station are still here in the air, you’re not focusing on them …
- Faith in Goodness… The Buddha focuses on the brahmaviharas, and particularly the brahmavihara of goodwill. But goodwill includes compassion and empathetic joy. You see people who are suffering, or who are creating the causes for suffering, and you don’t just leave them and say, “Well, they deserve to suffer.” You have compassion: May they find some way of ending their suffering. If there’s anything that …
- The Grass at the Gate… The focusing on the sensation here is directed thought. Watching over it, protecting it, is evaluation. Staying consistently with the relaxed sensation is singleness of preoccupation. And in that relaxed sensation there’s the potential both for ease and for rapture to develop. So you’ve got the potential for all five factors of the first jhana. They tend to grow stronger if they …
- Bless Yourself… So you can stay focused right here. Your mind takes on so much work in the course of the day—dealing with this person, that person, this duty, that duty, this job—and the body has its needs, or your emotions come up and you have to deal with them: so many different things the mind has to deal with. It’s good to …
- Quality… Keep things focused right here. As for everything else, just leave it as uncertain, unknowable. Or even it is knowable, you just don’t know for the time being. So let it be. Let it be. If you try to take on too many things all at once, think of Ajaan Lee’s analogy of starting an orchard. You’ve got a large piece …
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